Work Text:
Des and Katie's trip to Grandma's House
By Despoena
The day started out as they generally do when Katie and Des do a road trip. At 5:30 am, Des' alarm went off, causing her to fall (more or less) out of bed and go find the phone to call Katie. The resulting conversation generally goes something like this...(it goes exactly like this...):
"Hello?!"
"Hi Katie, it's Des."
"Who?"
"Des, ya know, the one down the street."
"What?"
"It's Des, get up."
"What time is it?"
"It's 5:30."
"What?"
"Katie, it's Des, it's 5:30 am, and we're supposed to go to the Chippendales strip show in New York today, remember?"
"O.K." (She's so impressionable when she's still half asleep!)
"No, Katie, we're going roaming, you need to get up."
"Oh, yeah, O.K."
A half an hour later Katie picked Des up at her house and they started out. Des had made the mistake of taking cough medication for her cold on an empty stomach and subsequently doesn't remember quite a bit of this part very well since she was zoned out on Robtitussin.
About two hours later they arrived in the town where Katie's grandmother had lived.
They looked at grandma's old house for a few minutes. Actually, Katie bemoaned the state that the house was in while Des said "Nice house" and rolled over and zoned out again.
Near the town where Katie's grandma had lived was a lake that Katie wanted to see and take a picture of.
She had found it on her nice DeLorme map and she had marked the road they needed to take to get there.
Des managed to become clear headed enough for long enough to realize that they were driving into the blueberry barrens. The fields of blueberry bushes ranged on for miles, gently undulating over the hills, broken only by the occasional scrub pine tree and some half-hearted windrows.
"Pretty," she stated, looking blearily at all the nice red and orange colors that blueberry fields take on in the spring.
Katie began berating the DeLorme map company for incorrect mapping skills, since they showed it as a paved road. Des wondered where all the other dirt roads went that weren't on the map at all, but she didn't wonder very long since her concentration wasn't what it should have been at that point.
They paused to watch four deer bounce across the field, then continued on down the gravelly road. Other roads intersected with the one they were on and ran off in a hundred different directions all over the barrens as far as they could see.
Katie started having serious issues with the map at this point and stated fervently that the next time they were near the DeLorme company they would have a little chat with their so called cartographers.
Des' feet started getting numb from all the bouncing on the dirt road when they saw the helicopter swooping down across the fields spraying the blueberries.
"Way over there," said Katie. "Looks like civilization."
Des agreed and they drove way over there and found a truck, a little hut, two guys, and some unidentifiable machinery. Des put on her best helpless female routine and one of the guys confirmed that the map was wrong and gave them directions to the lake, which involved turning around and going back about five miles through more barrens.
They got turned around and went back to turn at the one sign in the whole of fifty miles onto another dirt road that petered out after about three hundred feet. Des looked at Katie and stated the obvious.
"Wrong road," she said. Katie turned the car around using a few sharp explicatives to punctuate it's movements.
The next road looked promising so they took that. It, of course intersected with three other roads and after a moment's hot debate, they went right. A few minutes, a dead end and many more explicatives later, they decided it was time to take five.
Des got out of the car to take a picture of the empty barrens. Katie rummaged around in the tailgate for her own camera and listened as Des shouted to the barrens as if they were the Grand Canyon.
Katie looked at the car and decided that the carwash the previous day had been a fruitless measure since the miles of dirt road had produced a thick layer of dust all over everything. Her musings were interrupted by Des' scream.
"They're gonna eat me!!"
Katie looked up to see Des running back toward her, swatting at the black flies massing around her. Katie dove into the driver's seat and Des slammed down the tailgate as she ran by raising a large cloud of dust off the car.
Once inside they spent several frantic moments swatting and squishing the black flies that had snuck in with them. Des looked out the window and saw the swarm hurling their little buggy bodies against the glass and had a flashback to an X-Files episode when little green bugs got into a car and cocooned the occupants.
"Drive, Katie, drive!" she shouted.
Finally they came back to an intersection and went the opposite way towards something glinting in the sun about a quarter of a mile away. The something turned out to be a sort of drilling rig on tank treads that looked like it had been sitting there since last spring.
"Great!" Katie joked. "They've stuck oil. They're sure to come back for it, then they'll find us."
Des had her doubts.
Things weren't looking real good as they drove down a line of scrubby trees with more barrens on the other side. Des though she saw some people with a backhoe off in the distance, but there was no road at the next intersection that went that way. There were, however, roads that went, literally, in every other direction.
"Oh shit," Des said looking out the windshield. She proceeded to say the same thing looking in every other direction as well for good measure.
By now, the two were hopelessly lost on the blueberry barrens, which if you didn't know, have no signage, no landmarks, and no sense of direction. Just miles and miles of damned blueberries.
"We're gonna have Post Traumatic Blueberry Barren Syndrome," Kate moaned. Finally, Des had started to really wake up, nothing like the prospect of wandering for days on the barrens to shake a case of the groggies.
"All right," she said. "My wilderness and search and rescue training says find the treeline and follow it out."
After a couple of false starts, they found a treeline, some empty migrant worker camps and a road going away from the barrens instead of through them. They edged down the rutted road and just when it seemed like they might well be going in a loop, they saw it.
"PAVEMENT!" they shouted at the same time, and from there they found their way back to civilization.
END
MORAL: Subarus are good, never trust DeLorme, and when trekking through the blueberry barrens in the spring, take a crowbar along cause all the outhouses are nailed shut.