The Bunny Dance

We were driving back from the restaurant where we had dinner at, a place I picked out. Of course I had to pick the only excessively expensive restaurant in the tiny town of Mariposa. It looked like one of those restaurants in the middle of small towns where you would go for a birthday or a graduation party, the only place proper enough to host. It looked like a place where you’d bring your out of town lover for dinner to sort of say sorry for the… nothingness of it all. At least there’s this one restaurant! I hatched a plan to get a free slice of birthday cake, but the plan fell through.

Mariposa, California. A small town of only about 2,000 residents, located at the foot of Yosemite park, within the valley. Now, I don’t know much about small towns but upon entering this particular town, I knew there was something mystical about it. As soon as we entered, I knew I had never seen anything like it before. It was much too small, to start off with. The houses were yellow and pale green or pale blue, the yards overgrown with different sizes of grass. Dragonflies liked to dance around each house and at night there were too many stars to count. It seemed as if strange things happened in the town, perhaps unbeknownst to the people living in it.

***

“I think we’re lost.”

I was beginning to think that as well, considering we had been going up a hill for the past 20 minutes and the restaurant we had dinner at wasn’t even 5 minutes away from the house we were staying in. Also, the house in question was at the base of the mountain and we were definitely going up something.

“Perhaps we are. I was starting to think that. I should have stopped you but I kept getting distracted by the fact that we kept going up a hill! I wanted to see when it ended. Plus it’s way too dark,” I said from the passenger seat. “I can’t see anything even if I try.”

“I’m sorry! I feel like I’m ruining things,” Benji said, readjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose. He was starting to get nervous, and he had this constant trait of wanting to please me at all times. Sometimes I thought he was scared of me.

“Dude, you paid for dinner. Expensive ass dinner at the only expensive restaurant in town which of course I chose for no reason. I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay, I thought it was really good.”

“Eh, it would have been better with free cake. Let’s just find a place to park.”

“But it’s not even your birthday-”

“But it’s going to be! In a month! What are they gonna do, put us in jail? Check my birth certificate to make sure I’m not lying? We could have gotten away with it.”

I had this affinity for wanting things, more specifically free cake at a fancy restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

“I know, but I don’t think my acting’s that good. I would have given us away,” he said, continuing to drive suspiciously up something instead of down.

“We’ll do it next time, I guess. Did you find a spot yet?”

“I’ve just been following the road…” he said, sheepishly.

“You know it’s going to keep going, right?” I said, slightly annoyed.

“Yeah but maybe there’s a gas station or something we can stop at-”

“In the mountain?”

“I’ll pull over here.”

“Please. Okay let’s get situated. Where are we?”

“I think we’re still in Mariposa, just- you know, up some type of hill-like situation. I actually don’t know how we got here, it really doesn’t make sense. Come to think of it I was sure I was going the right way. Yeah, the house was definitely-”

He could keep going. He lost me at “hill-like situation” and besides, I got distracted thinking about the day that we had. We were near Yosemite, which is where we had been for most of the day. It was a lot bigger than I expected, which at some points, gave me weird nature induced anxiety.

Not nearly as much anxiety, however, as all of those times when we would drive past absolutely nothing. Road trips are mostly beautiful, give or take the couple of hours in between where it’s necessary to pass by nothing but farmland, big abandoned places, and trees that have been burnt to a crisp by the Northern California fires that seem to grab hold of the land every couple of months. Nothing scared me more than that, especially at sun down. I didn’t know what to do with the knowledge that there are so many wide open spaces in the world. They just make me want to scream into the nothingness.

Benji was my boy-person, or, boyfriend I should say. Before anything else, he was my friend, who was joining me on a trip to places I had never seen before. His Bay Area living situation settled him between everything I hadn’t seen yet. That giant aquarium- Monterey, along with a few coastal views (not unusual for California) and of course, Yosemite and whatever other giant, beautiful, magical places that existed there. Yosemite was just a taste of all the land that lay on the upper part of California that I had no concept of.

Southern California gets you a tad too comfortable to the beach, but then again, California in its totality is foreign to me sometimes. I’ve always had a false perspective on California, one that’s full of palm trees and tan women, of marijuana and heat which in a sense isn’t entirely false. Along with all that, there’s also mountains, snow, a cold morning breeze brought down from the mountains and not the ocean. Something entirely different, to me anyway.

All of this was his life. Rivers and lakes, creatures that weren’t rats (bobcats, bears, snakes), a breeze that tickled your nose and brought you to the mountain side with every breath. This much he knew, but I think he enjoyed watching me take it all in for the first time. I liked to press my face against the car window as we drove past the edge of the mountain carrying us down Yosemite- the long and winding road. It made me feel like a bird- gliding through the tops of trees and viewing the glorious vast center within our winding road.

I thought I saw something in the woods in the middle of Benjamin’s spiel. I hoped it wasn’t a bear, but there was certainly something rustling around in the trees and shrubbery. I was a bit scared. It was dark, yet the light from the full moon lit the road. We were parked next to some trees. I already had a fear of bears, even though I kept joking around the entire day that I couldn’t wait to see one. I knew I didn’t want to.

“I think there’s something in there,” I said, not looking away from the trees.

“What? In where?”

“Whatever’s behind the trees. Maybe there’s a clearing or something.”

“And? We’re not going in there. It could be a bear. I was charged at by a bear, remember? I have bear trauma!” One of his favorite stories to tell me was the time he got charged at by a bear. I think it made him feel extra brave.

“You were bluff charged it’s not the same thing-”

There was something odd about the situation. I felt something was calling me to whatever existed beyond the trees. Something that I simply needed to see. Then, we both heard music almost erupting from trees. Party music.

“They’re playing Katy Perry, Benjamin, they can’t be evil.”

“If you think I’m going to follow you into the woods at night, I’m not,” he said, crossing his arms. He had the tendency to act like a child sometimes.

“Fine, I’ll go look. You can stay here all by yourself in the dark. I’ll be right back, unless I’m not then you should do something about that,” I said, exiting the car.

I knew he would follow behind. It wouldn’t take long before I heard him shut the door and lock the car. I didn’t even make it past the trees. I looked up at him as he ran up to stand by me. “You’re such a baby sometimes,” I said, happy I wasn’t alone.

He wasn’t big into unexpected things. I think deep down he enjoyed them but there was something about him that always held him back from those types of things. I knew from the moment I met him that being afraid was in his nature. He was a pushover though, so of course he followed me.

We pushed past the trees. It didn’t take long to get closer to the music. It was a very short walk. Like I expected, there was a clearing in the middle of this small plot of woods. We sort of hid behind the trees when we got closer to the clearing in order to see exactly who was there. It was then that I was able to see maybe two or three people sitting around a fire in the middle of the clearing. They didn’t seem too dangerous. From what I could see they were-

“Are those kids smoking weed?” Benjamin said, distraught.

“I think so. They’re teens and they live in Mariposa. There probably isn’t anything better to do.”

After creepily watching them for a while, I decided that we should probably say hi. Otherwise it would just be weird, or I guess, weirder than it already was.

“Hey!” we said, almost exactly at the same time. We sort of tripped over each other.

We didn’t exactly have a good entrance. It was very awkward.

“We were driving up the mountain! We heard some music so we decided to see what that was all about-” Benjamin said, stuttering with his words.

The people in question were two teens. One girl and one boy, both settled on tree stumps with a speaker blasting music on the plush, grass forest floor. “Are you here for the bunny dance?” one of the teens asked.

Benjamin and I looked at each other. We didn’t really know what to say. Bunny dance? Maybe they weren’t smoking weed… “Uhm-”

“Do you guys wanna smoke some pot?” the male teen asked, blunt in hand and very clearly stoned. At this point, I think I wanted to be on his level.

“Come sit, if you want, it’s going to start soon,” the young girl invited. “Are you guys new around here?”

Still surprised and a bit confused, we decided to stay. Something about the place longed for us to be there with these interesting folks. “We’re just stopping through. We’re visiting Yosemite for a bit and we’re staying in Mariposa but we got a bit lost on the way back from dinner,” I said.

“What’re you guys doing here exactly?” Benjamin asked.

The teens looked at each other, almost like they were gaining approval to say what they were going to tell us. Almost like they were disclosing some type of very secret information. “So, every full moon something weird happens here, in this clearing. Nathan and I discovered it when we were young. Basically, every full moon the bunnies come out.”

Benjamin and I stood quiet, because it all seemed normal enough- much too normal for a fire pit in a small clearing and music. “Do you not normally have bunnies here?” we asked, curiously.

“No, we do. It’s just- they dance. That’s why we’re playing music. And smoking pot tends to make the whole experience better.”

“I’LL SAY! Hand it over, sonny boy.”

Benjamin and I both turn around to see the person behind the cracked voice we had just heard. On the other side of the clearing was an old man. A really, fragile, dusty looking old man. He was thinner than anything I’d ever seen. He flashed us a toothy grin, give or take a couple of teeth. The blunt was passed around to the old man who took a puff, after which caused him to make noises that sounded like a dying cat. After he got over his coughing fit, he looked over at us and said, “Lemme spin you a yarn. I have a yarn that goes on for miles.”

So we listened. Benjamin and I had come to accept that we were lost somewhere in the hills of Mariposa and not leaving anytime soon. We sat down upon some tree stumps in the area and listened to what the old man had to say. It seemed to be a story that the two teens had heard a couple of times before, as they both sighed and sat down on grass.

“I’ve been in this town for generations. I’ve seen people come and go more than I could count. This isn’t a town you want to stay in. It’s dusty and crusty like me, and very beautiful but…”

A sadness in his eyes. “Lonely. And when you’re like me and you don’t get out when you need to- you stay and you grow with the town. And when you hardly leave a town you begin to see things, things you didn’t use to see…” a sudden pause, then a surge of excitement, “And that’s when I saw the bunnies!”

“Explain the bunnies,” Benjamin asked, suddenly intrigued.

“I came up to this here hill to think one night, about my wrong-doin’s and what not and I suppose it just happened to be a full moon and I saw the most amazing thing. The buns were dancin’ and I spent my whole life not knowin’ that was something that could happen in this town,” he said. His eyes sparkled like that of a child.

“And we were the only ones who actually listened to his babbling because we were bored and there’s nothing else to do here anyway,” the girl said, putting the blunt out.

“Now it’s a thing. No one else believes us, though,” the boy said, picking his teeth.

I noticed Benjamin looking in wonder of something near to the ground across the way.

The old man gave a wallop and a yah-hee as he settled in his folding chair and said, “turn up the music.”

The bunnies seemed to walk out from nowhere, all in a row. They started dancing out of the darkness of the trees surrounding the clearing, their paws in the air and their bunny hips swaying. The light of the moon lit up the clearing and the fire flickered as the little bunnies danced towards the fire pit, before forming a circle around it. With each hoist of their little bunny legs and each shake of their bunny tails, I was in awe and quite frankly, confused. How did this happen? Why did this happen? Is this normal? It certainly didn’t feel like it. It was all so strange and yet, so beautiful.

Benjamin leaned forward to tell me what he thought. “I’m glad we got lost.”

That made me happy. The bunnies continued to dance, shaking their fluffy tails and hoisting their paws together for a unison clap. I looked over at the only other people who knew about this phenomenon. These two teens, young but still in awe at the scene, even though it was old news to them. And of course, the older gentleman, just a bit misty eyed, watched on, happy that he discovered this strange and wonderful occurrence sooner than later. We smiled and watched the bunnies dance under the moonlight until they couldn’t dance anymore.