I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them. I will ask, please, do not copy my stories elsewhere on the Internet. I work hard on these, and they mean a lot to me. Thank you.
Exploring the Madlands
(June 11, 2017)
1: Away from It All
By Sunday, Mabel had the Grunkles' party practically planned and had begun to dole out various work details. Very sensibly, Wendy and Dipper agreed to a long hike and an overnight camping trip that just happened to coincide with the most frantic phase of Mabel's plotting, scheming, and party preparations. Just coincidence. Really. Happy coincidence.
To be safe, they snuck away before daylight, using Wendy's car—which, the evening before, she had parked off the road way down at the base of the Shack driveway (Mabel always claimed she had ears like a cat and could hear in the dark). Equipped with backpacks, with the tent already stashed in the trunk, Dipper and Wendy tiptoed down the drive in hiking boots, and if you've never tried that, it's harder than you'd think.
They climbed into the Dodge Dart, Wendy released the emergency brake and put the car in neutral, and they coasted all the way down past Stan's driveway and then Ford's before she turned the key and the engine fired up. "Made it," she said. "Dip, you mad at me?"
"Huh?" Dipper asked. "No! Why? I mean about what?"
"Those weird living sock monkeys," Wendy said. "I teased you on-camera because Mabel bet me I wouldn't. I know that bothered you."
"Eh, just Mabel being Mabel," Dipper said. "I was ticked off at her, not you, but I'm over it. I just wonder who she's gonna prank when she gets into college. What happened to the monkeys, anyway? They didn't seem to be around this morning."
"When you were upstairs working on the edits and stuff, Mabel took them way off into the forest and released them into the wild," Wendy said.
Dipper shook his head. "Huh. Great. She's probably just ruined the whole ecology by introducing an invasive species."
"Not such a big deal, I think," Wendy said as they made the turn onto the county road. "I mean, the sock monkeys sure looked like they were making out, but they don't have the necessary equipment. They can't reproduce. Probably."
"Frankenstein," Dipper said.
"Huh? You lost me."
"That's sort of the plot of the novel Frankenstein. A stitched-together monster comes to life and demands a mate. Only in the novel the student who assembled the monster refuses at the last minute and tears the woman he made into pieces. The sock monkey wanted a mate, and Mabel sewed one and brought it to life. In the novel, it did not end well."
"Don't know the book, just the movies, Karloff and Christopher Lee and like that. Frankenstein." Wendy mused about that. "Well, you know, a sock monkey's not exactly a huge reanimated corpse lurching around. They don't eat—no mouths—and so they can't grow or anything. I think stealing Soos's socks was about as evil as they can get."
"Where did that first one, the sock thief, come from to begin with?" Dipper asked.
"Abuelita looked at some of the pictures and recognized it. She got it for Harmony in Mexico, but it scared her, so she never played with it. But it was just, you know, a doll. Not alive or anything."
"And I'll bet Soos said he stuck it in the underwear drawer until Harmony got old enough not to be afraid of it," Dipper said slowly. "So if the bureau is magical somehow—maybe it came to life in the drawer and climbed out and started looking for another creature like itself?"
"Maybe. I don't speak Sock Monkey, dude," Wendy said. "Anyways, it's gone now. Probably never see it again."
"But I really ought to check out that bureau," Dipper told her. "Soos says his grandmother inherited it from her grandmother, and so on and so forth. I don't think it's actually a thousand years old, but it might be a couple hundred."
"Hey," Wendy said as she turned onto a rough secondary road, "why don't you and me take it to the Antiques Road Show? Might be one of those things, you know, 'This golf club in ordinary condition would be worth thirty cents, but because this one was specially made for Abraham Lincoln, we appraise it at ninety bajillion dollars.'"
"Did Abraham Lincoln play golf?" Dipper asked, chuckling.
"Sure, dude! Don't you remember? 'Fore! Score and seven holes ago . . . . "
"Very punny," Dipper said.
"Like that was better?"
They didn't hold hands—Wendy was a two-fisted driver—and Dipper didn't caress her neck, because that distracted her, and on winding roads in the pre-dawn darkness, she needed to concentrate. Their telepathy didn't work without skin-to-skin contact, so they rode in comfortable silence for the best part of an hour, Wendy making turn after turn, each one onto a rougher road.
Finally the logging trail they were on just ended. "We hoof it from here," Wendy said. "Everybody out."
"Where are we?" Dipper asked. The sun was just beginning to peek above the cliffs that bound the valley, but the forest they were in made everything gloomy and fog-patched.
"Back of beyond, my dad would say," Wendy said. She opened the trunk and removed the tent, rolled up neatly, but still bulky. "I'll take first turn hauling this. We'll trade in a couple hours. OK with you?"
"I guess," Dipper said, helping her strap it to her backpack. "But a couple of hours? How far are we going in the woods?"
"Just halfway," she said, shrugging to make sure the load was balanced. "After that, we're coming out of the woods."
"What are you smiling about?" Dipper asked.
She grinned. "Just thinkin'. In my first English class in community college, one night the teacher gave us several questions to think about. Trick questions, you know. One was 'There are ten apples on a table, and you take three away. How many do you have?' Mine was 'How far can you go in the woods?'"
"Three apples, right?" Dipper asked.
"Hey, knew you'd get it, man!" Wendy said. "Turn around, let me tighten those straps. Yep, if you take three, you got three, you leave seven behind. But I caught the teacher off-guard when I answered my question. That started him thinking I was just a smartass, and it got me in trouble a little bit. I had to prove my first paper wasn't plagiarized, but when we got past that, I liked the guy. This way."
Wendy followed a trail that Dipper couldn't even see. Dewy ferns brushed their legs, and they had to duck dew-pearled cobwebs now and then. "What was your answer to the question?" Dipper asked.
"Well, I said, 'How far can I go in the woods? Depends on who I'm with, man.'"
Dipper laughed. "You didn't!"
"Yeah, I did! That was when I was all nervous about being in a college class, and I don't know what made me pop off like that, but it surprised him. Shouldn't have done it."
"It was funny," Dipper said.
"Yeah, people laughed," Wendy said. "But I learned to keep my impulses under control. Just 'cause I made a joke, a lot of the guys in the class figured that meant I was easy, you know? Had to turn a bunch of them down, some more than once."
"Well, when we start college, you'll have the rings on your fingers to help with stuff like that."
"Yeah, well, you better wear that wedding band too, dude!"
"I'll never take it off, but really I wouldn't need it as a sign that I'm taken. Girls just look past me," Dipper said.
"Oh, really? Paz? Eloise? Candy and the girls you met on that road trip with your Grunkle Stan when you were twelve?"
"You heard about those?" Dipper asked.
"Yeah, man! You think Mabel would keep her mouth shut about juicy stuff like that?"
"That was dumb of me," Dipper admitted. "I was trying to get over you. I mean, you wanted to be friends—you know."
"Yeah, older girl, younger guy. You know what, though? Deep down, I'm actually glad Weirdmageddon happened. It was scary as hell—hold up, let's find the bridge across this."
"This" was a gorge perhaps thirty feet deep, rocky and narrow—but not quite narrow enough to risk jumping across—and with a whitewater stream roaring through the bottom.
"Bridge?" Dipper asked.
"Yeah, it's a fallen tree. Douglas fir. Somewheres around here—I think uphill a way. I always get a little lost in this part.
They worked their way through a dense growth of mixed salmonberry and Doutlas spinea. The ground grew steeper, and Dipper started to feel the weight of his pack. "You're glad Weirdmageddon happened?"
"Oh, yeah," Wendy said. "It got us together. And the more I saw of how you reacted under pressure, the more I started thinking, really three years isn't all that much difference. 'Specially won't be when he's eighteen and I'm twenty-one. Well, twenty for most of that year. And when we said goodbye at the end of that summer—"
"We traded hats and you gave me that note to open when I missed Gravity Falls," Dipper said.
Wendy clambered over a rock and gave him a hand up. "Yeah. How long did it take you to open it?"
He laughed. "I read it about five minutes into the bus trip! And I knew I had to come back the next summer. Thanks for the note."
"Thanks for coming back," Wendy said. "There, that's our bridge. Won't be so bad from there on to the spot where we're heading. I blazed a trail a couple-three years back, and I think I can still follow it.
"That," Dipper asked, staring at the huge tree that lay across the gorge, "is a bridge?"
"Nearest thing to one we got," she told him. "Just a matter of balancing. If you want, I'll hold your hand."
"Better not," Dipper said. "If I fell, I might drag you off, too. But I may crawl across!"
"Let me go first," Wendy suggested. "Don't look down. Instead, keep your eyes on my butt, where they belong!"
"That's an offer I can't refuse," Dipper said.
He had to swallow hard and pause to get up his nerve, but walking over a log five feet in diameter wasn't exactly like walking a tightrope. The rush of the water distracted him a little—as did Wendy's bottom in her tight jeans—but they both made it across. "Gets easier from here," Wendy said. "Rising ground, lots of bare rock, not much undergrowth. Little steep, but we'll take it easy. Hardly anybody ever gets up in here, dude. Unexplored territory! I thought you'd like it."
"It's interesting," Dipper said. The trees began to thin out—they were on the north slope of a hill, which got less sunlight—and then they emerged onto a rocky slope, with only a few tough plants struggling to survive in small pockets of soil. A quarter mile ahead was a sheer cliff—part of the bluffs that bounded the valley, Dipper guessed—with a vertical cleft running from ground level all the way up to the top.
"We're going in there, Dip," Wendy said. "I always wondered what lies beyond that."
"Probably just a gorge," Dipper said. "But I guess we'll find out."
"It's Gravity Falls," Wendy said. "Could be anything. But if it goes on very far, we won't get in too far. Dangerous."
"What? Animals?" Dipper asked.
"No, but look around. Mostly bare rock, and as far as I could see in from the opening, the floor of the gorge is rock, too. If it rains way up on the top of the cliffs, all that water sheets right down. It can't drain into the ground, not through solid rock, so—"
"Flash flood," Dipper said. "I got it. But there's no rain in the forecast. We ought to be all right."
"We ought to be," Wendy said, "'cause we're gonna be careful. Let's rest here before we start across the rocks, have some breakfast."
Breakfast was gorp—the camper's word for a kind of calorie-packed trail mix with dried fruit for energy, nuts for protein, grains for fiber, and so on—and gulps of water from their canteens. Wendy stretched. "Sore from walking?"
"Not yet," Dipper said. "That's a good side effect of running. Makes hiking a little easier."
"You decided whether to go out for the track team at WAU?" Wendy asked.
"You want me to?"
She answered by reaching for his hand. Dipper, it's up to you. You don't have to prove a thing to me. If it would make you feel good, go for it, man!
—Thanks. I don't know. I guess I'm a little scared of playing in the big leagues.
Come on! You posted a couple of record times in the state track meets. WAU would be glad to have you—and lucky.
—But I won't have Bill urging me on. I think once or twice when I was about to give up, he kind of gave me a charge of energy to keep me going.
Trust me on this, Dipper. You can be the best if you want to be. And so what if Bill's not urging you on? You'll have a wife in the stands cheering for you. That do?
—That'll do, Dipper agreed. They spent a little time hugging and cuddling, but not too much. Wendy wanted to get to the split in the bluffs before noon, so they'd have time to go in a way and explore a bit. Then what?
"Well," she said, shouldering her pack again—Dipper had taken the tent and she had strapped it to his backpack—"that depends. I wouldn't want to camp inside the gorge, just in case of rain, but it may open up again on the other side. We'll just go in a ways and see what's what. It may end in a blank wall, it may open out into a small valley. We'll decide when we get to that point. But I definitely want us to camp on safe ground. I want tonight to be just the right amount of dangerous. Not too much, not too little."
"What's going to be dangerous?" Dipper asked as they started forward again.
"Oh, you and me," Wendy said. "We'll provide the danger. Ready? Let's pick up the pace!"
And off they went, toward the unknown.