I was camped with a friend on the edge of the Salmon-Huckleberry wilderness, on the edge of a huge overgrown clearcut, on the edge of a tiny hidden clearing just large enough for a two-person tent and a cookstove.
Around dusk some teenage retards in daddy's car come roaring up the dirt road, thumpa-chuck-BOOM, spinning cookies, hurling beer cans -- the classic stereotype. After a while they get out, to expedite the opening of coolers with further alcohol, and decide that they're bored, so they take out a load of weaponry and begin shooting wildly into the woods.
It's a remote location, yeah, but it's also an official trailhead. There are horses and riders and women and children passing through here at least once an hour on their way to someone else.
We pop up like jack-in-the-boxes and begin screaming and waving the lantern and yelling.
They shoot directly at us.
We douse the lantern.
They continue shooting.
We remain lying down behind a log for an hour or so until they get bored and leave.
If I had had a revolver in my hand again I would have welcomed whatever logistical, social, and legal consequences incurred.
Sometimes that memory makes me so frustrated I just want to cry.
Instead I rake pine needles.
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"Asking a bomb squad if an old bomb is still "real" is not the best thing to do if you want to save it." - denim
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