Mason

No trash, no obvious mess.

I remember noticing that because it made the place feel normal.

It made it feel like other people had been here and left, and the world had continued as usual.

We made dinner, hung our food, and crawled into our tents.

It rained lightly through the night, just enough to make everything smell greener in the morning.

We woke up stiff, but fine.

We ate, packed, and started walking again.

The second day is when the first small thing happened.

Small enough that if you heard it in someone else's story, you'd shrug and say, yeah, people do weird stuff in the woods.

We came to a junction that should have been simple.

Trail goes left for the loop, right for a spur that leads to a different drainage.

We had talked about it the night before.

The map was clear.

The sign at the junction was not.

The wooden post was there, but the signboard looked wrong.

Not broken, not vandalized with spray paint, just wrong.

The arrow was pointing left, but the lettering was sloppy, like someone had tried to rewrite it with a marker.

The name of the trail was spelled wrong, an extra letter, a missing letter, then scratched over again.

It looked like a kid had done it, but it wasn't bright or playful.

It was ugly and forced.