MLK motivates a hike.

By mid-afternoon, Jeremy had recovered from a mysterious bout of.... sickness... that had struck him and caused him to take off work on MLK. Rejoicing, I quickly whisked him away for a hike at Hone Quarry and later took advantage of his tire changing skills in the rain. Hopefully MLK would be proud of our chosen activities...we certainly enjoyed our freedom from....racial oppression...and work-related encumbrances.

After loading the map on my camera for easy storage, we continued to be confused by the "You are Here" flag...how could we still be 'there' as we hiked for two hours? Mind-boggling. You'd think we'd never left the parking lot. But the pictures prove otherwise.


Short sleeves at dusk in January.


As Jeremy and I are coming down the hill, it is nearly dark. We are nearing the road, and we see a large pile of something looming in front of us. It smells faintly sweet...
I turn to Jeremy in disbelief as I recognize the substance piled in the forest.
"no...." I say...
"yes......." he says....

"what?!?!?!...." I say....


See for yourself:



There are an infinite number of plausible reasons one might find a pile of doughnuts in the forest, I decided.

One:
In the face of the hemlock blight, nature needed to come up with some use for dead hemlock trunks. Slowly but surely, the woolly adelgid co-evolved with a species of small hemlock-trunk-dwelling elf, the doughnut dwarfling. Very small, but with extremely high metabolisms, these dwarves fit neatly into the hole of a doughnut. The doughnut can therefore serve as protection (imagine trying to sumo wrestle with a doughnut-clad dwarf), a fashionable solid sort of tutu, and a food reserve. Clearly the sub-species of dwarf at Hone Quarry had been particularly efficient this season and had to discard a large quantity of doughnuts in the woods in order to save their petite figures. Even a humming bird could get fat on this many doughnuts.


Two:
High school boys in Harrisonburg, Virginia hop in the Chevy S-10 with a case of Bud Light in anticipation of a fun-filled Saturday night. Halfway through the evening and three times back and forth across Harrisonburg, Gary says: "HEY, I have an idea!" "LET'S GO STEAL A SHITLOAD OF DOUGHNUTS FROM THAT DUNKIN' DOUGHNUTS!"

30 minutes later with a truck bed full of doughnuts, Gary and his friends are off-roading in the mud at hone quarry and find a prime spot for doughnut dumping, so as not to be caught white-handed and sugar-coated by the Harrisonburg police for their lemon-poppyseed muffin lifting escapades.


Alternately, a group of bread-fearing Atkins converts make poor use of the breakfast refreshments provided by their Sunday School class. Sheepish church leader, rather than give the doughnuts to the homeless population of harrisonburg, dumps them in the woods in an act clearly designed to benefit the foraging skills of the white-tailed deer population of the GW National Forest:

There once was a doe name Daphne
Whose winter browse was suffering badly
She would dream of green blades
And her hunger would fade
But it was a pile of doughnuts she longed for so madly