Lonaconing IV

We painfully tore ourselves away from our final photos, trying to get every shot we wanted before we could shoot no more. The outside world began to reassert itself and we became aware of the sounds of children’s voices. They seemed nearby, almost in the same room with us. We arrived on the second floor and started for the window where our escape ladder lay in a heap on the floor. But the kid’s voices seemed too close. Approaching the window I swiftly ducked down, even though I knew they almost certainly could not see inside the building. But they were right outside. On the road just past the thin line of trees, three or four young teenagers were riding their bikes in circles: directly in front of us. Beyond the road a few younger kids tossed a softball around the diamond. Trapped.

We certainly couldn’t lower the metal-runged escape ladder down now. Its awkward clattering would announce we were in the building. I wasn’t even sure we could use it on the other side of the building without them hearing it. As silently as we could we gathered up all our equipment from where we’d left it there near the window and moved it across the building to the window originally used by the man in the picture we saw. Now we had to figure out how to make the escape ladder work on a window with no inner lip, nothing to hook the thing onto. We let it down ever so slowly, a single rung at a time. Once again our intrepid leader held the ladder as we made our descent. She tossed the ladder off the ledge then she lowered all our equipment out on the rope. When our stuff was once again sitting on the muddy ground she went back to her original entry point and shimmied down the tree like a fireman. Except she is not a fireman and the tree was significantly wider and rougher than a fireman’s pole. It must have hurt like the devil.

I was certain she’d kill herself, or at least hurt herself getting out that window and I wanted to get there fast. But by the time our third and I had figured out how we were going to carry all the equipment and gathered it all up, our leader was coming around the corner to see what we were doing. She made it. Just as we did at the beginning we moved all the equipment to a spot in front in a small pile behind the tree line. I walked out of the trees alone with my backpack on as if I’d been hiking. Nothing suspicious about that. The kids glanced in my direction but the most attention they paid me was when I tried to back my car out. They were riding like wheeled wasps around the front of the vehicle and had a hard time negotiating themselves out of my way. I pulled up to where my partners in B&E were waiting and popped the trunk. In about 30 seconds all our equipment was in the trunk and they were in the car. We were out, we’d had a good day shooting, and we hadn’t been caught. That’s about all you can ask.