Wandering thanks

Almost every year, my immediate family spends Thanksgiving in the North Carolina mountains. My aunt and uncle have owned a cabin up there for years (they, like my parents, live in Florida), and they like my family to go up for Thanksgiving to air it out and clean it up before they come up for Christmas. We love it because it was usually the only time of year we could really see fall colors (sometimes) and every once in a while, it would snow!! This is super-exciting for a Florida family, and we spent a lot of time building snowpeople and sledding and throwing snowballs.

The best story to come from this, though, is a lot funnier in retrospect than it was at the time. On Thanksgiving day several years ago, before we put the turkey in the oven but after breakfast, we decided to go on a mid-morning hike. Not long after we started up the gravel road, we all agreed that we were pretty tough and adventurous and capable (a sudden infusion of mountain air can do strange things to otherwise sane people), and we decided to instead to climb straight up one of the mountains to see what was on the other side. This was no towering peak, so when we scrambled up and saw what was there, we felt unchallenged enough to climb up the next hill. I can't remember how long this went on before one of us finally stopped and noticed that we'd all lost track of which direction we'd come from.

While my family does go camping sometimes, we are expressly not hunters. I don't think there's ever been a gun in my house. In fact, I pretty much grew up equating guns with TV murderers (which I don't think is probably a bad thing, but that's another topic). So we were all getting a little nervous when we started hearing the ricocheting echoes of gun shots. My dad assured us people were just out hunting turkeys (my brother and I had seen more than enough cartoons to find this reasonable), but then we started hearing some turkeys gobbling nearby and moved away from them quickly. Later, we came across an old hunting shed with a few wooden benches, no locks, and bullet holes in the windows. I thought for sure there would be a dead body, but luckily there wasn't.

This went on for several more hours until finally we stumbled into an open pasture sloping down into a farm (farmers often don't put fences on the higher side of their farms in that area because the animals don't go up to far and what kind of crazy people would be wandering down from up there?). We passed a few cows, who ignored us, some dogs (my mom swore they were wolves, but I think they were dogs since they were in the farm and not eating things) who followed us suspiciously, then a pig pen with a sow suckling a whole litter of piglets. Eventually, and somehow without getting shot at by the farm's owner, we found the house trailer, complete with a deer strung up from a tree out front, bleeding out. I don't think any of us had EVER seen something like that deer: back feet tied at the ankles to a thick tree branch, both snout and front hooves reaching for the ground, bright white stomach, eyes open, blood dripping slowly off the nose. Ick. My mom stayed with my brother and me in the front while my dad knocked on the door to ask directions back to our cabin.

Following the directions along the road, we found we were still quite a few miles from where we had started. We were exhausted and hungry, but we followed the driveway back down to the hard road, hobbled along it for at least another hour, then turned up our gravel drive for another 30 minutes or so right up the side of the mountain.

All told, I think the whole "walk" was about 4 or 5 hours. As soon as we got home we collapsed in exhaustion for a while, then got up to make Thanksgiving dinner! There weren't very many leftovers.

This year, we have a new place to visit! The aunt and uncle who own the cabin we usually stay in bought the land across the gravel road and built a few houses with one of their contractor friends who lives year-round farther up the mountain. My parents bought one and I think it just finished construction, so this year we'll be staying in the new cabin. Eventually, my aunt and uncle want to tear down their small, comfortable cabin and build a big one to retire in (there's talk about donating it to the fire department to use as a practice house, but we'll see). We've had a lot of fun memories in that cabin, and it will be hard to give up. But I guess all traditions fade away eventually. For example, now when we take pre-dinner hikes, we try to stick to the roads.