It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

Top 6 Updates of last Week:

• Meta launches AI tools for ad creative creation and paid subscription tiers.
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• Pinterest launches Media Buyer Certification Course.
• X will soon allow advertisers to use AI for audience creation.
• Youtube launches a promotions tab for Creators & SMBs to run quick ad campaigns.
• Reddit is planning to launch search ads and a mixed feed. * Using ‘keyword + reddit’ on google > using reddit search.

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• Apple’s Safari 18 is expected to introduce webpage summarization, web eraser and more.
• Reddit’s Q1 2024 report showed strong user and ad revenue growth, 48% YoY increase in revenue.
• Jack Dorsey has left Bluesky Board sharing the company is making the same mistakes he and his team at Twitter.
• Ofcom is pushing for better age verification, filters and other checks in new online child safety code.
• Apple apologies for iPad Pro ‘Crush’ ad campaign.
• Ocean Outdoor and Battersea Power Station launch new premium DOOH network.
• OpenAI’s pitch deck for publisher partnerships gets leaked.
• Hubspot posts $617.4 million revenue for the first quarter of the year.
• Temu and Meta are being blamed by marketers for ruining performance and paid social marketing.
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• Sony and Apollo are in talks to acquire paramount.

TikTok 🎶

• TikTok is working on a collaboration feature similar to IG.
• TikTok shares new insights about brand and search experience on platform.
• TikTok to start auto-labeling AI-generated content to combat misinformation.
• TikTok is having ‘Creative Made Simple’ webinar for SMBs on May 16th.
  

  Instagram & Threads 🗂️

• Instagram continues to gamify content creation experience, to make people publish more.
  
• Threads adds view counts on posts.
  
• Instagram’s new ‘Meme it’ DMs feature capitalises on Gen-Z’s heavy use of DMs for chats and content sharing.
  
• Influencers see more Instagram engagement with still images than Reels.
  
• Instagram is teasing a new creator revenue program ‘Spring Bonus’.
  
• Threads is testing cross-posting from Instagram globally.
  
• Instagram is testing an new UI for Carousels, with no dots.
  
• Despite IG adding 3-minute reels, they were found discouraging creators from creating long reels.
  

Meta 😅

• Meta’s newly launched AI creative tools for advantage+ campaigns.
• The feature to create reels from existing content is coming to Meta Business Suite.
• Meta’s turn away from the news industry has lead to 50% traffic drop to publishers.
• Error: Meta shares detailed targeting exclusion alert sent to advertisers was a mistake.
• Meta Business Suite adds ‘review’ feature to request post to be reviewed by other admins before publishing.
• WhatsApp launches new UI elements, giving the platform a new look.
• WhatsApp makes it easier to find new channels with categories.

X (Twitter) 🕹️

• X working on Analytics for X communities.
• Nintendo ends their X integration for Switch.
• X’s new algorithm update has lead to prioritisation of smaller accounts, says Elon.
• Chat History is now live for Gork AI on web.
• X is adding a ‘cast’ button to the iOS app.

Youtube 🕹️

• YouTube outlines its measures to ensure EU Election Integrity.
• Youtube expands testing of ‘Jump Ahead’ premium AI feature.
• MrBeast is parting ways with Night Media, Talent Management Company.
• Youtube testing a new shopping feed in Youtube Shorts.

Google 🔦

• Google launches new ‘Saved Comparisons’ feature for Analytics.
• Google Shopping Ads get conversion annotations.
• Google Search results without SGE jump to 65%, up from 25%.
• Google hides search results count under tools section.
• Google shares Disavow link tool will go away at some point.
• Google is defending lack of communication around Search Updates.
• Google’s site reputation abuse policy enforcement started on Monday May 6th.

Agency News

• Issa Rae’s Hoorae Media unveils Ensemble, a branded entertainment company.
• Omnicom is shuttering Honey & Sparks and the talent is being distributed.
• Nestlé Canada appoints Citizen Relations as Confectionery PR AOR.
• GE Lighting, a Savant company appoints Bakery as Social AOR.
• Rocket Cos. Puts its media account in review.
• We Are Social US partners with Valerie Moizel, CEO of The Woo to form Hello US.
• Virgin Active appoints We Are Pi for global brand transformation.
• Famous Footwear appoints Yard NYC and THE MAYOR as Creative AOR.
• Warner Bros appoints BigSmall to launch streaming service Max.
• Lovesac appoints Hearts & Science as media AOR.
• BUNTIN appoints Trex as Media Agency of record.
• IPG Health consolidates agency brand roster, launch of new Rise & Run brand.
• THIRD EAR appointed by Nissan North America and INFINITI USA as Multicultural AOR.
• Indie Agency Boathouse creates supplier diversity program, expanding external DEI efforts.

Brands & Ads 🏓

My Fav; Liquid Death’s latest campaign ‘The Adventures of Murder Man’ is a creative masterpiece as usual and a corporate parody.

• New Balance’s seven-minute film shares seven stories of its influence in subcultures.
• Coca-Cola’s new ad ‘Coke Spills’ celebrates the joyous moments of coke spilling.
• The Ordinary and Uncommon’s new OOH campaign embraces science instead of celebs.
• Jung von Matt’s UK ad debut for Wayfair takes a very simple approach but the vibe matches.
• Volkswagen’s new brand platform ‘Your Wagen’ celebrating customer journeys.
• PG Tips launches their first campaign in eight years, starring Ashley Walters.
• Another Ad campaign featuring dogs but this time it’s for dog food from the brand tails.com.
• Currys new ad spot is funny and aligned with Euro 2024 vibes, you can’t miss it .
• Budweiser uses song lyrics mentioning the brand to launch new Spotify ad “UninterruptAds”.
• Impossible Foods new ad campaign sticks out with very digestible message to make people vegan.
• Nescafé’s kettle ad campaign speaks sustainability and stands out as a loner, but on a broader look, it doesn’t align with Nespresso.
• EasyJet goes into Eurovision mode for the new ‘All Aboard the Orange Plane’ ad campaign.
• Peroni 0.0% joins Formula 1 as Ferrari Team Partner, hoping to ride the non-alcoholic beer growth train.
• McDonald’s new plan to invest more dollars (Millions) in Digital marketing and its reward program.

AI 🤨

• OpenAI increase AI content transparency with launch of new detection tools.
• Etsy’s plan to improve delivery tracking using new ML model.
• Absolut & Copy Lab launch copyright-free diverse images for fashion content.
• OpenAI and Stack Overflow announced an API partnership.
• OpenAI introduces Model Spec to better the model behaviour and explores how AI can generate explicit content.
• Eleven labs preview their music AI model.

Reddit & Pinterest

• Reddit announces new Public Content Policy, setting new parameters for data usage.
• Pinterest hires Former Levi’s CEO to Board of Directors.

Microsoft & LinkedIn

• Microsoft is building a bigger and better LLM ‘MAI-1’ to fight Google.
• Bing tests clear distinction between free and paid search results.
• LinkedIn shares new insights on measuring B2B marketing campaigns.

Marketing & AdTech

• Bluesky adds new features; DMs, Improved custom feeds, Video and more.
• Shopsense launches retail media platform for second-screen shopping.
• GAP names Fabiola Torres new global CMO.
• Ocean Outdoor becomes official OOH supplier to London Fashion Week.
• Curb, a ride/hailing app launches Curb journey Connect, one-stop ad solution.
• Constant Contact launches new AI feature for Brandkit and Campaign Builder.
• 160over90 launches Integrated Creator Commerce service with Lumanu.
• Omnicom announces major expansion in India.
• Kantar Media hires Lucy Bristowe as CEO for UK & Western Europe.
• Instacart and Uber Eats partner, allowing customers to order Uber Eats food via Instacart.

I hope this helps to plan your week ahead. All the sources can be found in the newsletter archive post.

Top 6 Updates of last Week:

• Meta launches AI tools for ad creative creation and paid subscription tiers.
• TikTok sues US Government over divest-or-sell law.
• Pinterest launches Media Buyer Certification Course.
• X will soon allow advertisers to use AI for audience creation.
• Youtube launches a promotions tab for Creators & SMBs to run quick ad campaigns.
• Reddit is planning to launch search ads and a mixed feed. * Using ‘keyword + reddit’ on google > using reddit search.

Trending

• Sam Altman debunks the rumours of gpt-5 and search engine launch, announcing new updates to GPT-4. The launch of GPT-4o.
• Google’s CEO responds to Search Quality Issues.
• Constellation Brands launches creative review for Corona Extra.
• Apple’s Safari 18 is expected to introduce webpage summarization, web eraser and more.
• Reddit’s Q1 2024 report showed strong user and ad revenue growth, 48% YoY increase in revenue.
• Jack Dorsey has left Bluesky Board sharing the company is making the same mistakes he and his team at Twitter.
• Ofcom is pushing for better age verification, filters and other checks in new online child safety code.
• Apple apologies for iPad Pro ‘Crush’ ad campaign.
• Ocean Outdoor and Battersea Power Station launch new premium DOOH network.
• OpenAI’s pitch deck for publisher partnerships gets leaked.
• Hubspot posts $617.4 million revenue for the first quarter of the year.
• Temu and Meta are being blamed by marketers for ruining performance and paid social marketing.
• Instacart and NBCUniversal’s new partnership connecting CPG with Streaming, changing retail.
• Sony and Apollo are in talks to acquire paramount.

TikTok 🎶

• TikTok is working on a collaboration feature similar to IG.
• TikTok shares new insights about brand and search experience on platform.
• TikTok to start auto-labeling AI-generated content to combat misinformation.
• TikTok is having ‘Creative Made Simple’ webinar for SMBs on May 16th.
  

  Instagram & Threads 🗂️

• Instagram continues to gamify content creation experience, to make people publish more.
  
• Threads adds view counts on posts.
  
• Instagram’s new ‘Meme it’ DMs feature capitalises on Gen-Z’s heavy use of DMs for chats and content sharing.
  
• Influencers see more Instagram engagement with still images than Reels.
  
• Instagram is teasing a new creator revenue program ‘Spring Bonus’.
  
• Threads is testing cross-posting from Instagram globally.
  
• Instagram is testing an new UI for Carousels, with no dots.
  
• Despite IG adding 3-minute reels, they were found discouraging creators from creating long reels.
  

Meta 😅

• Meta’s newly launched AI creative tools for advantage+ campaigns.
• The feature to create reels from existing content is coming to Meta Business Suite.
• Meta’s turn away from the news industry has lead to 50% traffic drop to publishers.
• Error: Meta shares detailed targeting exclusion alert sent to advertisers was a mistake.
• Meta Business Suite adds ‘review’ feature to request post to be reviewed by other admins before publishing.
• WhatsApp launches new UI elements, giving the platform a new look.
• WhatsApp makes it easier to find new channels with categories.

X (Twitter) 🕹️

• X working on Analytics for X communities.
• Nintendo ends their X integration for Switch.
• X’s new algorithm update has lead to prioritisation of smaller accounts, says Elon.
• Chat History is now live for Gork AI on web.
• X is adding a ‘cast’ button to the iOS app.

Youtube 🕹️

• YouTube outlines its measures to ensure EU Election Integrity.
• Youtube expands testing of ‘Jump Ahead’ premium AI feature.
• MrBeast is parting ways with Night Media, Talent Management Company.
• Youtube testing a new shopping feed in Youtube Shorts.

Google 🔦

• Google launches new ‘Saved Comparisons’ feature for Analytics.
• Google Shopping Ads get conversion annotations.
• Google Search results without SGE jump to 65%, up from 25%.
• Google hides search results count under tools section.
• Google shares Disavow link tool will go away at some point.
• Google is defending lack of communication around Search Updates.
• Google’s site reputation abuse policy enforcement started on Monday May 6th.

Agency News

• Issa Rae’s Hoorae Media unveils Ensemble, a branded entertainment company.
• Omnicom is shuttering Honey & Sparks and the talent is being distributed.
• Nestlé Canada appoints Citizen Relations as Confectionery PR AOR.
• GE Lighting, a Savant company appoints Bakery as Social AOR.
• Rocket Cos. Puts its media account in review.
• We Are Social US partners with Valerie Moizel, CEO of The Woo to form Hello US.
• Virgin Active appoints We Are Pi for global brand transformation.
• Famous Footwear appoints Yard NYC and THE MAYOR as Creative AOR.
• Warner Bros appoints BigSmall to launch streaming service Max.
• Lovesac appoints Hearts & Science as media AOR.
• BUNTIN appoints Trex as Media Agency of record.
• IPG Health consolidates agency brand roster, launch of new Rise & Run brand.
• THIRD EAR appointed by Nissan North America and INFINITI USA as Multicultural AOR.
• Indie Agency Boathouse creates supplier diversity program, expanding external DEI efforts.

Brands & Ads 🏓

My Fav; Liquid Death’s latest campaign ‘The Adventures of Murder Man’ is a creative masterpiece as usual and a corporate parody.

• New Balance’s seven-minute film shares seven stories of its influence in subcultures.
• Coca-Cola’s new ad ‘Coke Spills’ celebrates the joyous moments of coke spilling.
• The Ordinary and Uncommon’s new OOH campaign embraces science instead of celebs.
• Jung von Matt’s UK ad debut for Wayfair takes a very simple approach but the vibe matches.
• Volkswagen’s new brand platform ‘Your Wagen’ celebrating customer journeys.
• PG Tips launches their first campaign in eight years, starring Ashley Walters.
• Another Ad campaign featuring dogs but this time it’s for dog food from the brand tails.com.
• Currys new ad spot is funny and aligned with Euro 2024 vibes, you can’t miss it .
• Budweiser uses song lyrics mentioning the brand to launch new Spotify ad “UninterruptAds”.
• Impossible Foods new ad campaign sticks out with very digestible message to make people vegan.
• Nescafé’s kettle ad campaign speaks sustainability and stands out as a loner, but on a broader look, it doesn’t align with Nespresso.
• EasyJet goes into Eurovision mode for the new ‘All Aboard the Orange Plane’ ad campaign.
• Peroni 0.0% joins Formula 1 as Ferrari Team Partner, hoping to ride the non-alcoholic beer growth train.
• McDonald’s new plan to invest more dollars (Millions) in Digital marketing and its reward program.

AI 🤨

• OpenAI increase AI content transparency with launch of new detection tools.
• Etsy’s plan to improve delivery tracking using new ML model.
• Absolut & Copy Lab launch copyright-free diverse images for fashion content.
• OpenAI and Stack Overflow announced an API partnership.
• OpenAI introduces Model Spec to better the model behaviour and explores how AI can generate explicit content.
• Eleven labs preview their music AI model.

Reddit & Pinterest

• Reddit announces new Public Content Policy, setting new parameters for data usage.
• Pinterest hires Former Levi’s CEO to Board of Directors.

Microsoft & LinkedIn

• Microsoft is building a bigger and better LLM ‘MAI-1’ to fight Google.
• Bing tests clear distinction between free and paid search results.
• LinkedIn shares new insights on measuring B2B marketing campaigns.

Marketing & AdTech

• Bluesky adds new features; DMs, Improved custom feeds, Video and more.
• Shopsense launches retail media platform for second-screen shopping.
• GAP names Fabiola Torres new global CMO.
• Ocean Outdoor becomes official OOH supplier to London Fashion Week.
• Curb, a ride/hailing app launches Curb journey Connect, one-stop ad solution.
• Constant Contact launches new AI feature for Brandkit and Campaign Builder.
• 160over90 launches Integrated Creator Commerce service with Lumanu.
• Omnicom announces major expansion in India.
• Kantar Media hires Lucy Bristowe as CEO for UK & Western Europe.
• Instacart and Uber Eats partner, allowing customers to order Uber Eats food via Instacart.

I hope this helps to plan your week ahead. Follow for more.

Top 6 Updates of last Week:

• Meta launches AI tools for ad creative creation and paid subscription tiers.
• TikTok sues US Government over divest-or-sell law.
• Pinterest launches Media Buyer Certification Course.
• X will soon allow advertisers to use AI for audience creation.
• Youtube launches a promotions tab for Creators & SMBs to run quick ad campaigns.
• Reddit is planning to launch search ads and a mixed feed. * Using ‘keyword + reddit’ on google > using reddit search.

Trending

• Sam Altman debunks the rumours of gpt-5 and search engine launch, announcing new updates to GPT-4. The launch of GPT-4o.
• Google’s CEO responds to Search Quality Issues.
• Constellation Brands launches creative review for Corona Extra.
• Apple’s Safari 18 is expected to introduce webpage summarization, web eraser and more.
• Reddit’s Q1 2024 report showed strong user and ad revenue growth, 48% YoY increase in revenue.
• Jack Dorsey has left Bluesky Board sharing the company is making the same mistakes he and his team at Twitter.
• Ofcom is pushing for better age verification, filters and other checks in new online child safety code.
• Apple apologies for iPad Pro ‘Crush’ ad campaign.
• Ocean Outdoor and Battersea Power Station launch new premium DOOH network.
• OpenAI’s pitch deck for publisher partnerships gets leaked.
• Hubspot posts $617.4 million revenue for the first quarter of the year.
• Temu and Meta are being blamed by marketers for ruining performance and paid social marketing.
• Instacart and NBCUniversal’s new partnership connecting CPG with Streaming, changing retail.
• Sony and Apollo are in talks to acquire paramount.

TikTok 🎶

• TikTok is working on a collaboration feature similar to IG.
• TikTok shares new insights about brand and search experience on platform.
• TikTok to start auto-labeling AI-generated content to combat misinformation.
• TikTok is having ‘Creative Made Simple’ webinar for SMBs on May 16th.
  

  Instagram & Threads 🗂️

• Instagram continues to gamify content creation experience, to make people publish more.
  
• Threads adds view counts on posts.
  
• Instagram’s new ‘Meme it’ DMs feature capitalises on Gen-Z’s heavy use of DMs for chats and content sharing.
  
• Influencers see more Instagram engagement with still images than Reels.
  
• Instagram is teasing a new creator revenue program ‘Spring Bonus’.
  
• Threads is testing cross-posting from Instagram globally.
  
• Instagram is testing an new UI for Carousels, with no dots.
  
• Despite IG adding 3-minute reels, they were found discouraging creators from creating long reels.
  

Meta 😅

• Meta’s newly launched AI creative tools for advantage+ campaigns.
• The feature to create reels from existing content is coming to Meta Business Suite.
• Meta’s turn away from the news industry has lead to 50% traffic drop to publishers.
• Error: Meta shares detailed targeting exclusion alert sent to advertisers was a mistake.
• Meta Business Suite adds ‘review’ feature to request post to be reviewed by other admins before publishing.
• WhatsApp launches new UI elements, giving the platform a new look.
• WhatsApp makes it easier to find new channels with categories.

X (Twitter) 🕹️

• X working on Analytics for X communities.
• Nintendo ends their X integration for Switch.
• X’s new algorithm update has lead to prioritisation of smaller accounts, says Elon.
• Chat History is now live for Gork AI on web.
• X is adding a ‘cast’ button to the iOS app.

Youtube 🕹️

• YouTube outlines its measures to ensure EU Election Integrity.
• Youtube expands testing of ‘Jump Ahead’ premium AI feature.
• MrBeast is parting ways with Night Media, Talent Management Company.
• Youtube testing a new shopping feed in Youtube Shorts.

Google 🔦

• Google launches new ‘Saved Comparisons’ feature for Analytics.
• Google Shopping Ads get conversion annotations.
• Google Search results without SGE jump to 65%, up from 25%.
• Google hides search results count under tools section.
• Google shares Disavow link tool will go away at some point.
• Google is defending lack of communication around Search Updates.
• Google’s site reputation abuse policy enforcement started on Monday May 6th.

Agency News

• Issa Rae’s Hoorae Media unveils Ensemble, a branded entertainment company.
• Omnicom is shuttering Honey & Sparks and the talent is being distributed.
• Nestlé Canada appoints Citizen Relations as Confectionery PR AOR.
• GE Lighting, a Savant company appoints Bakery as Social AOR.
• Rocket Cos. Puts its media account in review.
• We Are Social US partners with Valerie Moizel, CEO of The Woo to form Hello US.
• Virgin Active appoints We Are Pi for global brand transformation.
• Famous Footwear appoints Yard NYC and THE MAYOR as Creative AOR.
• Warner Bros appoints BigSmall to launch streaming service Max.
• Lovesac appoints Hearts & Science as media AOR.
• BUNTIN appoints Trex as Media Agency of record.
• IPG Health consolidates agency brand roster, launch of new Rise & Run brand.
• THIRD EAR appointed by Nissan North America and INFINITI USA as Multicultural AOR.
• Indie Agency Boathouse creates supplier diversity program, expanding external DEI efforts.

Brands & Ads 🏓

My Fav; Liquid Death’s latest campaign ‘The Adventures of Murder Man’ is a creative masterpiece as usual and a corporate parody.

• New Balance’s seven-minute film shares seven stories of its influence in subcultures.
• Coca-Cola’s new ad ‘Coke Spills’ celebrates the joyous moments of coke spilling.
• The Ordinary and Uncommon’s new OOH campaign embraces science instead of celebs.
• Jung von Matt’s UK ad debut for Wayfair takes a very simple approach but the vibe matches.
• Volkswagen’s new brand platform ‘Your Wagen’ celebrating customer journeys.
• PG Tips launches their first campaign in eight years, starring Ashley Walters.
• Another Ad campaign featuring dogs but this time it’s for dog food from the brand tails.com.
• Currys new ad spot is funny and aligned with Euro 2024 vibes, you can’t miss it .
• Budweiser uses song lyrics mentioning the brand to launch new Spotify ad “UninterruptAds”.
• Impossible Foods new ad campaign sticks out with very digestible message to make people vegan.
• Nescafé’s kettle ad campaign speaks sustainability and stands out as a loner, but on a broader look, it doesn’t align with Nespresso.
• EasyJet goes into Eurovision mode for the new ‘All Aboard the Orange Plane’ ad campaign.
• Peroni 0.0% joins Formula 1 as Ferrari Team Partner, hoping to ride the non-alcoholic beer growth train.
• McDonald’s new plan to invest more dollars (Millions) in Digital marketing and its reward program.

AI 🤨

• OpenAI increase AI content transparency with launch of new detection tools.
• Etsy’s plan to improve delivery tracking using new ML model.
• Absolut & Copy Lab launch copyright-free diverse images for fashion content.
• OpenAI and Stack Overflow announced an API partnership.
• OpenAI introduces Model Spec to better the model behaviour and explores how AI can generate explicit content.
• Eleven labs preview their music AI model.

Reddit & Pinterest

• Reddit announces new Public Content Policy, setting new parameters for data usage.
• Pinterest hires Former Levi’s CEO to Board of Directors.

Microsoft & LinkedIn

• Microsoft is building a bigger and better LLM ‘MAI-1’ to fight Google.
• Bing tests clear distinction between free and paid search results.
• LinkedIn shares new insights on measuring B2B marketing campaigns.

Marketing & AdTech

• Bluesky adds new features; DMs, Improved custom feeds, Video and more.
• Shopsense launches retail media platform for second-screen shopping.
• GAP names Fabiola Torres new global CMO.
• Ocean Outdoor becomes official OOH supplier to London Fashion Week.
• Curb, a ride/hailing app launches Curb journey Connect, one-stop ad solution.
• Constant Contact launches new AI feature for Brandkit and Campaign Builder.
• 160over90 launches Integrated Creator Commerce service with Lumanu.
• Omnicom announces major expansion in India.
• Kantar Media hires Lucy Bristowe as CEO for UK & Western Europe.
• Instacart and Uber Eats partner, allowing customers to order Uber Eats food via Instacart.

I hope this helps to plan your week ahead.

Top 6 Updates of last Week:

• Meta launches AI tools for ad creative creation and paid subscription tiers.
• TikTok sues US Government over divest-or-sell law.
• Pinterest launches Media Buyer Certification Course.
• X will soon allow advertisers to use AI for audience creation.
• Youtube launches a promotions tab for Creators & SMBs to run quick ad campaigns.
• Reddit is planning to launch search ads and a mixed feed. * Using ‘keyword + reddit’ on google > using reddit search.

Trending

• Sam Altman debunks the rumours of gpt-5 and search engine launch, announcing new updates to GPT-4. The launch of GPT-4o.
• Google’s CEO responds to Search Quality Issues.
• Constellation Brands launches creative review for Corona Extra.
• Apple’s Safari 18 is expected to introduce webpage summarization, web eraser and more.
• Reddit’s Q1 2024 report showed strong user and ad revenue growth, 48% YoY increase in revenue.
• Jack Dorsey has left Bluesky Board sharing the company is making the same mistakes he and his team at Twitter.
• Ofcom is pushing for better age verification, filters and other checks in new online child safety code.
• Apple apologies for iPad Pro ‘Crush’ ad campaign.
• Ocean Outdoor and Battersea Power Station launch new premium DOOH network.
• OpenAI’s pitch deck for publisher partnerships gets leaked.
• Hubspot posts $617.4 million revenue for the first quarter of the year.
• Temu and Meta are being blamed by marketers for ruining performance and paid social marketing.
• Instacart and NBCUniversal’s new partnership connecting CPG with Streaming, changing retail.
• Sony and Apollo are in talks to acquire paramount.

TikTok 🎶

• TikTok is working on a collaboration feature similar to IG.
• TikTok shares new insights about brand and search experience on platform.
• TikTok to start auto-labeling AI-generated content to combat misinformation.
• TikTok is having ‘Creative Made Simple’ webinar for SMBs on May 16th.
  

  Instagram & Threads 🗂️

• Instagram continues to gamify content creation experience, to make people publish more.
  
• Threads adds view counts on posts.
  
• Instagram’s new ‘Meme it’ DMs feature capitalises on Gen-Z’s heavy use of DMs for chats and content sharing.
  
• Influencers see more Instagram engagement with still images than Reels.
  
• Instagram is teasing a new creator revenue program ‘Spring Bonus’.
  
• Threads is testing cross-posting from Instagram globally.
  
• Instagram is testing an new UI for Carousels, with no dots.
  
• Despite IG adding 3-minute reels, they were found discouraging creators from creating long reels.
  

Meta 😅

• Meta’s newly launched AI creative tools for advantage+ campaigns.
• The feature to create reels from existing content is coming to Meta Business Suite.
• Meta’s turn away from the news industry has lead to 50% traffic drop to publishers.
• Error: Meta shares detailed targeting exclusion alert sent to advertisers was a mistake.
• Meta Business Suite adds ‘review’ feature to request post to be reviewed by other admins before publishing.
• WhatsApp launches new UI elements, giving the platform a new look.
• WhatsApp makes it easier to find new channels with categories.

X (Twitter) 🕹️

• X working on Analytics for X communities.
• Nintendo ends their X integration for Switch.
• X’s new algorithm update has lead to prioritisation of smaller accounts, says Elon.
• Chat History is now live for Gork AI on web.
• X is adding a ‘cast’ button to the iOS app.

Youtube 🕹️

• YouTube outlines its measures to ensure EU Election Integrity.
• Youtube expands testing of ‘Jump Ahead’ premium AI feature.
• MrBeast is parting ways with Night Media, Talent Management Company.
• Youtube testing a new shopping feed in Youtube Shorts.

Google 🔦

• Google launches new ‘Saved Comparisons’ feature for Analytics.
• Google Shopping Ads get conversion annotations.
• Google Search results without SGE jump to 65%, up from 25%.
• Google hides search results count under tools section.
• Google shares Disavow link tool will go away at some point.
• Google is defending lack of communication around Search Updates.
• Google’s site reputation abuse policy enforcement started on Monday May 6th.

Agency News

• Issa Rae’s Hoorae Media unveils Ensemble, a branded entertainment company.
• Omnicom is shuttering Honey & Sparks and the talent is being distributed.
• Nestlé Canada appoints Citizen Relations as Confectionery PR AOR.
• GE Lighting, a Savant company appoints Bakery as Social AOR.
• Rocket Cos. Puts its media account in review.
• We Are Social US partners with Valerie Moizel, CEO of The Woo to form Hello US.
• Virgin Active appoints We Are Pi for global brand transformation.
• Famous Footwear appoints Yard NYC and THE MAYOR as Creative AOR.
• Warner Bros appoints BigSmall to launch streaming service Max.
• Lovesac appoints Hearts & Science as media AOR.
• BUNTIN appoints Trex as Media Agency of record.
• IPG Health consolidates agency brand roster, launch of new Rise & Run brand.
• THIRD EAR appointed by Nissan North America and INFINITI USA as Multicultural AOR.
• Indie Agency Boathouse creates supplier diversity program, expanding external DEI efforts.

Brands & Ads 🏓

My Fav; Liquid Death’s latest campaign ‘The Adventures of Murder Man’ is a creative masterpiece as usual and a corporate parody.

• New Balance’s seven-minute film shares seven stories of its influence in subcultures.
• Coca-Cola’s new ad ‘Coke Spills’ celebrates the joyous moments of coke spilling.
• The Ordinary and Uncommon’s new OOH campaign embraces science instead of celebs.
• Jung von Matt’s UK ad debut for Wayfair takes a very simple approach but the vibe matches.
• Volkswagen’s new brand platform ‘Your Wagen’ celebrating customer journeys.
• PG Tips launches their first campaign in eight years, starring Ashley Walters.
• Another Ad campaign featuring dogs but this time it’s for dog food from the brand tails.com.
• Currys new ad spot is funny and aligned with Euro 2024 vibes, you can’t miss it .
• Budweiser uses song lyrics mentioning the brand to launch new Spotify ad “UninterruptAds”.
• Impossible Foods new ad campaign sticks out with very digestible message to make people vegan.
• Nescafé’s kettle ad campaign speaks sustainability and stands out as a loner, but on a broader look, it doesn’t align with Nespresso.
• EasyJet goes into Eurovision mode for the new ‘All Aboard the Orange Plane’ ad campaign.
• Peroni 0.0% joins Formula 1 as Ferrari Team Partner, hoping to ride the non-alcoholic beer growth train.
• McDonald’s new plan to invest more dollars (Millions) in Digital marketing and its reward program.

AI 🤨

• OpenAI increase AI content transparency with launch of new detection tools.
• Etsy’s plan to improve delivery tracking using new ML model.
• Absolut & Copy Lab launch copyright-free diverse images for fashion content.
• OpenAI and Stack Overflow announced an API partnership.
• OpenAI introduces Model Spec to better the model behaviour and explores how AI can generate explicit content.
• Eleven labs preview their music AI model.

Reddit & Pinterest

• Reddit announces new Public Content Policy, setting new parameters for data usage.
• Pinterest hires Former Levi’s CEO to Board of Directors.

Microsoft & LinkedIn

• Microsoft is building a bigger and better LLM ‘MAI-1’ to fight Google.
• Bing tests clear distinction between free and paid search results.
• LinkedIn shares new insights on measuring B2B marketing campaigns.

Marketing & AdTech

• Bluesky adds new features; DMs, Improved custom feeds, Video and more.
• Shopsense launches retail media platform for second-screen shopping.
• GAP names Fabiola Torres new global CMO.
• Ocean Outdoor becomes official OOH supplier to London Fashion Week.
• Curb, a ride/hailing app launches Curb journey Connect, one-stop ad solution.
• Constant Contact launches new AI feature for Brandkit and Campaign Builder.
• 160over90 launches Integrated Creator Commerce service with Lumanu.
• Omnicom announces major expansion in India.
• Kantar Media hires Lucy Bristowe as CEO for UK & Western Europe.
• Instacart and Uber Eats partner, allowing customers to order Uber Eats food via Instacart.

I hope this helps to plan your week ahead. Follow for more.