Shortly after the 2020 United State Census, one of those real estate personal finance travel guide eCommerce websites released a report they harshly called “The 100 quickest dying cities in America.” The study looked at municipal population change from their 2010 Census count to their current. Boring! Someone from the website crunched the population change percentages and sorted the cities and towns by how they grew or shrunk over the last decade. Yawn! The cities with the highest negative population change percentages (meaning their populations declined the most) made this America’s top dying cities list.
Among their ranks was good ole Lake July, North Carolina. Lake July (LKJ) saw an 8.0% decline in population, going from 17,674 residents in 2010 to 16,423 in 2020. This negative shift could be because LKJ citizens have been rapidly leaving either by moving vans or by a guided angel’s hand for years. The former reason is that all the young folk left and didn’t return, and the latter seems a morbid thought, with LKJ just making a list of the top dying cities in the US.
Wallace Creed didn’t regret relocating to North Carolina from Foley, Alabama, on the Gulf of Mexico. He moved to the Wilmington Area for a banking job after graduating from the University of Southeast Alabama. A family friend hired him as a loan specialist at a local credit union. Wallace had the Atlantic Beach there that reminded him of home. Sitting atop the sand and diving into the crashing waves gave him needed comfort when he was lonely. That ocean was his big blue shield and armor against his sometimes emotions and sentiments that go with being away from family and friends. He stayed in Leland, NC, for three years.
However, after moving to Lake July for a mortgage loan officer job Wallace wishes he had remained on the coast. Because for the last two years, he’s had difficulty gaining footing in the city, finding people around his age to hang out with, and meeting single women.
There are a lot of much younger twenty-somethings like his next-door neighbors because of the college. He likes them enough and has drunk the occasional weekend beer since they turned 21. But he’d rather hang out with the two thirty-something couples closer to his age that he met through work. Unfortunately, they can’t get out much and have young kids. Wallace just wants to know where are all the 25 to 29-year-olds at. The age group in-between his neighbor’s ages and the ages of the married couples with children seem nonexistent in Lake July. It can’t be a coincidence with the declining population. Wallace could make use of the ocean he left behind. His shield and armor. He’s grown tired of his mostly empty nights and weekends in North Carolina’s western Piedmont.
So a month ago, he came across a social media post about the college’s personal enrichment courses. Their continuing education, professional improvement, and hobby-type classes. Now Wallace is into his second week of photography class and initially signed up to meet people and for something to do. His homework assignment for the week is to snap some nature or outdoor pictures. He immediately decided he was going Saturday to Lake July Park to take his. Wallace read that Lake July was named after the body of water. He found this weird and confusing because the city is almost an hour’s drive (west toward the mountains) from the body of water.
Lake July Park has about fifteen miles of hiking and mountain biking trails. Wallace plans to hike the three-mile Gnome’s Loop. The mid-morning Saturday is low-seventies and sunny when he arrives at the northeast trailhead. Many cars are parked along the road to the trailhead, which generally means no parking in the main lot. He turns in. The gravel parking lot crunches under his blue sedan’s weight and tires. He’s indeed lucky. A parking space at the trailhead rapidly fills up during the summer. His is the last car parked in the fifteen parking space lot. He gets out of the car, changes into his grey waterproof North Face hiking shoes, and grabs his blue trail daypack from the back seat. He unzips the hiking backpack and double-checks the contents of a water bottle, trail mix, light rain jacket, and point-and-shoot digital camera. Everything is there.
Then heads northeast on the dirt surface path into the dense hardwood forest of green pines and hemlocks. His first nature photos are of some yellow wildflowers about a half-mile in. He watches the flowers grow more prominent in the camera viewer as he zooms in. Some wind flowing through the flowers makes them look like they’re moving in a rhythmic way. Wallace asks the flowers for a dance, and they foxtrot and cha-cha down the trail.
Lake July Park is a popular destination for raptor bird watching. Wallace either watched a bald eagle or osprey fly over him a few months back, and he wishes he had a camera then. His work would be sublime today to capture such a creature in flight for his photography class. After the one-mile marker, he sees three turkey buzzards picking away at something dead on the north trail. Maybe a rabbit or squirrel. They aren’t the birds of prey he wanted, but he wants a picture of them anyway. He gets on one knee and directs the camera toward them. Then of a sudden, his three vultures shed their dark lackluster feathers and morphed into 2 1/2 feet-tall bird skeletons. What the hell, Wallace thinks. One of them sees him and exhibits their impressive six-foot wingspan of white bones. It takes off, close to the ground, and chases Wallace south into the forest, shrieking behind him.
Wallace emerges from the forest back onto the trail, not knowing where he’s been. The trail now parallels the lakeshore. He moves further south along the path and breaks at the overlook, the halfway point for Gnome’s Loop. What a vista, Wallace thinks. The lake’s sunlight sparkles like thousands of stars on a cloudless night. This is the place to get the perfect picture. He focuses on the extent of the sparkling blue water, the line of dark green trees, and the Blue Ridge Mountains backdrop outlined by the sky blue.
Afterward, he’s advancing through the digital photos on his camera. Then raindrops begin to lightly splash the LCD screen. He looks up and sees a damning cloud heading his way. Too late! The rain has turned torrential, and lightning begins to snap around him. The water in the lake starts to flash flood and rises rapidly to the 1,300-foot elevation where Wallace is standing. He takes off, southeast, down the trail. He wants to outrun the storm. The once dry course is now slick and muddy. He slips and falls on the water’s edge on the wrong side of the track. He’s submerged, trying to swim toward the surface for breath. But none of the swimming and kicking techniques he learned as a kid are working. He sinks more, hyperventilates, and passes out.
Luckily, something underwater snatches his jacket and hurries him to the surface. Fortunately, the rain stopped, and the water level was lower. Wallace is left on the ridge side, just above the shoreline, catching his breath. He grabs tree roots to pull himself up and looks down at the lake to see the tail of a giant fish disappear in the blue water. Was that a mermaid that saved me? In freshwater? Naw. Back safely on the trail, he falls over from exertion. His oversaturated clothes make a splat noise on the ground.
Wallace is about 2-miles into his hike on the southwest portion of the loop when he realizes he hasn’t seen any hikers or mountain bikers on the trail yet. He peers onto the lake, and there are no boats. Where the hell is everyone? Why are there no damn boats? It’s the middle of summer, he thinks. He listens, but there’s nothing. The environment is silent, except for his inner thoughts. Where are the animals? I haven’t seen any since the vultures. Did they eat them all? Was that a mermaid?
Some wind comes off the lake and makes some of the nearby hardwoods creak! These awful noises make him paranoid. Have I entered into some slasher movie? The forest has turned grey. Someone or something starts playing the organ, which he hears through the holler. Wallace always thought the organ was an eerie instrument. The gloomy music creates a strange and spooky atmosphere. He swears there’s something behind him. He picks up a moderate pace. He looks back and sees what appears to be a ghostlike image of a giant wolf on fire. The massive wolf howls. The howl sounds like organ music. I am in a slasher film, Wallace screams. His moderate pace is now a full-on sprint. The creaking and organ seem louder now, much closer like he’s about to hit it straight on. Is the wolf keeping up? Something strikes him. Boink! Crash! Smash! Smack! Another crash! Bang!
Wallace comes to as a hump of a body because he was knocked out with his backpack on. What the hell, he thinks. He’s disheveled, disoriented, and several other words that begin with “dis.” He is like a turtle trying to get up. He is rocking side to side on his back. Finally, he’s up and grabs his aching head. What hit me this time? That wolf was a figment of my imagination, right? He’s back on the trail and heading northeast toward the trailhead. There’s a fallen tree lying across the path. I must’ve hit my head on this. Back at the car, he finds twigs in his hair and leaves in his short pockets. He unzips a side pocket on his day pack. He looks inside and realizes why everything is so intense on the trail. All that craziness he just experienced: the buzzard skeletons, the flood, the maybe mermaid, and that giant wolf fire creature. He ate all his psychedelic drugs. The ones he bought from his neighbors. No wonder! He swears he’ll never eat so many shrooms on the Gnome’s Loop again.