The Trail That Kept Adding Steps

The Hollow Pines loop is a trail I know the way you know a song. Four point two miles, one big climb, a footbridge over a creek, back to the lot. I have walked it in every season. So when my brother came to visit and wanted a hike, I picked it because it is impossible to get lost on. That is what I told him. Impossible.

We went in around noon on a gray autumn day, the kind where the light never really commits. The forest out there is old growth in patches, tall pines that swallow sound, and about a mile in you notice how quiet it gets. No birds, really. Just your own feet and the creek somewhere off to the left. My brother, who is not a woods person, said it felt like the trees were listening. I laughed it off. I had stopped hearing it years ago.

We hit the footbridge at the usual spot, right on schedule. Then the trail did something it does not do. It kept going. Past the bridge there is normally the climb, then the turn back toward the lot. Instead the path ran flat and straight into a part of the forest I did not recognize, the pines closer together, the ground darker. I stopped and pulled out my phone. No signal, which is normal. But the trail behind us -- the way we had come -- was gone. Not overgrown. Gone. Just forest.

My brother thought I was messing with him. I was not. I checked my watch, which tracks distance, and it read 5.1 miles. We had walked maybe two. I did not say anything about that. I just said we should keep going, because a loop always comes back, and I did not want him to hear my voice do the thing it wanted to do.

We walked. The light got grayer, though it was hours from dusk. And then we came out into a small clearing, and in the middle of it was a ranger cabin I had never seen in all my years on that trail. Old. Log walls gone silver, a stovepipe leaning, one window with the glass still in it. My brother wanted to look inside. I did not. Something about it sat wrong, the way a smell you cannot place sits wrong.

Through that one window there was a lantern on a table. It was lit. A small steady flame in an abandoned cabin in the middle of a forest with no road to it. We stood there and looked at it and neither of us said the thing, which was that someone had to have lit it, and someone had to be keeping it lit.

That was when the birds came back. All at once, a wall of sound, like a switch had flipped. And past the cabin, plain as anything, was the climb. The real trail. Our trail. I could see the trail marker, the little blue blaze on the pine. We took it. We did not run, but we did not linger either.

The loop dumped us back at the lot exactly where it should. My watch said 6.8 miles for a 4.2 mile trail. My brother has never come back to visit in the fall. I have hiked Hollow Pines maybe twenty times since, looking for that clearing, and it is not there. There is no cabin on any map of that forest, current or historic. I checked. I really checked.

I still walk it. I tell myself the watch glitched, that we took a wrong spur, that memory does strange things under gray light. But I always cross that footbridge a little quicker now, and I always glance left into the pines, and part of me is looking for a small steady flame, and part of me is terrified I will see it.