My Haphazard Trip In Fremont
- By: Cecilia Abate
- Created on: 09/23/2009
- Rated By 1 Users
- Comments: none
Winter break of 08 rolled around and found me visiting Shaina. Shaina was a friend of mine from art school, and she had taken the duty of hosting my presence for a day or two at her house in Freemont. Her parents were godly with decoration and furnishing; the house was lovingly adorned with adorable Asian décor and constantly kept perfectly organized and clean. I envied them terribly, and always loved staying at their house. This was exactly what I was looking back on as I sat in the back seat of one of their cars, staring numbly into the blackness of the forest.
It was pitch black, miles away from home and gaining inches by the second, and we were lost.
A pile of folded papers sat abandoned on the cup holder between the two front seats. Shaina would occasionally rifle through them with a quiet discontent, an air of ‘Well, these didn’t help’. They were the hastily printed instructions from Google Maps that were supposed to lead us through a canyon, up and around a few mountains, and to the freakishly rich residence of one of Shaina’s distant relatives. They apparently lived in a mansion atop one of these godforsaken- I cursed them then- mountains, and it was someone’s birthday that day. We had been invited to the party.
It was generous of them to bring me along, seeing as I wasn’t related in the slightest. I had worn a dress that I brought along for the occasion and now sat in it uncomfortably, head against the window, staring out with a broken sort of anguish.
I was from the city. San Francisco. We were in a forested canyon- hell, we didn’t know where we were exactly- we were lost and I felt very much like I had been tossed into something I knew nothing about. Wilderness? Survival? It was pitch black! Occasionally the outlines of pine trees would go whizzing past, and I could see the illuminated shape of a STOP or SLOW sign. Safe for the reflections from the headlights of the car onto fences or signs, that was the only light.
Shaina’s grandmother, our escort for the night, had a wonderfully gung-ho attitude about the whole affair. “Oh well!” she cheerfully supposed when I voiced my concerns about the darkening sky, and the lack of recognizable street names or houses. “We’ll get there when we get there, I guess!” Shaina picked up our useless instructions and looked through them again, and then turned around from the passenger seat to give me an apologetic glance. She wasn’t so worried, either. I sat in the backseat and grasped my phone, and decided to text everyone I knew.
“Hi, guys!” the texts read. “I’m terrified.”
It was about an hour or so in the car. We listened to Shaina’s mix of Japanese rock on the car stereo, interrupted by Shaina’s grandmother cussing occasionally. They tossed ghost stories back and forth for a while, during the majority of which I turned my music up and curled up in the back seat so that I only heard snippets between songs-
“The white witch-“
“Only at midnight-“
“She walks beside the road-“
Eventually we saw another car, and lo and behold- we had gotten onto the main road, from where we followed the car in front of us right up to the family’s mansion. It was as grand as we had expected, and we found that the travel back was a lot easier.
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