Yule and Sirens

Tonight, Hannah and I decided, rather on the spur of the moment, to take some food, some wood, some matches, and some sodas and go out to Kiwanis Park to cook a Solstice meal and enjoy nature.  Well, the park technically closes from "sunset to sunrise" and since today is the shortest day of the year, sunset came at 3:59 PM.  Meaning our trespassing began shortly after we arrived.  In the time it took us to walk from the car to the pavilion, there went the sun.  For all my talk, I'm actually a pretty rule abiding citizen, same with Hannah, and so with the dark came a feeling of breaking the law.  Fear of being fined (we are so freaking poor right now) and fear of being arrested (thank you Cracked.com articles featuring the bad apple/barrel police department encounters) quickly overshadowed the slight adrenaline high that comes from being rebellious.  Maybe it was the mixture of fear and adrenaline that kept us there because before we knew it I was starting a fire in the grill pit and Hannah was fixing up the MP3 player with the speakers.

The air was filled with the crackling of summer wood and the melodies of Solstice carols.  We were about to put the tinfoil wrapped casserole and bacon onto the grate when I pointed out that lacked a stick for poking and proding the food and fire.   I was pretty certain we had a metal poker in the car so I got the keys and readied myself to venture back to the parking lot alone (probably a three minute walk but still, it was dark!).

And then, through the trees we see headlights moving nice and slow, somewhat reminiscent of how a cop car might drive through a closed park to keep all Pagan shenanigans to a minimum.  So Hannah and I freeze and watch the balls of light as they slow to a stop and then disappear.  Suddenly I decided I didn't really need to go to the car.  It had to have been a cop, right?  And I just knew that he'd either taken down the license plate number so he could fine us later or left a big fat ticket on the window.  And if he wasn't a cop then it was a random person out looking for someone to tattle on.

Our hearts beating a little faster after the mysterious drive-by, we threw the food onto the fire and cuddled together to wait for the feast, hoping that we could still enjoy our evening before the police showed up in force to haul us away. It was nice to just sit there in the woods, surrounded by snow and the pretty orange glow of the fire.  But that ended when we heard, way off in the distance, the sound of a police siren followed by the loud belching alarm of a firetruck.  We gave each other nervous smiles and tried to ignore it, but it kept getting louder and louder and louder.  Until it sounded like they were pulling into the park.  Hannah immediately began piling snow onto our nice fire sending a whoosh of smoke up into the night sky, making a kind of 'guilty' beacon.

The siren sound gets closer and closer and then goes right on by.  Yep.  But we've already killed the fire and it seems like a good time to make a run for it before something does happen, so we grab our half cooked food, our blankies, music, and sodas and head home.  I half figured there would be a police road block waiting for us at the park entrance, but the only thing waiting for us were a couple of deer and they were beautiful. The best part of the story, however, is that later, when explaining how we freaked ourselves out over a random car driving slowly through the park, dad replies casually, "Oh, that was us!"  My parents went out to see if the area was plowed because they worried that we might be stuck in the snow.  We weren't stuck.  Just paranoid.