Meet Larry.

Checking in from Portland here, though I won't be spending time talking about our gracious hosts in this funky Southeast neighborhood, the eclectic Easter egg Victorians, the crisp first days of an Oregon autumn, the vintage stores, coffee, books or dessert bars. It's all delightful and warm and fuzzy, but the night we spent on Mount Shasta makes for a far more interesting story.

The sun was setting as we drove up the 5 on Saturday evening and as we neared our destination I insisted that Jordi take out the guidebook and select a campground. "This one's free," he said, "just exit here and follow this road to the end. It's close." Fine, I thought. Free is free and maybe it's nice. I just wanted a convenient place to camp for a quick night before we continued on to Oregon. But the road kept going, became empty, dark. It was winding slowly up the mountain. The moon, white and full, rose over the trees and glowed through the purple haze of the dim sky. Signs for 4,000 feet elevation, 5,000 feet, 6,000 feet. It got darker, we drove on.

What Jordi hadn't mentioned was that the campground, Panther Meadows, is "high on the mountain"--7,400 feet up, roughly. This mountain is the second highest volcano in the US and still considered active. When we finally found the place, there was just enough light to see the face of the only other person there, getting supplies out of the trunk of his old car. He was in his 40s, a backwoods type with a big gut and long graying curly hair. We asked him a bit about the place, it sounded fine so we unloaded and set up camp in the dark.

As we settled in, we got to talking to our lone neighbor a bit more. He was exceptionally friendly, offered us a helping hand and told us some things he knew about the mountain. He'd been camping up there for about a month so far. Though a nice guy, he was an excessive talker and seemed to disregard a certain level of social protocol. But hey, when we're eating leftover rice out of a pan with plastic spoons, who are we to judge? "Beautiful moon," I said to him as I passed, "Do you think it's full?"

"Full enough for me," he said.

So we joined him, Larry, at his fire. At first the conversation floated around topics like travel and the weather, but we all too quickly learned that Larry, dear old Larry, is a religious fanatic, racist and homophobic. A-ha! I knew there was something less than desirable about this fellow. But we were mooching off his fire atop a cold, dark mountain, and were sort of ensnared in this conversation, so we remained seated on our tree stumps.

Then, it got weird. After Larry finished warning us about gruesome death by quicksand on Oregon beaches, expressing sympathy for white supremacy, and sharing his hopes that God would send him a lonely woman to keep him warm in his tent, he said, "Now here's where I'm gonna sound crazy."

Right, because until this point he was screaming normalcy. "All my life," he went on, "I've been able to see things before they happen. See what's gonna happen to people." I closed my eyes, bracing myself, half-expecting to hear next, "And you two are gonna die tonight on this mountain, and I ain't sayin' how."

He didn't say that. But he did tell us about a telepathic encounter he had with a bear in Tahoe and about hearing the growling breath of a Yeti at the nearby Lake Siskiyou. He said Yeti attacks happen all over Mount Shasta. That they attack groups of grown men. He told us that the ghosts of Indians roam through the land, and that strange men in mysterious vans wander through campsites shining flashlights in random tents and snatching women.

"Yer gonna have bad dreams," he said.

The fire was dying and I'd heard enough. We went to bed and I lay there, stiff, unmoving and scared out of my mind. One of three things will happen tonight, I thought:

1. Larry will remain quietly in his tent and we will pass the night in peace.
2. Larry will remain quietly in his tent but we will be attacked by a Yeti, an Indian ghost, or men in unmarked vehicles scouring the area for innocent campers.
3. Larry will axe us to death in the night.

Fortunately, my imagination proved unreliable yet again, and Larry did remain quietly in his tent. Well, mostly. He was actually making loud, unnatural grunting noises all night. And I don't mean snoring or clearing a sore throat, I mean weird, unnatural, almost shouting grunts. Noises a person can't make while asleep. My fears were outlandish, but Larry was right in predicting that I would have bad dreams.

After spending most of the night in terror, either in waking or asleep, I woke up to the tiny cricks and ticks of chipmunks scrambling through the trees above us. It was morning. The sky was light. We'd survived. We emerged from the warmth of our sleeping bags into the cold, gray day. The jug of water in our tent had frozen while we slept. It was snowing. We explored the empty mountain, the still trees that seemed to greet us calmly and wisely, the frozen creek with fresh running water bubbling just below the ice.

I hated that mountain while I lay terrified in our tent, hated Jordi for having no reservations or worries about Larry, for saying he was just lonely and scared and not actually dangerous. I'm glad he was right. And I'm glad he lured me up to that mountain under false pretenses. Because it was an adventure, and it was pure and simple and beautiful.

But I probably would have rather been on that mountain with a Yeti or a ghost than with Larry.