I was at some kind of big outdoor festival where hundreds of cars had to park in a field and the only way in and out was on a little gravel lane. The event, whatever it was, was over and people were scrambling for position to get out. I saw the line and knew it could be an hour or more so I drove to the other end of the field thinking there might be some other way available. There was a path that went down into a ditch that might have been crossable w/ a tractor or ATV at low water time, but I was in a car and the water was up.
I decided that with an hour to wait I had time to go to the lodge. There was a trail that headed off from the field into the woods to the lodge about ½ mile away. I was wearing cut-off jeans and sandals, no shirt, so I was hoping the trail would be pretty open and have no poison ivy. It wasn’t well tended, though. It had a lot of underbrush that was mostly packed down on a wheel path and some ruts and holes with water standing in them. I started trotting along dodging and weaving around holes and brush, and soon got into it and started running faster. I thought that I should have told Ruth what I was doing, but then decided that it was going to be an hour before she went anywhere anyhow and I had my cell phone if she wanted to check on me. I was enjoying the run, not feeling winded or strained at all and going pretty fast when suddenly a woman ran up and passed me. I wanted to enjoy my run and not get distracted by competition, but found I couldn’t let it go. I sped up and got back ahead of her and pushed hard the rest of the way there. She must have stayed close behind me because she was there when I came out of the woods.
When I popped out of the woods I was at the side door of a state park style lodge. This doorway had fired pottery porch – columns holding up a roof, but it had partly collapsed. One of the columns had buckled over and the roof was tilted down in front of the door. I thought I would have to go to a different entrance but someone grabbed the roof, which must have weighed close to a ton and easily pushed it up out of the way. It was nearly balanced on one of the remaining columns so it pivoted like a teeter totter. It didn’t look like a safe place to stay, so I hurried in.
The inside was all old wooden walls, floors and ceiling panels w/ big exposed timber beams. There were several little shops off the main area – a news stand, a clothes store, a souvenir shop, a restaurant. To the right of the main room was a section of floor that was about 3 feet higher than the main floor and it had more rooms off the higher floor. Straight out from the hallway at the higher level came a combination stair/ramp out into the middle of the lower large room. The stair/ramp looked in plan view sort of like a slice of a mushroom. It had a straight section that came out and then it fanned out both directions. The center of it was the ramp and as it fanned left and right the ramp gradually turned into stairs until at 90 degrees from the center left and right were normal sets of stairs. So at 45 degrees it had sort of stairs that were about half the normal height and tread depth and rounded. At 20 degrees it was mostly ramp with just the beginnings of bumps that would later turn into stairs. It was made entirely of highly polished hard wood, sort of cherry colored, but probably maple or hickory because it was very hard. It had heavy, highly polished railing along the stem section that turned down at 90 degrees with the stairs.
As I stood admiring it, because it was an amazing piece of woodwork, a 5 or 6 year old boy came running out the stem and dove head first and slid down the ramp. About this time I heard someone call my name. I turned and saw a man carrying a carved wooden animal. I don’t know what it was supposed to be for sure. Its body was just flattened box, about the size of a thick book, and it had a 2” diameter round head attached to the front of the upper corner of the box. The head had a pointed nose that stuck out about an inch and curved up slightly. It had little plastic eyes glued on that had the little movable black circles in the middle and it had leather ears that stuck up from the top.
Its most interesting feature was that there was a hole at the end of its nose and as I moved the box quickly front to back a little dowel, maybe 1/16” in diameter and 1” long would come bobbing out of the end of its nose. I first took it to be wooden snot, but as I thought about it I decided it was supposed to be a tongue. I had been handling it a little, getting the feel for what motion made the dowel bob out, when I spotted Emma at 3 or 4 years old sitting on the top of a pile of about a dozen stackable chairs. I went over to her w/ my animal and started moving it so it was sticking its tongue out at her, which she giggled at.
That's weird! :)
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