IN LIKE A LION PART 1: CHAPTER 1
In Like a Lion
Maps, myths, and manifestations
(a memoir)
Part 1
This is a story about our curious relationship with belief.
It is a work of complete nonfiction.
As with any tale of the supernatural, you, dear reader, must ask yourself: what do you believe?
Browse Chapters:
CHAPTER 1
The Cabin at the End of the Road
Soundtrack: Listen While You Read
April 2019: Kentucky State Route 11 curved slow and long beneath the shadow of jagged hills upon my approach towards the cabins of Natural Bridge State Park. I had just departed the main lodge, where I had received my key, and was eager to drink beer, grill burgers and play guitar in solitude. I pushed the small Japanese rental car around the sharp turns, cutting ravenously into this ripe, new slice of Earth. Like a flash, a hawk suddenly appeared above me. I was happy.
I slowed down and advanced through the empty ranger checkpoint upon reaching the turn off, looking for signs of life. Miniature rivers, broken branches, rocks and other debris dotted the asphalt, remnants of the massive storm that had just rolled over. RV campers and tents lay splayed out along the banks of the Middle Fork river, backing awkwardly up the slope of the hill bordering the road to avoid the swollen water.
The way grew steep and narrow and offered impressive views. When I spotted the cabins, the cabin numbers made it obvious that mine, 208, wasn’t anywhere close. Cell phone service was a ghost at best. The higher up the hill I drove, the stronger I felt the potent absence of other human life. Besides one empty pickup truck, I saw absolutely no signs of guests or rangers. Was I alone? A native southerner, I knew places like East Tennessee and north Georgia like the back of my hand; but I was fully uninitiated to this wild, ragged world between Lexington and the Virginias. This was uncharted land.
*****
I lost all sense of direction as the hills began to dominate the sun. The road ran out at a large mossy bluff. I put the car in park, seeing my cabin number on a wooden sign painted in pale mustard yellow at the bottom of a long flight of wooden stairs. The cabin loomed above. I winced. I had already reinjured my bad knee on the first morning of my trip. Full time office work had not been kind to my body. Getting out of the car, I was greeted by the piercing sounds of the wilderness wafting eerily from all directions. I jumped as an owl hooted somewhere closeby.
Groaning, I forced my way up the stairs with my belongings in tow. My clothes, guitar, laptop, backpack, and the groceries I’d brought for the grill required three or four trips. But despite the screaming pain coming from my MCL tendon, I liked this place. I had my own private refuge deep within a haven as strongly established as my childhood memories: the forest.
Once loaded in, I stood perfectly still inside the living room to get my bearings, glancing around the corner towards the bedroom. Something pushed back against me, heavy and laden with shadows. The air grew very still. I instinctually checked my phone—no service. Goosebumps tiptoed across my skin. I felt something similar to the anticipation of knowing someone else is about to speak despite deathly quiet and moved quickly to check every room, finding nothing.
“Get a grip,” I said out loud. “This place is a dream.” I had just stayed the night in another even more isolated cabin two nights earlier, down in Pine Mountain State Park, without incident; the fact that I was feeling unnerved here in broad daylight seemed nonsensical. But when I turned to sit down on the couch, I found myself physically unable to. Something about the light of the late afternoon gave the shadows shape, stretching sparsely in through the trees, spanning the corners of the room. I knew the dangers of the night were trespassing here in the sun.
I recently came across Tanya’s story on the Euphomet podcast
and found it startlingly familiar. Hear a short excerpt above
(or the full episode here) and make sure to subscribe:
Euphomet by Jim Perry
“Come on, stop. I don’t believe in anything like that,” I said aloud, a go-to that had come to serve me well over the years. Besides, it was true. Mostly. While I was a seeker at heart—after all, here I was alone in the Appalachian wilderness simply to write stories and play music—in my mid thirties, a father, fiancé, and full time office worker, I was comfortable believing that I didn’t really believe. And as easy as it would be to present this moment as my first unexplainable experience, this nuts-and-bolts spoken statement actually belied my remarkably weird past.
I was born with a heart problem, beat the odds and survived, and was raised to believe that God had a hand in this. Steeped in a charismatic church where miracles were commonplace, we were taught that the Bible was fact. In other words, I was raised to believe purely for the sake of belief.
“The Chronicles of Prydain” Book II
By age 7, if I wasn’t curled up with a sci-fi fantasy novel I was leading my two dogs through the woods, getting lost between the towering trees, looking behind every bush and boulder for “It,” that unseen current behind the mythos of Narnia, Tessering, or the Black Cauldron of Prydain. I developed a taste for paranormal TV shows, but all it took was one abduction story to put the fear of God in my young heart and kill the buzz entirely.
Age 16 brought my first UFO sighting. I also experienced my first miracle during an evening worship service at church. Not long after, a group of friends and I all heard a disembodied voice singing to an empty forest, hand in hand with the sunset. It was all around me, and I was wonderfully and wildly fascinated with It.
I first struggled with my faith in college at the age of 21, surrounded by logic and proof, until my congenital heart defect forced me back to the hospital. I had to undergo an emergency cardiological procedure which required signing a more than slightly macabre legal waiver acknowledging that dying within the hour was a real-world possibility. This flipped the final switch.
Instantly, all around me: Heaven, Hell, and The Unseen. The architecture of the material world—career, debt, legacy—all faded away into a grainy, monochrome blur. I explored Europe by myself and, after graduating college, moved to the Pacific Northwest, following the call to camp and backpack alone in the wilderness. Memories of church and the magic therein paled in comparison to the holy initiation of sleeping alone in the forest or hiking upon the coastal cliffs.
By age 28 I had moved back home to build a career, write music, and toy with speculative fiction on the side. Uprooted and uninspired, I wobbled back and forth between belief and the matter of facts. Though a series of failed romantic relationships inspired me to dust off a few sacred texts I had saved from college, and though I learned meditation and flirted with the edges of true inner peace, any interest in the esoteric was blown to pieces at age 33 when my now-wife and I had a surprise pregnancy a few months after falling in love. My car and computer both died within a month of each other, cutting off my only sources of income. It was the biggest ordeal I’d ever faced in my life. The material world had returned for its due.
*****
Fast forward three incredible and difficult years later: I had replaced creativity with a car note and was commuting to and from a full-time office job to support a family. Having so mastered the architecture of the material world, I had neither the time nor the headspace to deal with the idea of staying in a haunted cabin on the last night of a long overdue creative retreat. I was here simply in search of fresh air and screensaver sunsets.
But nonetheless, here I stood a statue. Something real—not my imagination—gripped me in its hand. My heart pounded and my throat constricted. The aura of the cabin’s interior; the empty space overhanging the chintzy, dated furniture; the heavy, magnetic buzz…I felt pushed and backed out towards the door. I left so quickly I forgot my cooler of groceries and had to come back later, shaking in fear, to retrieve it. I started the car and drove back towards the lodge, nausea taking over, repeating to myself, “But I don’t believe in any of this…”
Closing Credits
Natural Bridge State Park - Cabin 208
SHARE YOUR STORIES
Share your own stories in the comment section or via the contact form.
Writing prompts:
How do you explain what happened in the cabin?
Do you believe in unseen forces? Categorize your answer as either “absolutely,” “maybe,” or “absolutely not.” Why or why not?
Describe a time in the past where you felt like something or someone was standing behind you.