Forrest stumped
- Oscar the Pooch
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
“Welcome to California,” the Witch said. Where you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave, her tone added.
The downward momentum set in, sucking us even faster toward the End of the World. We drove until water softened the air, and the smell of green filled the spaces between buildings. The Wagon rolled through grape fields and redwood forests. When the air smelled of ocean again, a new species of sign I’d never seen before began sprouting among the redwoods beside the road.
“What do they say?” I asked.
“They say, SHELTER IN PLACE ORDER IN EFFECT,” Mom read.
“What does that mean?”
“It means, Go home.”
“Well at least they’re being polite about it.” I inspected the next several signs as we passed. They were the kind that are made to last, with sturdy faceplates, stalks as thick as the trunk of a small tree, and roots fastened into the ground. “What are they gonna do with all these signs in a few weeks when the boogeyvirus is gone?”
“They’re saying it’ll be months now, and these signs look permanent,” Mom said. “They put intent and funding behind these rules. I thought a community of peaceful outlaws would be a little more open-minded.”
“Are we gonna be grounded forever just for being here?” I asked as ninjas swarmed my thoughts. If the Law did all that for a plant that wasn’t going anywhere, what would they do for a stresspassing Mom and the dog walking her?
“It’s not criminal, but it’s a violation of something-or-other,” Mom said in her law-gic voice. “I wouldn’t call it il-legal. More like extra-legal.”
What a relief. If the Law found us, they would probably give me a medal for being so much more legal than everyone else.
“You have arrived!” the Witch butted in.
The Wagon rolled into a seaside car kennel, where shiny papers stuck like scarecrows to every post. The sun reflected off of each sheet’s polished shell, hiding its message. The Wagon stuck its nose close to one of the posts like an old person trying to read small letters. Mom leaned forward in the driving chair, squinting into the glare. “Dog doo. It says that if they catch us hiking they can fine us, or even put us in jail for up to a year.”
“If they ask, you should choose fine thanks, not jail,” I suggested.
Mom gave me that look again. “A fine is money.”
“Do you think they mean dog year, or a human year?” I asked thoughtfully as if I were weighing my options, not tricking Mom into giving me a hint about what we should do next.
“Neither one makes sense!” Mom’s paws gripped the driving wheel like she wanted to strangle it. “How can they take you off an 11-mile trail that might only have 1 person per mile…” she held a finger beside her ear to show how many one was, “… and put you in a crowded jail, then say the world is safer because of it?” The finger retracted back into its fist. “But whatever. Let’s not push it.”
The Wagon backed away from the sign and tip-toed out of the car kennel. A block away, a Law watched us drive past from the front seat of his Whale-mobile. The Wagon did its best to look innocent, and Mom kept her nose pointed straight ahead like someone with nothing to hide. If this were a cartoon, she would have whistled and twirled an umbrella.
When we were out of view of the Law, the Wagon slowed in front of a house and stopped in a way that someone who lived there might. Mom summoned the Witch for an emergency meeting.
“We drove through all those woods on the way here,” I reminded her. “Let’s sleep in there.”
“The whole forest is closed.” She pointed at a paper badge on the nearest tree. “That’s what the signs say.”
With all the permanent signs beside the road and the polished signs in the car kennel, I’d hardly noticed the naked paper pinned to just about every tree you could see from the road. “How can you close a whole forest?”
“That’s what I’m saying!” Mom said in a voice that usually comes with a stomp and a fist on the table.
I was used to being shut out of nature, but nature had never been off-limits to Mom before. Until now, Mom had always been able to talk us out of a fix by knowing just enough about the rules to pretend she didn’t know anything. But that only worked in America where people have rights. For the first time, she was like a weed that someone could rip up by the roots just because they decided we didn’t belong. It felt like we didn’t belong anywhere anymore.
A battle raged in Mom’s thought bubble between fury that a flower like her could be treated like a weed, and worries about whether she’d been wrong about thinking herself a flower in the first place.
We drifted back the way we’d come like a canoe without a paddle. There was no time to find somewhere new before bedtime, and with the Law lurking about, we’d have to stay well hidden. With so many signs guarding the road, even Mom’s law-gic wouldn’t convince the Law that we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to be there. The Wagon’s nose wandered with the current of Mom’s thoughts as she looked into the trees for a safe place to hide.
Finally, the Wagon snuck onto an old dirt car-trail mostly hidden by trees. We followed the road a short way until it stopped at the base of a power tower. If the Law spotted us, maybe Mom could convince them that we were fixing the power poles in the middle of the night.
We may have found a place to sleep, but there was still plenty for Mom to fret about. In the game of Simon says, Wyoming was easy mode and California was the boss level to beat the whole game. Mom begged the Witch for help, but the Witch was in another one of her sullen moods. No matter how Mom pleaded, all that good-for-nothing would show her was a screen as blank as the Salt Flats.
“If a place is so remote that you have to search to find out if anyone’s inside, what does closed even mean?” Mom threw the Witch onto the blankets.
I was getting tired of this game. “So? What are you going to do about it?”
“Take my ball and go home.” When I cracked my eye open to check for a ball, Mom’s arms were crossed and she was pouting. There was no ball.
I closed my eye again and rolled over. “That’ll show ’em.”
The next morning, Mom set her eyes back to trail spotting mode and aimed them at the forest beside the road. “We’ll take the scenic route so you can run around on the beach or something along the way,” she said. “CHP can’t monitor them all.”
Before I’d even had a chance to settle into the ride, everything and everyone inside the Wagon tumbled forward as it lurched into a teency-weency parking cubby.
When all was still, I gathered my legs and stood to look out the window. In the back corner of the cubby, a path hid in the underbrush behind a pile of trash and old clothes. Mom looked both ways, checked all the mirrors, and we dismounted.
“Why is there luggage in the woods?” I asked as we walked around the dusty suitcase marking the trailhead. “I thought no one was allowed to travel.”
Mom’s face said that she was trying very hard not to think about something inconvenient. “Maybe there’s a story behind it that happened long ago,” she guessed hopefully.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “There’s probably an airport in here.”
“I know I keep repeating myself, but I just can’t wrap my mind around why they’re ‘closing’ a trail that they don’t maintain in the first place.” Mom ducked under a branch with a pair of ripe tighty-whities hanging from it. “There are no services. What’s to close?”
I looked for something to distract her from playing the same thought on repeat for the rest of the day. Between us and the road, there were vines, trees, food wrappers, an old boot, a rusty bicycle tire… Nothing in the woods looked like it wanted to be seen, so I pointed to something beside the road instead. “What does that sign say? Isn’t it nice that they put it in braille so that blind drivers can read it?”
“It says, NO SHOOTING,” Mom read. “And that’s not braille.”
I was confused for a moment, until I realized that there was a clue on the sign. “But how did the bullet holes get through the sign if there wasn’t any shooting?”
“No dog doo, Sherlock. A rule isn’t worth the sign it’s printed on if no one’s gonna enforce it.” She held up one finger and paused dramatically like she was about to reveal the solution to a mystery. “Those bullet holes tell me that no one’s patrolling around here, so nobody who cares about safety and the law will see us sneak in.”
“Are you sure that’s the message that bullets are trying to tell you?” I asked, but Mom was listening too hard for clues from the trail to hear me.
The trail had the look of a path that wasn’t going places. It kept disappearing behind shaggy bushes and matted vines.
“About that suitcase,” I said. “Do you think the traveler was going into the woods, or coming out of the woods? And where are they sit-staying now? And do they need their stuff?”
But Mom’s imagination was occupied with finding the trail under the bullet skeletons and bottle bones, so she didn’t answer those questions either.
Now that we were far enough into the trees that the road couldn’t see us, even more trash blossomed on the forest floor. A little ways back from the trail, a washing machine lay on its side with its mouth open while grimy clothes stiffened on the branches above. The clues were trying to tell me something, if only I could figure out what.
