Every Unexplained Thing, Part 1: The Hike

I have never encountered anything I would categorize as supernatural or paranormal. But that doesn’t mean I can explain everything, and I decided that a series I’d write here on my new blog would explore these little mysteries, in hopes that I can make some sense of them. I’m calling it “Every Unexplained Thing.”

I have a story that isn’t mine, but I’ve told it enough times to know that it lingers with people. The person who first told me this story, the person to whom it happened, was a guy I met once years ago. After that one date we both mutually, tacitly decided not to meet up again, but because I’d ended up telling his story a few times, I did eventually scroll back into the history of my every failed Tinder match to say hi and see how he was doing and ask if he minded me telling people about the strange thing that happened to him once when he was hiking. He was fine with it, he told me, but he asked that I not use his real name. For the purposes of this version of the story, let’s just call him Dennis.

I’d like to think I remember the story fairly clearly — like I said, it lingers — but I am drawing on a years-old memory, so I may have certain details wrong. Even so, the gist is correct. The narrative oomph of it remains the same.

Dennis and I had met for drinks, and the subject of hiking came up, specifically in the context of how every basic gay man in Los Angeles lists hiking as an interest on their dating profiles, which is actually not all that interesting because so many people in this city take the occasional hike that it would be like saying that your interests include breathing air and drinking water. In an effort to seem less basic than those guys, we tried naming slightly more out-of-the-way, under-the-radar locations when I asked if he’d ever hiked in Los Padres National Forest, a great green expanse that stretches from the northern tip of Los Angeles County, near Pyramid Lake off Highway 5, to parts of Kern, Ventura, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties. Dennis said that he actually had, but something weird happened to him there, so he had consequently not gone back.

Of course I pushed him to tell me what happened, which I realize now was inconsiderate. I did want to know the story, but also I wanted to find out what this new person’s metric for weird was, because that’s a good way to get to know somebody, I’ve found. But when someone declines to get into the details of some past incident, you shouldn’t push them. I try not to anymore.

After some nudging, Dennis explained that he’d driven up to go hiking in Los Padres National Forest one weekday in December. (This is actually the best time to go hiking in the greater Los Angeles area, because Decembers here tend toward temperate and sunny, and on weekdays most people are at work, making even the most popular trails easy to navigate.) Once there, he began hiking a nearly deserted trail that eventually crested a hill in a way that allowed him to see all around himself — no corners or trees to hide behind, just the trail ahead of and behind you, and downhill to either side. But it was here that suddenly someone collided with him — walked into him from behind, like you would imagine happening in a place where people are clustered tightly together, not in a more wide-open space devoid of humans.

Immediately, Dennis apologized, though he told me he was aware that this could not possibly be his fault, and the woman who’d walked into him also said she was sorry. I think she said she’d been looking at her phone or something. Dennis described the woman as petite, in her forties or fifties, and not at all intimidating, with hair that reminded him of Drew Barrymore’s in Scream. (This part is important later.)

Apologies exchanged, Dennis continued forward, but as he did, he said he got a weird, suspicious feeling. When he turned around to see if the woman was following him, she wasn’t. In fact, she was standing in the spot where she’d bumped into him, not seeming to do much of anything. But that didn’t stop the feeling, and soon he was overwhelmed by the sensation that something was very off. (This part gave me goosebumps. Why would she just stand there? Where was she going?) Dennis said he wished he hadn’t been out there alone, and though he admitted this was not typical of how he’d handle a distressing situation, the one way he could think not to be alone was to call his mother. So he did. And she did pick up. And he began just making pointless small talk to her, narrating his hike.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back, in the dirt, with two strangers pouring water on his face. They told him he might be dehydrated — it was not hot out that day — and that they’d called the rangers and someone was coming to pick him up. That is what happened, and on the way to the station in whatever vehicle they were in he felt pretty much okay. (I don’t know what kind of vehicle makes sense here: a four-wheeler? a truck? I’m not sure how I imagine this happening, and I’m not sure I asked at the time.) Per my memory of the story, when he told the ranger this, the ranger explained something to the effect of them needing someone to give him a medical once-over before they could let him head off on his own. So at this point, he’s just chilling out in whatever office or station with the ranger, and he’s trying to remember what happened, and he asks the ranger where it was that they picked him up. The ranger points at a map, and the place he’s showing Dennis is a lower trail running parallel to the higher-elevation trail he remembered being on. What’s more, this spot is over quite a ways, as if he not only traveled directly down the hill from where he had been, but he also had gone farther down the path a ways.

Perplexed, Dennis asks the ranger if it was possible that he could have fallen down the hill and rolled for a bit in a way that accounts for the rest of the distance between where he remembered being and where he ended up. The ranger says no, especially because he’d have cuts and scratches all over him if he’d done that and, as it turns out, Dennis does not have any on him. But if Dennis fainted, the ranger goes on, it’s possible that he might have blacked out the last few minutes before he hit the ground.

Then Dennis remembers that he’d been mid-conversation with his mother, so he pulls his phone out of his pocket — it had been turned off, apparently — and when he gets it back on, he recieves a stream of alerts for texts and missed calls from his mother. So he calls her back, and once he calms her down and explains the situation, he asks her what she remembers happening. She tells him that they were talking and he was in the middle of a sentence when the call just dropped. She’d been trying to call him back ever since. (I don’t know how much time had passed between Dennis talking to his mom and Dennis being picked up by the ranger, I admit. I feel like it wasn’t a terribly long time, but this is not a detail I can remember asking him about.)

Eventually, the person who can tell Dennis that yes, he seems fine and is medically sound to leave, shows up and tells him that yes, he seems fine and is medically sound to leave. And someone drives him back to his car — he is not keen to continue hiking — whereupon he drives back to L.A. proper, arrives at his home, and immediately decides to take a shower, because although he is not injured, he was lying in dirt. When he goes to take off his clothes, he discovers he is not wearing socks.

Where are his fucking socks?

Where are his fucking socks?

I don’t know if this will strike all audiences as dumbfoundingly strange verging on sinister, but if you put on hiking boots — L.A.-style hiking boots, more for style than function but boots nonetheless — and if you’re taking those boots to walk on the dusty trails we have around this city, you would wear socks. Unless you have the toughest, most calloused, most free spirit earthchild feet ever, taking a hike in boots without socks would tear up your feet something awful: blisters at best, but actual raw chunks of foot meat at worst, at the end of a long hike. And Dennis was not the kind of guy who’d roughed up his feet enough that he’d ever consider taking a hike without socks on. I myself — no free spirit, no earthchild — am almost exclusively barefoot in my backyard, and I would still put on socks if I were going hiking. I would never go hiking and, like, forget to wear socks.

Where are his fucking socks?

Dennis, not at the moment he realized his socks were missing but here in the bar where he’s telling me this story, goes through in his mind and tries to imagine any situation where he could have forgotten to put socks on — your feet would tell you fairly quickly into the hike that you’d skipped a necessary step — or if he could have stopped and taken off his boots and then thrown his socks off a cliff — could dehydration make a person do that? — and he can’t come up with an answer for why he’d arrived back at home without his socks on. It’s at this point when I just ask him, “So what do you think happened?” but I immediately regret this because any of the explanations just raise a lot more questions. In terms of the conversation, I might have seemed like I was asking about what he thinks happened to his socks, but my question was bigger than that: “What strange thing happened to you that resulted in any number of outcomes, one side effect of which was the loss of your socks?” He says he has no idea.

I know I must have filled the silence with something, probably out of guilt for pressing him to tell a story he didn’t want to tell, and after a bit he seems more relaxed about it, maybe no longer reliving the emotions of the original incident so vividly. I had follow-up questions, and a lot of those answers are now incorporated into the story as I have told it, except for one point: Drew Barrymore’s hair in Scream. If you go back and watch that movie, something that is obvious is that Drew Barrymore’s character has hair that Drew Barrymore herself did not have in real life, which is to say that she is wearing an obvious wig. So Dennis’s statement that the mysterious woman had hair that looked exactly like Drew Barrymore’s in Scream could mean, maybe, possibly, that the woman was also wearing a wig. I explained this and asked if it were at all possible, but he couldn’t say. (Why would he want to say it? For what purpose would a person trek into the wildness on the edge of L.A. County and put on a wig in order to bump into random hikers? Why would someone do this at all, much less why would someone do it in furtherance of some larger, more sinister goal?) He did tell me that he sometimes sees that woman in dreams, sometimes walking toward him in slow motion.

We did move on to discuss other things, but I couldn’t tell you what. We talked enough to make it clear we didn’t have a whole lot in common, and without having to explicitly say so, we left that date and went our separate ways. 

Dennis isn’t on Tinder anymore. For all I know, he’s married and deleted the thing. (Good for him if so.) A few times now I’ve done the thing where you are not married and so you delete your Tinder account and start over, only to end up flipping past every single one-off date you’ve been on, and I’ve never seen Dennis in the mix again. I’ve also never seen him at a party or a bar. I wonder if he moved away.

I’ve also never told this story and had someone listening say, “Oh my god! That’s my friend Dennis! He told me that too! Isn’t it a crazy story?” I have two reasons for thinking someone else would recognize this story. For one, Los Angeles is a closer-knit community than you’d think, especially among men who date men and who live east of West Hollywood and who are happy to meet up in Silverlake for drinks and who do occasionally hike, even if they don’t say so on their dating profile. For another, I eventually wrote this story out in a Twitter thread last year, and it got some retweets, but it also got retold on an episode of My Favorite Murder, in which co-host Karen Kilgariff identifies me as Drew McGrory, which I think is a fusion of me and Drew Magary, which was annoying because if you liked the Twitter thread so much then please give me the benefit of getting my name right on your massive podcast platform. But at the same time, it’s not my story no matter how many times I tell it, even if I did get the okay from Dennis to share it. Of the My Favorite Murder listeners who reached out to me, none had any idea what might have happened to Dennis’s socks, which remain missing, and none said that they also knew Dennis.

modified image via flickr user el_ramon, under creative commons license

In writing this post, I tried to just work from memory to see if what I recalled now would match what I put in the original Twitter thread. It does, more or less. I am aware that time can distort a memory, however, and if I’m being honest, the more I think about it, the more I wish I could double-check with Dennis that I’m remembering it all correctly. For example, I did put Los Padres in the original thread, but does that make sense? Could it have been the Angeles National Forest instead? It could have been. Maybe I got that part wrong when I wrote it up for Twitter and now that’s overwritten the original memory. How does a person become certain about these sorts of things?

The point of translating a Twitter thread to a standard blog post was just to collect it in one place, because I have somewhere to write now, and because this is perhaps a story worth telling. That said, I don’t think I can I can sum up what’s weird about this story and, really, what will be weird about every entry in this “Every Unexplained Thing” series better than I did in the final tweet in the chain: “I think the scariest stuff plays out very plainly, very mundanely, and only after the fact, when you add it all up, do you realize that it doesn't make sense. Like, there's not a UFO or a monster or a Terminator or anything. It's boring normal life, minus comprehension.”

I still think this. Also, where are his fucking socks?

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