Recently, I can't help but think of my friends and a silly game we used to play.
The year was 1999. The big movie everyone was talking about was The Blair Witch Project. It freaked out a lot of my friends. One, who lived in Vancouver, even mentioned that it had now given him the willies whenever he walked through a nearby park. So, we started talking about when and where to watch it in order to give you the maximum willies.
Let me present this scenario.
You hop in your pick-up truck. You set out down an oilfield road. You drive for about an hour and a half on a road that's barely maintained. You constantly hit potholes. You wonder if that last rock broke something. If you're lucky, you'll pass one car.
Once you've traveled about 150-km down this road, you stop and unload your quad. The trained eye has spotted the abandoned oilfield road. It's overgrown with long grass and saplings. You hop on your quad and set off down what remains of this road. Thanks to the long grass and saplings, you never know when you're going to sink into muskeg or get overturned on a log. Drive down this "road" for about, oh, 10-km.
At the end, you come to an unnatural clearing. It's a 10-year old oil lease. You're surrounded on all four sides by extremely dense bush. You can only see for about a dozen feet into the woods before the sunlight gets blocked out. The only break in the bush is the overgrown path you came in on.
You are a good 300-km from any form of civilization. It's a safe bet that if something bad happens to you, you will never be found. The last mark you leave will be a pick-up truck on the side of a little-used oilfield road, and some quad tracks disappering into the bush.
You are completely alone, in the deep, dark woods, with no hope of ever seeing another human being.
Tell me, my Blair Witch-watching friend, would being out here scare you?
It's what I've been doing all week.
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