Empty Promises

Every one of these elements is vital in unraveling the story of Robin* and Hank Marcus* and their seemingly benign meeting with a stranger in the woods.
    It was Thursday, July 22, 1976, when Robin and Hank set out from their home in Canby, Oregon, for a camping trip along the Clackamas River near the foothills of Oregon’s majestic Mount Hood. The trip was to be a celebration of their first wedding anniversary. Robin was only sixteen, her husband five years older, but they were so much in love that her family didn’t object when their beautiful raven-haired daughter wanted to marry. They knew Hank loved Robin and would take care of her. The young couple’s happy first year of marriage showed everyone that their decision had been the right one. The trip into Oregon’s idyllic wilderness would be like a second honeymoon for the couple.
    Hank and Robin lived on a shoestring. They had only sixty dollars to spend on their trip; that immediately eliminated motels and restaurants. They would have to sleep out under the trees or in their car and cook over a campfire. At first they planned to leave Rusty, their collie, with Robin’s grandmother, but she was ill. They certainly couldn’t afford to put him in a boarding kennel, so they decided to take him along.
    A sense of fatalism would run through all of Robin’s eventual recollection of the events of that bizarre weekend. Call it karma, destiny, or what you will. If they had made even some small decisions differently that weekend, Robin’s and Hank’s lives might have gone on without incident for another fifty years.
    Robin initially wanted to go to the Oregon coast, where she and Hank had spent their honeymoon, but Hank chose Austin Hot Springs in the Oregon mountains instead. He wanted to teach her how to fish; it was one of his passions, so she finally capitulated. That made him happy, and they could always go to the coast another time.
    But Robin had terrifying dreams the night before their trip. Something indefinable frightened her and she woke knowing only that her nightmares had something to do with their planned outing in the mountains. The next morning she mentioned her fears to a girlfriend, who suggested she take her Bible with her on the trip. “If you have your Bible with you,” she said, “you know everything will be all right.”
    Robin tucked her much-read Bible into her backpack, but she was still afraid. She told Hank about her dreams, and he too admitted that he felt a presentiment of danger, something that was totally unlike him. Just to be on the safe side, he suggested they stop and ask a friend of his to go along with them for the weekend, but the friend wasn’t home. They left him a note which read, “We were by to ask you to go to the mountains with us. Sorry you missed the fun!”
    The sun was shining, the weather was perfect, and Robin and Hank tried to shake off their forebodings. They bought fishing licenses and canned food, and they gassed up their car. That left them with about twenty dollars to cover any emergencies.
    They drove the twenty miles from Molalla to Estacada, and headed south. Somehow though, they missed the turn leading into the Austin Hot Springs campground and turned instead into the road leading into Bagby Hot Springs. They drove deep into the wilderness before they realized they were heading in the wrong direction. “This road is so much spookier than I remember it,” Hank commented when he failed to recognize any landmarks. “In fact, it’s so spooky, it gives me the creeps. It’s like no other road I’ve ever been on.”
    Once they realized they’d taken a wrong turn, they retraced their path. By then they had used up a quarter of a tank of gas, they were running late, and they finally arrived at the Austin Hot Springs campground just as the gates were being locked for the night. All the camping spots were taken.
    The park ranger told them they could park outside and walk back in. “You can cook your supper, take a dip in the hot springs, and you can fish, just so long as you don’t camp inside the park tonight.”
    Robin and Hank cooked dinner, laughed at some people who were skinny-dipping, and took Rusty for a walk in the woods. They felt better and their spooky feelings now seemed silly.
    Still, they didn’t want to camp alone; they wanted to park near other campers, and they finally found an enclave of Russian families and parked their sedan close to them. They slept in the car with the doors