Skeeter Landing

It was the summer of twenty-thirteen and my family decided to go on a wild road trip across the country from Southern California to North Alabama. I had never been to Alabama before, unlike my parents and brother, but thought I knew enough about the place to be somewhat prepared. 

The entire ride there was exhausting, but nothing like the settling in part. Our first stop in Alabama: Waterloo, population: one hundred eighty-three, elevation: one hundred forty-two meters, on the border of Tennessee and Mississippi, built on the edge of the Tennessee River. The town was likely named after the Battle of Waterloo. After its incorporation into Lauderdale County, it was at its peak in the nineteen forties, with a population of five hundred twenty-four residents, only second largest community to Florence, but had since lost much of its population, similar to its land. Due to the community being on the river, and the building of Pickwick Landing Dam, Waterloo had succumbed to many flooding over the years.

What made my parents want to visit Waterloo first? Beats me. Aside from a couple of very distant relatives who lived in the backwoods, there really wasn’t much to do there. One post office, one high school - the elementary school was permanently closed - one bank, and one general store were the main attractions unless you were going there for a fishing tourney or a Mullet competition.

The funny thing was that on our way there, all I saw was woods. Trees on every side of the road, for as far as the eye could see. I honestly didn’t think there was any life out there, or any civilization anyway. When we finally stopped at the cousins’ home, we had to turn down old dirt roads that were barely marked with a sign. If you didn’t know your way around the place, it was easy to get lost. I honestly didn’t know how people here didn’t get lost all the time with directions like ‘turn at the road across from the pond’ or similar vague language like that.

We pulled up a long dirt driveway that was lined with wooden fences and woodland just beyond. It was beautiful in a way, but too rustic for my taste, with the camper and sheds placed next to the house that looked like little homes for dwarves. There were hanging pots of flowers, mini horses enclosed in a pen, and chickens freely roaming around as they left their trail of scat all over the place. Then, there were two big hound dogs that barked ferociously at us when they saw us. I was terrified.

“Howdy ya’ll!” Uncle Sam said to my parents.

“Hey, how are you?” 

“Gid, gid, y’know how it is, j’st busy cannin’ fer the farma’s mawket Sat’day,” Sam replied, tipping his straw hat.

Gosh these folks really were country as cornbread, I thought. 

Uncle Sam looked at me, clearly a city slicker, and raised an eyebrow, “So ya brought yer kid this time, hmm?”

Dad turned and looked at me with embarrassment, “Yeah couldn’t just leave her on the side of the road,” he laughed as if joking, but I knew he really wished he could’ve left me somewhere on the way.

When we got inside, the house stunk to high heaven like cigarette smoke and okra. I was already feeling my head spin and stomach turn, wishing I was left back in Arizona or Texas. It was Aunt Lola who was smoking like a freight train while she was washing the okra and green beans she was getting ready to can. Disgusting.

My parents were enjoying the chatter with Sam and Lola while I found a safe corner to just stand and try to blend into. Those dang dogs were trying to slobber all over my legs as they sniffed around me and panted like they too were dying from second hand smoke.

It wasn’t long that we were there when a massive thunderstorm blew in. It just came right out of nowhere, it seemed; one minute it was clear and blue skies, the next,, it was hailing and crashing thunder like I never heard before. Honest to God I never been anywhere in my entire life where there were so many kinds of thunder sounds, and where it was so loud it shook the walls and made reverberating sounds!

I wanted to crawl under a piece of furniture with the dogs, I was so scared, and Dad didn’t help any with comfort or reassurance.

“Stay away from the windows, lightning can strike through them,” he’d say as he made an ominous look.

“I’ve gotta wash these bowls real quick,” Lola said.

“You go right ahead, I’ll stay here - I don’t want to get electrocuted from washing dishes during a thunder storm!” Dad laughed, again like he was joking, but I knew better.

The entire time I was there I felt so bored I could have died. I wanted to go be with the miniature horses, roaming free and enjoying the fresh air - without a thunderstorm, mind you, but that wouldn’t happen. I pulled out my old cell phone to find the battery nearly dead and no service. 

“I wouldn’t play on your phone if I were you; lightning could strike that too.”

Gee, thanks Dad.

When the thunderstorm had finally passed, it was almost sundown. We apparently were not just stopping by to say hi.

“Yep, the camper is all cleaned and ready for ya!” Sam said to my parents, pointing across the dirt road their house was on. It looked relatively decent from the outside, I supposed. 

When I stepped in through the flimsy door, there was a musty smell throughout, and the furniture and appliances all looked quite outdated. 

“Just exactly how long are we supposed to be staying in this?” I questioned my parents who seemed unbothered by the living accommodations. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Dad said, his usual dismissive tone and clever way of answering without answering. I hated how Dad would do that. 

We settled down for the night, sharing one small bathroom. The water pressure, we soon discovered, was minimal at best. I had never been in a camper before, so I assumed this was what they all were like, but my goodness I couldn’t fathom how anyone with longer hair could manage to wash their hair thoroughly.

My parents got to sleep in the one and only “bedroom” and shared a nice queen sized mattress that was tucked in the back of the camper. I squeezed onto the longest section of seating in the front, hoping to be able to sleep.

After about an hour of fidgeting and squirming, trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in, I finally managed to fall asleep. I’m not entirely sure how long I was asleep for, when a sudden sound woke me in the dead of night.

SQUEAK SQUEAK.

I felt something crawl up my leg and squealed, kicking my leg frantically. I think there was a mouse or something on me! Ewww.

Then I heard another sound. With barely any light to see, I froze and strained my ears to listen for the sound again.

BUMP BUMP. I know it was ever so slight, but I swore I could feel the camper shake whenever I heard the sound. Something was outside, something big!

BUMP BUMP BUMP. SNIFF SNIFF.

There it was again! I was scared out of my mind. Were there bears out here? What about the dogs - were they all inside the house? What if it was a wild hog - I heard about them being more abundant here than the squirrels in the woods! These hogs were so big that if you hit one with your car it was pretty much game over - for your car, not the hog - and it was like hitting a really big log.

After a few minutes, the bumping and the thumping seemed to dissipate, and I was left with my wild imagination. I tried as I might to go back to sleep, but it seemed hopeless. The more I lay there, the more I began to hear things.

KNOCK. KNOCK KNOCK. KNOCK.

What in God’s name was that sound? It started out like the sound of someone knocking on wood, just really slowly, but over the course of one or two minutes it began to sound like a million people were out there knocking on doors!

I lay there in the pitch dark trying to come up with a reasonable explanation. Maybe it’s some kind of bugs out there making that weird noise? I shivered, feeling a bit of cold air coming from the window. Oh goodness, if I ever did get sleep it would be from passing out from exhaustion.

The next morning, I woke up a little cold, and to the smell of coffee. Dad was across from where I slept at a little table and eating some cereal and sipping his black coffee that he brewed using microwavable instant coffee packets. Gross.

I got up and went to the bathroom, feeling like a hot mess, and washed my face with my hands. At least it’s day now; if there’s any critters out there we will see them.

After I ate some cereal, plain - no milk, I changed my clothes to something a little more comfortable then wondered what my parents were planning to do today. Surely we weren’t going to just stay here at the cousins’ house the entire time.

“What are we doing today?” 

“I don’t know, probably drive around and see what’s around here,” Dad said casually, as if we were actually in a tourist destination with plenty of attractions. 

I rolled my eyes and sat down where I was previously sleeping. After about twenty minutes of waiting for my mom to get ready, my dad got up and went out the door without saying a word to me, then got in the car and cranked it. He always cranked the car to warm it up before going anywhere.

“Is your mom ready yet? Golly, she takes forever,” Dad said shaking his head.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m ready - let me just grab some snacks for the road,” Mom reached in the fridge and took a bag out.

We piled in the little sedan that now looked periwinkle with spots from years of acid rain, then drove out the dirt road slowly. Dad seemed to know where he was going. We drove for almost twenty minutes down the same highway that brought us to the cousins’ home, but in the opposite direction we came from, and still - the entire time - only seen woodland all around. After a while, we came to another road and Dad turned onto it, driving us into the unknown.

“There should be some camping and picnic areas around here,” Dad muttered under his breath, almost to himself, barely audible to anyone else. I noticed that my mom learned the skill of ignoring half of what he said; it was the only way one could keep their sanity, rather than asking what he said every time he mumbled something. 

We came upon a very run down old village of some kind. As we got closer to it, it became evident that it was possibly abandoned.

“WELCOME TO WATERLOO” a weathered wooden sign read. 

The community looked so tiny, it reminded me of the Munchkin Land from “Wizard of Oz” - literally a loop that was less than a mile long, and a few homes scattered about, one Post Office that looked rather desolate, and that was it! There were some very strange large structures, like rows of giant brown pills, methodically placed around and were surrounded by standing water. My parents didn’t seem to think anything of it, and quietly peered out their windows as we drove.

We literally drove through downtown Waterloo in less than two minutes going ten miles per hour! When we came out of the loop, Dad turned down some old sketchy road that was almost grown over with kudzu, a type of invasive plant that seemed to be everywhere in Alabama, and had old trees with branches covering the road nearly the entire way.

BANG!

“Oh! My heart - did you see that?” Dad was startled, possibly from having a flash of PTSD. I didn’t know what was going on, and could only try to figure out from what my parents were saying.

“Dang, that was SCARY!” Mom said, leaving me still in the dark.

“What happened?” I finally said, aggravated by their vagueness.

“You didn’t see that huge tree limb just fall in front of the car?” Dad said, shocked, as if I had the ability to see through him and a car seat.

“Oh wow.” I suddenly realized if we went any faster we may have had that limb crash into the car and hurt us.

Dad got out very hesitantly, appearing like the Wicked Witch when she was afraid another house would fall from the sky. He hurried over to the limb and pulled it out of the way, then rushed back into the car before another limb could fall on him and break his neck. 

When we finally got to the end of the road safely, we came to a place called Skeeter Landing. Weird name, I thought. Dad wanted to go for a walk down a nature path, so he got out and took his binoculars, then headed down the trail. Mom and I followed close behind, hoping that there weren’t any dangerous creatures out here.

As we walked, there seemed to be some unusually sized birds and bugs. In the nearby thickets there were dragonflies twice their normal size. I observed a Yellow-hammer, the State bird, on a tree that seemed abnormally large. Were my eyes deceiving me?

“Shh!” Dad hushed us when he thought he heard something.

I could hear something too. It’s just a Carolina Wren; they are plentiful in the Southeast. The little birds could belt out a song or call and be heard half a mile away probably. Just after I thought this, however, I seen the wren on a tree; it was the size of a basketball!

“Do you hear that?” Dad pointed up to the sky, as if he was hearing something not on the ground, like a bird. “It sounds like a helicopter, but more than one!”

Mom and I both stopped walking by then and listened - holding our breath so as to hear it better - and sure enough we could hear what reminded me of a swarm of bees almost. Oh no, I hope to God it isn’t like killer wasps or something coming after us!

Dad took out his binoculars, then looked around, then suddenly had a minor heart attack. Distressed, we tried to revive him, but before we could even call 911, we suddenly seen what the sound was.

In the sky, coming at us from a distance, was an entire fleet of giant mosquitoes that seemed to be at least the size of puddle jumper airplanes. Frantic, we tried to lift Dad up but we were too weak. We didn’t want to leave him behind, but we had to. It was all we could do. 

“The keys, we need the keys!” Mom tried to find the car keys on Dad, but was so distraught that she couldn’t. 

“Here!” I saw them in Dad’s back pocket, and handed it to Mom. 

We ran for our lives, trying to get to the car. I stumbled and fell to the ground, scraping my knee. Mom tried to help me up. 

“Hurry! They’re gaining on us fast!”

We were so close, yet so far. I was dripping sweat. Mom made it to the driver’s side of the car, but I was a few feet behind, and out of breath from being so unhealthy. I knew I should’ve laid off of those potato chips I ate the entire way here.

JAB! A sudden feeling of being cold overwhelmed me. I didn’t know what happened until it was too late.

“Nooooo!!!! Mom, I love you!” I screamed as I felt something grab me - no, STABBED me - from behind. I had been skewered by one of the giant mosquitoes, and was being flown away to some camp ground. I could see the look of horror on my mom’s face in the final fleeting moments.

Barely alive, bleeding profusely, I thought I could hear the mosquitoes talking in plain English.

“This is good stuff here,” One said to another.

“O Positive is a rare treat; I wonder if that other one in the car has that blood too?”

Then, all went black and I breathed my last.