Rescued by my iPhone

Last night I left the cybercafe after darkness fell.  And darkness fell in horror movie fashion.  I mean the kind where light is swallowed like little children by the tooth fairy monster.  This was the kind of darkness where you find a few body parts in the morning because the cheesy sci-fi horror movie monster had a snack before it went on to dine on some slutty, big breasted bimbo defended by her condescending, egocentric jock-boyfriend.  Too dark for Jeepers-Creepers, but not dark enough for Pitch Black.  Yet, dark enough to abuse similes and metaphors to horror movies.

I stepped outside the one story maintenance building that housed the Canteena, cybercafe, and maintenance center for the Exercise.  The building stands between the main road through the base and the flight line.  Until the exercise gets into full swing, this is the defacto headquarters building and houses the entertainment center while we are here. 

I would have thought a main road would be lit through the night.  Perhaps not equal to day light, but enough to see the existence of the road.  I couldn't see the main road 30 feet away or the foot bridge over the ditch 20 feet from where I stood.  I looked left and right and saw no street lights.  The light from the building was absorbed by the darkness within five feet of the source. 

Great.  A seven minute walk back to the barracks in near pitch black, over several ditchs, across several roads, through an orchard and a lightly wooded area and a neighborhood.  Flackbacks to TBS night land navigation came to mind--"I'm going to poke my eye out falling over a tree and bleed to death." 

Night land nav at TBS involved walking through heavily wooded terrain littered with deadfall, thorny bushes, rocks, steep hills, unexpected ditches and several creeks.  F-ing creeks, F-trees, F-ing thorny bushes, and Muther-F-ing deadfall. 

The heavily wooded part meant that the illuminatin from the half-moon was absolutely useless.  The only light I saw came from the glowy stuff on the compass and 299 cell phones or digital watches belonging to my fellow tormented TBS-ers.  I appreciated the moon only when I found my way to the dirt roads marking the borders of our little joyful playground.

On the first night tortured land-nav I wore my BCGs (Birth Control Glasses--yeah, no sex with those attraction enhancers) because we were told to where eye protection.  At the time I was without contacts, and that meant I wore the ballistic corrective lenses instead of my regular glasses.  Thank God for those BCGs.  On my last trip across the rolling wooded hills I found some deadfall.  Three steps into the forest and I landed face first into a broken tree branch.  The BCGs deflected my head from the branch.  At the time, I suspected, but I confirmed later when I saw the scratch, that if I had not had the BCGs on I would be operating right now without my left eye.  Night land-nav II saw those BCGs get lost, but only after preventing more damage.

Visions of night land-nav in my mind, because they offered a real possible outcome instead of my horror flick head trip, I took a deep breath and pulled out my iPhone activating my flash light app.  Yeah, my flash light app.  No night land-nav reinactments for me.  Thank you iPhone.