“You need four-wheel drive out there?”
“Yes, you do, and yes, I learned that the hard way.”
“Oh really?” He twisted toward me, and there was a grin in his voice as he asked. “Do tell.”
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, so…” I hesitated. “This, um… A lot of my stories up there involve Selena. Just so you know.”
“I figured as much, since it’s her dad’s cabin. Go on.”
I went on. “Right, so there’s a place out there where a B-52 went down in—I don’t know, the 1960s, I think? Anyway, you can either drive up to the memorial, or you can hike to it. It was cold and kind of wet, so we decided to drive up, and this was when I had my old car, which was…notfour-wheel drive.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yep. So, the way up is on logging roads. There’s signs leading you to the memorial, and every other sign is like, ‘move over if there’s a logging truck because they have right of way.’ And I thought, okay, if these roads can handle logging trucks, then they’ll be fine for my car.”
“Famous last words?”
“Mmhmm. We got up to the memorial just fine. Checked it out, took some photos, read the placards.” I shrugged. “It’s really interesting, and it’s really sad what happened. Plus it’s just—it’s surreal to basically see all this aircraft wreckage scattered along the mountainside.”
“Oh, shit,” Jesse murmured. “That sounds like… a lot.”
“It was, definitely. Then afterward, we go to head down, and it turns out… the road down isn’t nearly as well-marked as the roadup.”
“You can’t just follow it back?”
I shook my head. “There’s a lot of turns and intersections. I kind of had to guess based on what looked familiar, which is not an easy thing to do in the woods with zero landmarks. And somewhere along the way, I took a wrong turn. The road went down and then back up, and apparently the rain had saturated the ground at the bottom. One minute we were fine. The next, we were in the mud up to the tops of the rims.”
“No shit?” Jesse said. “That’s not good.”
“No, it was not. The best part, we had almost no cell phone signal. We had to climb out the car windows because we couldn’t get the doors open, jump onto the shoulder, and basically try not to fall on our asses in the mud. And when we tried to call for help…” I flailed a hand.
“Wow,” he said, chuckling. “So how did you finally get out?”
“We walked a ways until we found some signal, and that was enough to get ahold of the roadside service. Then we had to wait four hours for a tow truck—two until one was available, and another two for them to find us.”
“Holy shit,” Jesse laughed. “That must’ve been… an experience.”
“Ugh. Yeah.” I almost mentioned that Selena and I had joked about how“this is how either a horror movie or a porno starts.”I didn’t want to get into how we’d spent some of the time while we’d been stuck out there; it would’ve been awkward to tell Jesse about it, and quite frankly, I just didn’t want to think about it.
I cleared my throat. “We got out of there eventually, though. And I’ll still go out exploring on some of the back roads, but only if I have four-wheel drive”—I tapped the Jeep’s steering wheel—“and not when it’s been raining that much.”
“Good call.” He paused. “I don’t know if I want to go up there, though. Less because of the mud and more… I don’t know. Seeing the site of a plane crash sounds…” He shuddered.
“Yeah, it was a little weird, not gonna lie. We definitely don’t have to go.”
“Okay, cool.”
I glanced at him. “Do you want to go moose-watching one day?”
“Not gonna lie—it sounds interesting. I’ve never seen one before.”
I grinned. “Let’s do it, then. We, uh, have to get moving pretty early for it if we want to catch them waking up, though.”
His voice was laced with suspicion when he asked, “How early is ‘pretty early’?”
“About three in the morning.”
“Eww.”
