Wednesday, October 31, 2001
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Wednesday, October 31, 2001 |
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Pitch darkness. Strange sounds. A mysterious light. And things going bump in the night. By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Life handed me a Halloween story right on schedule. High winds had kicked up the Tennessee and we were tired of pounding toward Guntersville, so when Dave found what promised to be a quiet anchorage on the last night of our cruise, we turned into it with great relief. Paint Rock River, flowing straight as an arrow into the Tennessee, is narrow and deep and so heavily wooded that it looks like a tunnel through the trees. We had spent a few nights at marinas hard by noisy highways and welcomed the silence, the remoteness, of the turgid Paint Rock. Our charts showed no roads within a mile. By positioning ourselves nearly that far from the Tennessee, we felt secluded indeed. That feeling would be less welcome in a matter of hours. I thought later that what happened would barely have registered if it had occurred in daylight. Darkness has a way of sharpening our response to sound. The moon was in its last quarter, the sky overcast. Rain on and off. It was very dark. We'd been asleep several hours. Dave heard it first, and before awakening fully, thought it was coyotes like those we'd heard yodeling in Kentucky some weeks before. By the time I awoke, we both knew it was a man's voice calling loud through the trees. And close by. We barely breathed as we listened for snapping branches or splashing water. He was shouting something like, "Go, Donna left, left, left, left, left." Absurd, I know, but that's what I heard. And believe me, I had ample opportunity to focus on that sound. I rose carefully to a sitting position and looked out of our uncurtained windows. There was enough of a breeze we knew that by the persistent rattle of the flag in its mounting to move the boat within the narrow confines of a river littered with downed tree trunks, so it was difficult to determine whether we were still heading upstream or had swung 180 degrees, or perhaps were crosswise in the little estuary. Wait. A light. Splashing on the ground the way a flashlight does when its bearer is striding. "Go, Donna left, left, left, left." We were invisible no anchor light is required when a boat is moored out of a navigable channel unless the searcher turned the light toward the boat. He never did. He either did not see us or was not interested. Sounds from the previous evening came back to mind. Pleasant sounds: chattering redheaded woodpeckers, squirrels dropping nuts into the river, the question and answer of a pair of barred owls. Neutral sounds: from very far away, the intermittent baying of hounds. Worrisome sounds: several loud reports of gunfire, probably within half a mile. "What time is it?" I breathed to Dave. "One-thirty our time," he breathed back. That's 12:30 local. "Go, Donna left, left, left, left, left." In the rain. I began forming scenarios: The guy had got off the night shift and came home to find his favorite 'coon hound loose, and went searching. That's as far as I got. Abruptly, the light went out. A door slammed. A motor started, and headlights passed a few hundred feet from us, paralleling the river bank. Then darkness again. And silence. Sleep had driven off with the truck. We lay there in the dark, listening. A branch scraping the side of the canopy as the boat swung on its anchor. Then a solid thud as the hull fetched up against a submerged log. Brave Dave got up and shortened the anchor line with a deafening screech, took down the flag, and we tried again to sleep with eyes wide open. We must have, because neither of us heard the truck return. Just the dull thump of its door, and then the unmistakable screech of metal on metal, then metal on gravel a boat being pulled from a truck bed and dragged across gravel. That's when I remembered that we had spotted what appeared to be a dirt-road boat launch a short distance upstream from us. The flashlight again, low. No voices. Probably just one person. Did he even know we were there? More scraping sounds, a splash or two, and just when we expected to hear an outboard snarl, silence fell again. Total silence. Total darkness. What was he doing? Fishing? Gigging frogs? Both require lights. Was he letting the imperceptible current carry him toward us? There was no way we could weigh anchor and pick our way out of this inky tunnel. We were trapped. He couldn't board us without our hearing or feeling it, and if he did, he couldn't easily gain access to the cabin. But did he have a gun? The high-powered rifle we'd heard earlier? We both sat there, not daring to breathe, our eyes straining vainly to penetrate the blackness. And on the screens of both our imaginations, the same feature film "Deliverance." When we heard and saw absolutely nothing for several long minutes, we slid back down, swearing we'd never sleep this night. Maybe we did. Suddenly we were hearing metal on gravel again. The sky was barely perceptible now, as dawn began breaking somewhere over Georgia, but in Alabama it was still too dark to see anything under the deep overhang of branches. The truck door slammed. We should have heard the engine crank or the truck drive away. But only silence, until, somewhere in the woods, a bird called. Dawn.
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