With some good fortune it happened exactly as planned, except I didn’t consider the aftershock of the impact: the mirror flying off the tree, hurtling down at my tripod, knocking it over, and shards of glass cutting lines into my camera. But all seemed like a fair price to pay because the shot was in the bag. And we were going home.

At that moment I heard the sound of crunching leaves and I looked to my right, toward the direction we had entered the woods. Thirty feet away I saw ten people approaching our location. They were far enough away that I couldn’t tell who they were. I turned back to James to see if he saw them.

When I looked back at them, the man in the center of the group seemed to take the lead, raised his gun at me and yelled “Hands up!”, which caused a domino effect, and all ten people in the group raised their guns and trained them on us.

I paused. Without intending to, I froze in place, looking them dead on. My brain had never connected these neural pathways before: that I could be in the position of someone who is committing a crime of such severity that cops would point ten guns at me because of the danger I posed.

The strangeness of that thought is what shocked me in place. Perhaps registering my inaction, they rushed forward yelling more forcefully “Hands up! Down on the ground! Face down on the ground!” Hearing this, a voice appeared in my head, and with a firmness commanded me to “move slowly, follow directions, speak deliberately” with the implication that my life depended on it.

As I knelt down slowly, I could see the group rushing toward us, surrounding us with their guns still drawn. As the adrenaline was now flooding my bloodstream, my brain issued forth the panicked thought: “What if these aren’t police officers?” I looked, and to add to my confusion I saw half of them were in plain clothes. But what option was there? To run? My mind firmly repeated “move slowly, follow directions, speak deliberately.”

As I laid my face on the dirt and the dried leaves, one of the men patted me down, quickly and thoroughly, like he knew what he was looking for. After finding nothing, they told us both to rise and the questions began: “Are you the owner of a blue Hyundai with license plate ——.” “Do you live at —–?” “Do you have a rifle?” That last question caught me off guard and I made a point of looking at the officer directly and saying:

“No no. Absolutely not.”

“Do you have a rifle anywhere around here?” asked another officer.

“No.”

“So if we got a search dog here, and they looked around this forest, would the dog find a rifle?”

(I was tempted to play devil’s advocate and say that logistically maybe the dog might find one that belonged to someone else. I decided this was the wrong crowd.)

“No no. There’s no rifle… Can I ask what this is about?”

At this point, all ten officers were still surrounding us, but their guns were holstered, nine men and one woman, a mixture of plain clothes and officer uniforms, hands on their hips, half looking at us, and half taking a cursory glance at the uncommon amount of ‘weird black magic serial killer’ stuff laid out around them.

“Someone called ten minutes ago, saying that they saw you taking a rifle out of your car and running back into the woods.”

“What…?”

“Someone called in an emergency, that you took a rifle out of your car. Were you at your car ten minutes ago?”

“No. Definitely not. We’ve been here in the woods. Sorry officer, we’re just filming a stupid music video.”

“So you weren’t at your car ten minutes ago? They were very clear they saw you.”

I put aside the rifle accusation for a moment and considered what this claim about going to the car could mean. Then it dawned on me:

“Oh yes. About forty minutes ago I went to the car because we needed to get another tripod. And we were chasing sunlight, so I was in a hurry.”

“Mhmm.” Another officer asked “How many of you are out here?”

“Just us two.”

“Anymore in the woods here?”

“No. No… Ohhh, it was the tripod! They saw me taking the tripod.”

“What tripod?”

“You know, for the camera.” I pointed at the ground, but chose to stay still because the phrase was still echoing: “move slowly, follow directions, speak deliberately”.

I could tell they were trying to piece it together. All ten of them. Turning the narrative inside-out, trying to find holes in it. There was a prolonged silence during this as they mulled it over. James pointed at something and told the officer next to him we were filming a music video and the officer waved his hand and said “Yeah yeah, I don’t care.” Not in a rude manner, just in a manner reassuring James that they didn’t care there was glass all over the floor, they weren’t here for that. Another officer asked me:

“Is there anything else we should know about that you have here?”

“Uhmm.” And here is where it all dawned on me. The gas mask. The switchblade. The shovel. The camera. The woods. The ‘ghost rifle’. Things were not looking good. He said:

“What’s the shovel for?”

“Oh… Yeah, we were using that in the music video, to dig up like a crystal ball thing that was underground.”

“Anything else we should know about that you have here?”

“…There’s a gas mask.”

“A gas mask? Where is that?”

“Over there.”

He nods his head

…Silence…

During the silence I considered things: How would this situation be playing out if one of us had panicked when we saw ten guns and decided to run? How would it have played out if they interpreted the panicked run as a sprint for ‘the rifle’? And how would things have played out if we weren’t just some weird white dudes they’ll tell their spouse about later that night? If James and I were black, or looked Muslim, or anything but white?

And in that pensive silence. They just. Slowly began to turn. And walk away.

James and I finally made eye contact. We looked back at them, and all ten of them had already walked about twenty feet away by this point. James raised his voice and asked “So, are we good? Are we free to go?”