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I didn't plan on posting this.

I wrote most of it down the week it happened

because the details were crowding each other in my head

and I was forgetting what came first,

what came next, what came next,

what belonged to which night. It's been almost a year now, and the order is still clear to me,

not because I've gone over it a hundred times, but because it sits in me like a bruise you

keep bumping into by accident. If you've camped the river hills in late October, you know

the smell I'm talking about.

Cold leaf rot, damp iron in the air, wood smoke from some other site you can't see.

That's what the weekend was supposed to be. A last trip before winter.

There were four of us, me, my buddy Aaron, his girlfriend Kayla, and her older brother Matt.

We took two vehicles so we could split gear and leave one at camp if we wanted to poke

around the old bunkers over in Mason County without tearing down the tents.

We set up in Wayne National Forest on the Ohio side at a primitive spot off a rutted spur

...