I have multiple copies for most of my games, Trades are mostly based on prices from gg.deals. Please notify me if my keys are not for your personal use (i won't take any responsibility if i wasn't notified) and also please clearly state what you have and want in exchange when making an offer, i have no interest in buying games for Keys/Gems etc. and i also have no interest in Alpha, Beta, Curator, Dev and Non-Steam Keys

Barter.vg Reddit Steam Profile SteamTrades

FUEL (Removed from Steam Store) Magicka: Wizards of the Square Tablet (Removed from Steam Store) Human Resource Machine (Steam Inventory Gift) Magicka+All DLC's except Ninth Element Novel Magicka Shank 2 Operation Flashpoint: Red River (Removed from Steam Store) Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards: Reloaded (Removed from Steam Store) All Zombies Must Die! (Removed from Steam Store) R.I.P.D.: The Game (Removed from Steam Store) ibb & obb (Steam Inventory Gift) Afterfall InSanity Extended Edition (Removed from Steam Store) eXceed - Gun Bullet Children (Removed from Steam Store) eXceed 2nd - Vampire REX (Removed from Steam Store) God Mode (Removed from Steam Store) Gundemonium Recollection (Removed from Steam Store) Hitogata Happa (Removed from Steam Store) Naval War: Arctic Circle (Removed from Steam Store) Red Faction+Red Faction II Red Faction®: Armageddon™+Red Faction Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered+Red Faction Guerrilla Steam Edition Real World Racing (Removed from Steam Store) GundeadliGne (Removed from Steam Store) Beast Boxing Turbo (Removed from Steam Store) BlazeRush eXceed 3rd - Jade Penetrate Black Package (Removed from Steam Store) FortressCraft Evolved! Jagged Alliance - Back in Action King Arthur Collection (March 2012) Mini Motor Racing EVO+Mini Motor Racing X Monday Night Combat Sine Mora+Sine Mora EX Surgeon Simulator The Showdown Effect (Removed from Steam Store) Zeno Clash 2 Angel Express [Tokkyu Tenshi] Cloud Chamber (Removed from Steam Store) Darwinia DEFCON Demigod Droplitz (Removed from Steam Store) eversion ENDLESS™ Space - Definitive Edition (Steam Inventory Gift) Frozen Synapse Prime (Steam Inventory Gift) Galaxy on Fire 2™ Full HD Hack 'n' Slash (Steam Inventory Gift) Hard Reset Extended Edition Hydrophobia: Prophecy MIND: Path to Thalamus Enhanced Edition Multiwinia No Time to Explain+No Time To Explain Remastered On The Path Out There Somewhere (Steam Inventory Gift) Paranormal State: Poison Spring (Removed from Steam Store) Patrician IV Gold Post Apocalyptic Mayhem Primal Carnage Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad with Rising Storm Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood Run Away Sacred Gold Space Rangers (Removed from Steam Store) Spirited Heart Deluxe Splendor Suguri Collection The First Templar - Steam Special Edition The Ironclads Collection The Old City: Leviathan The Ship - 2 Pack Gift (Steam Inventory Gift) Trainz Settle and Carlisle Trainz™ Simulator 12 UFO: Afterlight+UFO: Afterlight - Old Version Uplink Warlock - Master of the Arcane War of the Roses (Removed from Steam Store) World War 1 Centennial Edition (Removed from Steam Store) Jets'n'Guns Gold Anna - Extended Edition BanHammer (Removed from Steam Store) Beat Hazard Complete Betrayer (Removed from Steam Store) Bionic Heart Crazy Machines 2 Crazy Machines Elements Crazy Machines: Golden Gears Defenders of Ardania (Removed from Steam Store) Depths of Fear :: Knossos (Removed from Steam Store) Driftmoon Edna & Harvey: The Breakout Europa Universalis III Complete Fairy Bloom Freesia FlatOut Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook Gettysburg: Armored Warfare (Removed from Steam Store) Grand Ages: Rome GOLD Hearts of Iron 2 Complete Heileen 1: Sail Away Heileen 2: The Hands Of Fate Heileen 3: New Horizons Interstellar Marines Ion Assault KAMI King's Bounty: Armored Princess Knights of Honor Knock-knock Koi-Koi Japan [Hanafuda playing cards] Lilly Looking Through Little Racers STREET LYNE Megabyte Punch Painkiller Overdose Painkiller: Recurring Evil Painkiller Redemption Patrician IV Praetorians Rebel Galaxy Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 SATAZIUS Skara - The Blade Remains Sky Mercenaries The Void Toby: The Secret Mine Tropico Reloaded Tropico 4 Unexplored Zombie Driver HD Complete Edition About Love, Hate and the other ones A Game of Dwarves Air Conflicts: Secret Wars A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda A Valley Without Wind+A Valley Without Wind 2 BANZAI PECAN: The Last Hope For the Young Century Beat Hazard Blood Knights CAPSULE Chroma Squad Cities in Motion Dangerous Waters Darkest Hour: A Hearts of Iron Game Dark Fall: Lost Souls Death to Spies+Death to Spies: Moment of Truth Dementium II HD Deponia Disciples II: Gallean's Return Disciples II: Rise of the Elves Dollar Dash (Removed from Steam Store) Dungeons Dungeons - The Dark Lord Eastside Hockey Manager Finding Teddy Frederic: Evil Strikes Back Ghost Master® Grand Ages: Rome Home Imperial Glory Imperium Romanum Gold Edition Kalaban Knights of Pen and Paper +1 Edition Leviathan: Warships (Removed from Steam Store) Men of War: Assault Squad - Game of the Year Edition Meridian: New World Motorama NecroVision NecroVisioN: Lost Company Not The Robots Nuclear Dawn Oniken: Unstoppable Edition Onikira - Demon Killer Patrician III PixelJunk™ Monsters Ultimate Rooks Keep Solar Flux Solar Shifter EX Summoner Sweet Lily Dreams Switch Galaxy Ultra Sword of the Stars: Complete Collection The Journey Down: Chapter Two The Last Tinker™: City of Colors Tropico 3 Truck Racer Trulon: The Shadow Engine Tulpa Vessel Violett Remastered Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa's Rampage Zombie Driver HD Alien Hallway Alien Shooter 2: Reloaded A New Beginning - Final Cut Angvik AquaNox AquaNox 2: Revelation Axis Game Factory's AGFPRO + Voxel Sculpt + PREMIUM Bundle Bad Rats: the Rats' Revenge Ballpoint Universe - Infinite Bang Bang Racing Battle Group 2 Bridge Constructor Bridge Constructor Medieval Cargo! The Quest for Gravity Cat on a Diet Ceville Cold War Commander: Conquest of the Americas Commandos 2: Men of Courage Commandos 3: Destination Berlin Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines Crash Time 3 Curse: The Eye of Isis Dark Fear Dead Hungry Diner Deadly 30 Deep Dungeons of Doom Drawful 2 Driftland: The Magic Revival Dynamite Jack East India Company Eidolon El Matador Elven Legacy Empress Of The Deep Eurofighter Typhoon Explodemon Face Noir Faces of War Fantasy Wars Final Slam 2 Fireburst Galactic Civilizations® I: Ultimate Edition GeoVox Gravi Greed: Black Border Greed Corp Grind Zones Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes Grotesque Tactics 2 – Dungeons and Donuts Gunman Clive Guns of Icarus Online Hacker Evolution Duality Hacker Evolution Source Code Haegemonia: Legions of Iron Helicopter Simulator 2014: Search and Rescue Hexcells Plus Holy Avatar vs. Maidens of the Dead Idol Hands In Between inMomentum Keebles Konung 2 Konung 3: Ties of the Dynasty Labyrinthine Dreams Last Knight: Rogue Rider Edition Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West Machines At War 3 Majesty 2 Making History: The Calm & the Storm Mata Hari Men of War™ Men of War: Assault Squad Men of War: Red Tide Miner Wars 2081 Miner Wars Arena Mirror Mysteries Mountain M.U.D. TV Musaic Box Overcast - Walden and the Werewolf Paranautical Activity: Deluxe Atonement Edition Perimeter Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic Plush POPixel Probably Archery Purgatory: War of the Damned Puzzle Kingdoms Quell Quell Memento Quell Reflect Real Horror Stories Ultimate Edition Really Big Sky Reign: Conflict of Nations Rig n Roll Rush Bros. Sacraboar Satellite Repairman Saturday Morning RPG Save the Dodos Shadowgrounds Survivor Shadows: Price For Our Sins Sinless + OST Skilltree Saga SoulCraft Space Empires IV Deluxe Space Empires V Star Ruler Starsphere Star Wolves Star Wolves 3: Civil War Steel Storm: Burning Retribution Syberia II Teddy Floppy Ear - Mountain Adventure (Removed from Steam Store) Teddy Floppy Ear - The Race (Removed from Steam Store) Terrian Saga: KR-17 Theatre of War Theatre of War 2: Africa 1943 Theatre of War 2: Kursk 1943 Theatre of War 3: Korea The God's Chain The Joylancer: Legendary Motor Knight The Kings' Crusade Tobe's Vertical Adventure Trapped Dead Turba Twin Sector Two Brothers (Removed from Steam Store) Two Worlds II HD Type:Rider Vault Cracker Vegas: Make It Big™ Velvet Assassin Warriors' Wrath Who's That Flying?! Windforge XIII Century – Gold Edition Yumsters 2: Around the World Zombie Pirates ZombieRush Zombie Shooter

Hello! I found an incredible deal for a single room in a shared 2-bedroom apartment in richmond for $800/mon. Everything so far has looked legit- the girl moving out posted about it on FB marketplace (her profile has a 5+ year long history with posts, comments, timelines, stuff, etc)- the posting looks legit & I messaged her several questions; she allowed me into the apartment to see the room and it looks fine; the deposit is standard (first month upfront + additional $800 deposit).
But the price is just so cheap for SF. Could this still somehow be a scam?
The only potential falgs I could think of:
- the landlords don't live in this property, but they have a property manager, which seems standard.
- I've been communicating mostly with the girl whose room I would take over, and not the property manager (haven't met property manager). But I assume I put in a rental application, I would communicate with the property manager. I was thinking of asking for a call with the property manager and/or some credentials?
The 2-bedroom is a shared in-law unit, so perhaps that's why the price is so low?

Hey all,
I guess the title says it all, but here's some additional context. I'm currently using a 2019 MacBook Pro which appears to be dying a slow death, presumably due to the shifted focus inside Apple toward their new Apple Silicon Chips. I bought the MBP back in university when I was moving around a lot, but that's not the case anymore so having a powerful laptop is not a requirement anymore (on the rare occasions I do need one, my dying 16" MBP is still good enough).
I've been thinking about replacing it, but I was unsure which route is the best to go. I was initially dead-set on the Mac Mini M2, but the price combined with the fact that I basically use zero Mac-exclusive applications got me thinking). My requirements basically boil down to

• Be relatively quiet (at least don't sound like an F35 taking off)
• Suitable for software development (light virtualization, so +16GB RAM is a must)
• Suitable for light video editing (max 2-3 4K tracks, mostly screen recordings, occasional color grading, mostly H264 footage from my ZV-e10)
• Occasional really light gaming (I'm talking Binding of Isaac light)

The cheapest Mac mini I was able to find, suiting those requirements, is 1.429 EUR (10 Core M2 Pro, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD), 1.636 EUR with the bigger 1TB SSD.
While I do like MacOS, I don't mind running Linux on an alternative system and dual-booting into Windows when I need to. My alternative system options seem to be as follows:

• Buy an Intel NUC or other Intel Mini PC (as far as I understand, Intel Quick Sync is significantly better than AMDs media engine?) barebones and equip it myself, which probably ends up being half the Mac Minis price. (Intel NUC13ANHi7 is around 580 EUR + 65 EUR for 32 GB of RAM + 80 EUR for a reasonably fast PCIe 4 SSD comes out to 725 EUR)
• Build a DIY PC in a small form factor case like the fractal design ridge, not as mini but still really compact. Comes out to around 1.100 EUR (can get a used RTX 2070 for cheap) with a 12700K and 32GB of DDR5

As far as I see it, the only option where the Mac beats both options is in terms of power efficiency. However, for the price of the MacMini, I can run both of the setups for quite some time, even at 36ct/kWh. Both a Mini PC and the Small form factor build beat the Mac in terms of upgradability. The SF build is almost certainly the most powerful (and power-hungry) of the three.
What would your recommendation be? Do you have any feedback on my thought process? How do mini PCs with "regular" (x86) CPUs perform in terms of noise under (medium) loads?
Appreciate your feedback

Hello everyone,
Recently flew frontier on a roundtrip from Charlotte NC to Salt Lake City UT with a layover at Las Vegas NV. Since there has been a lot of questions, complaining and posts in general on this sub regarding flying with frontier, I thought I would share my experience here. My and my fiancé flew for the first time with frontier.
CLT to LAS
We both decided to pay for a carry-on as it was a week long trip. Cost us $69 per direction through the app. We checked in early through the app. At the gate, they announced multiple times regarding the bag policy that the personal item needs to fit in their metal compartment for us to board the plane. When the zone 1 boarding was announced, we got up asap and boarded smoothly without anyone questioning us about the bags.
LAS to SLC
The only problem here was a 2 hour delay, with the previous flight being late as the reason. Same as Charlotte for the bag policy, lots of announcements beforehand but barely checked anyone during the boarding. A lot of people in the zone 1 line had obnoxiously large bags and strollers but were allowed without any questioning.
​
SLC to LAS
This is where I felt them being a little strict for the first time. We had to wait for a flight that was boarding before us with two of the frontline workers standing next to the metal boxes and selectively asking people to get their bags measured. They were randomly picking people out from the line. Some had to check-in their carry-ons that they had paid for because of size being too large. Lots of back and forth going on and I feel like the only people who were asked to pay were the ones who had ridiculously stuffed personal items or some really big ones. Luckily my gate changed (not to mention the flight being late for 1.5 hours) and we were transferred to a make-shift basement where there were not metal boxes and everyone was able to board without any measurement hiccups.
​
LAS to CLT
There were 3 frontier gate in line with lots of people waiting for the flight. Luckily again (ikr) the other two flights were before mine so most of the frontier workers were busy handling those lines. The weirdest part was that the line on my left was pretty chill with the workers allowing people to literally shove their personal bags as hard as they can and letting them board without any issues. But the line on the right was super strict for literally the same thing. Lots of people being told to pay for the personal items if they didn't fit. By the time I could see more of that shit show my boarding was announced with literally 1 worker handling the boarding, meaning there was no one to question the bags, and were were able to board smoothly.
Conclusive remarks:

1. The airline bag policy is a mixed bag. There is no definite protocol to enforce the bag policy. It's basically pure luck at this point. Zone 1 definitely gives you some advantage as I saw them being a little lenient towards the people who board first. It also comes down to pure luck, and the gate workers. But I would heavily advise to go light on the personal item. That's what we did. Got some bags that would help us fly without any measurement issues.
2. Check in early if you can. On return flight I received an email like 4 hours before the flight regarding them downsizing the plane and giving away vouchers. Luckily I had already checked in the night before so I had been assigned a seat already so it wasn't an issue for me.
3. The main issue I would say is the flight delays. This issue was common, throughout the airport, specially with frontier, as I could see on their app. So make sure you keep checking the flights and their timing either through the frontier app or flightaware.
4. The planes are not in the best condition and the service is mid at best. But you get what you pay for. Will I fly with them again? With bags and the ticket I paid $300 roughly for a round trip to fly coast to coast to see my family, so yes I will probably do it again considering the next best option for this trip is $800 unless I find anything else that's cheap, because I would definitely pay just a little more to not fly with them.

I live in a student accommodation building in a en-suite room with shared kitchen and will be living here until August. I live on the first floor which is about 8 ft above a lower roof which I assume is for window cleaning and maintenance. Because of this everyone on my floor is not allowed their windows properly opened unlike everyone else on other floors. Instead of opening along a vertical hinge fully they are locked so that they tilt slightly which leaves at most about a centimetre gap at the top for air to get in.
The building gets very hot, considerably hotter than the outside and my bedroom window gets direct sunlight from about 11am to 6pm. Many people have complained and the manager placed a thermometer in the shared kitchen a week ago which he says will help determine if the heat is too high, which will result in the windows being opened fully only after bars are fitted, which certainly won’t happen anytime whilst I live here.
Out of the 7 people I live with no one has seen a temperature in the kitchen of lower than 24.5 degrees which was at 2 am the windows have not been shut in months. The highest temperatures have been around 33 degrees for the past week when anyone cooks and it remains above 30 for hours at a time. It is May and has been 23 degrees outside here at the highest. Our bedrooms don’t have thermometers but the feel the exact same temperature and all have the same windows which face the same direction as the kitchen.
Does anyone know if this is legal, I have no medical conditions or anything else but it makes us all feel unwell and makes a good night sleep near impossible and it’s not even summer yet

My gf (26F) of 9 months wanted to do a trip to Vegas to see a concert this summer. She can afford to do the trip by herself, but to make it easier on her bank account, she asked me if I'd like to split the hotel with her. In response, I said that I would love to go to Vegas with her and to visit my best friend who lives there; moreover, I have tons of credit card points, and I offered to book the hotel using my points, which she happily accepted.
The hotel we chose came to a total of 100,000 credit card points. I told my GF that, before using the points, I wanted to check two things:

1. I wanted to compare with Google, Expedia, Kayak etc. to see if we were getting a good deal on the hotel.
2. I wanted to see whether we could get a better rate of return on the 100,000 credit card points by using them toward flights or one of the other trips we have planned for this year.

I told her that I didn't want to waste her time, so I would take a day to verify these two things on my own. I also mentioned that, even if I found a better use of the credit card points, I would still be happy to cover the hotel with cash.
My GF insisted on helping me verify the above two things. This took 2 hours. She then came up with an idea that stunned me --- if I was prepared to pay for the hotel with cash, why not use the credit card points to upgrade our hotel room to a suite, or upgrade our flights to first class? I did not see this as a good use of my credit card points, and when I told her so, she blew up at me.
As of now, she doesn't want me to come on the trip because she doesn't like stingy travel companions who waste hours of her time trying to save money. I explained to her that I didn't ask for her help, and I also pointed out that she took hours to choose the hotel in the first place. She says that even if I'm not wasting her time directly, I'm wasting my time, which means I have less time to spend with her. She then berated me for two more hours before calming down and returning to her usual affectionate self.
I am beginning to think that my gf is being abusive toward me. When I said this to her, she rolled her eyes. How would you recommend that I communicate to my gf that she's being unreasonable? Is my only option to break up with her?

Bet Record: 5-7 Individual Picks: 6-9

Sundays picks 28/05/2023

Indiana Fever Vs. Atlanta Dream @3:00 EST

Indiana Fever +7.5 ✅ FINAL: 90-87 IND
IND/ATL UNDER 160 ❌ TOTAL: 177
Indiana ML ✅ FINAL: 90-87 IND

Dallas Wings Vs. Chicago Sky @6:00 EST

Dallas Wings +2.5 ❌ FINAL: 94-88 CHI
DAL/CHI OVER 161.5 ✅ TOTAL: 182

Minnesota Lynx Vs. Las Vegas Aces @9:00 EST

Las Vegas Aces -14 ✅ FINAL: 94-73 LV
LV/MIN OVER 169.5 ❌ TOTAL: 167

Todays picks: 30/05/2023

Indiana Fever Vs. Connecticut Sun @ 7 EST

Indiana Fever +12.5 FD odds -106
IND/CON OVER 158.5 FD odds -106

Chicago Sky Vs. Atlanta Dream @ 7 EST

Chicago Sky ML FD odds +118
CHI/ATL UNDER 160.5 FD odds -110

Minnesota Lynx Vs. Dallas Wings @ 8 EST

Dallas Wings -6.5 FD odds -110
MIN/DAL UNDER 167.5 FD odds -115

New York Liberty Vs. Seattle Storm @ 9 EST

New York Liberty -15.5 FD odds -102
NY/SEA OVER 161.5 FD odds -106
Seattle Storm ML (.5u) FD odds +920
New York isn’t playing spectacularly to start the season imo. For that reason gonna sprinkle a little on the Moneyline for Seattle, call it a hedge lol.
To anyone that tails or fades, BOL! Let’s get it!

To win you have to finish the regular season in the top half. Then you have to win 16 or a potential 28 games. And the games are basically every other day. If after 60 minutes of one of the most physically demanding sports you are tied you keep going 20 minutes at a time until someone scores. (Keep in mind the 2 longest games in history went almost the equivalent of 3 games each) The game is hard. It is exhausting you skate the hell for 45 seconds get off the ice panting and 2 minutes later you are back at it. 200lbs men are constantly smashing you into wood and plexiglass walls. When you fall, and you will fall, it is onto concrete covered by a cushion of hard as concrete ice. Players chase a 3 inch 6 oz frozen rubber disc moving at speeds around 20 mph with bursts to 30 mph. That rubber bullet can be propelled at 100+ mph. And your job is to try and make it hit you so the guy in the hurt locker suit doesn't have to. Look at this year. 4 of the top 5 and 9 of the top 10 teams are not playing for that silver chalice. Including the team that set records for wins and points in a season.
This is why we play. This is what we strive for. As kids we played on the streets and backyard rinks, on ponds and in church or school parking lots. We played in small barns that never got warm and in gyms that always seemed a bit hot.we played for that cup every week. Sometimes we lost sometimes we won. Then we went home to watch the real guys doing it. They where are heros and our foes. To the players and fans of both the Florida Panthers and the Las Vegas Golden Knights good luck, enjoy may the better team win (it can't be the best team, Toronto is playing golf or tennis). Remember the history of that Cup and do it proud.

(owing to the reddit character limit, I'm posting this in two parts, but it's one contiguous story)
There are instincts that you develop when you’re a parent. If you don’t have any children it might be a little hard to understand. If you have a toddler, for example, and they’re in the other room and silent for more than a few seconds, there’s a good chance they’re up to no good. I take that back, most of the time they’re doing nothing, but you still have to check. You feel a compulsion to check. I don’t think it’s a learned skill, I think it’s an actual instinct.
Paleolithic parents who didn’t check on their toddlers every few minutes, just to double check that they weren’t being stalked by smilodons were unlikely to have grandchildren and pass on their genes. You just feel you need to check, like getting goosebumps, a compulsion. I suppose it’s the same reason little kids are always demanding you look at them and what they’re doing.
I think that instinct starts to atrophy as your kids grow. They start learning to do things for themselves, and before you know it, they’re after their own privacy, not your attention. I don’t think it ever goes away though. I expect, decades from now, my own grown kids will visit and bring my grandkids with them. And the second I hear a baby crying in the earliest morning hours, I’ll be alert and ready for anything, sure as any old soldier who hears his name whispered in the dark of night.
I felt that alarm just the other day. First time in years. My boy came home from riding bikes with a couple of his friends. I’m pretty sure they worked out a scam where they asked each of their parents for a different new console for Christmas, and now they spend their weekends traveling between the three houses so they can play on all of them.
We all live in a nice neighborhood. A newer development than the one I grew up in, same town though. It’s the kind of place where kids are always playing in the streets, and the cars all routinely do under 20. My wife and I make sure the kids have helmets and pads, and we’re fine with the boy going out biking with his friends, as long as they stay in the neighborhood.
You know, a lot of people in my generation take some weird sort of pride in how irresponsible we used to be when we were young. I never wore a helmet. Rode to places, without telling any adults, that we never should have ridden to. Me and my friends would make impromptu jumps off of makeshift ramps and try to do stupid tricks, based loosely on stunts we’d seen on TV. Other people my age seem to wax nostalgic for that stuff and pretend it makes them somehow better people. I don’t get it. Sometimes I look back and shudder. We were lucky we escaped with only occasional bruises and road burns. It could have gone so much worse.
My son and his buddies came bustling in the front door at about 2 PM on a Saturday. They did the usual thing of raiding the kitchen for juice and his mother’s brownies, and I took that as my cue to abandon the television in the living room for my office. I was hardly noticing the chaos, by this point, it was becoming a regular weekend occurrence. But as I was just leaving, I caught something in the chatter. My boy said something about, “... that guy who was following us.”
He hadn’t said it any louder or more clearly than anything else they’d been talking about, all that stuff I’d been filtering out. Yet some deeper core process in my brain stem heard it, interpreted it, then hit the red alert button. My blood ran cold and every hair on my skin stood at attention.
I turned around and asked “Somebody followed you? What are you talking about?” I wasn’t consciously aware of how strict and stern my voice came out, yet when the jovial smiles dropped off of their faces it was apparent that it had been so.
“Huh?” my son said, his voice high-pitched and talking fast, like when he thinks he’s in trouble and needs to explain. “We thought we saw somebody following us. There wasn’t though. We didn’t really see anybody and we’d just spooked ourselves.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Nothing? We really didn’t see anybody! Honest! I just saw something out of the corner of my eye! But there wasn’t really nobody there!”
“Yeah!,” said one of his buds. “Peripheral! Peripheral vision! I thought maybe I saw something too, but when I looked I didn’t see anything. I don’t have my glasses with me, but when I really looked I got a good look and there was nothing.”
The three boys had that semi-smiling but still concerned look that this was only a bizarre misunderstanding, but they were still being very sincere. “Were they in a car?”
“No, Dad, you don’t get it,” my boy continued, “They were small. We thought it was a kid.”
“Yeah,” said the third boy. “We thought maybe it was Tony Taylor’s stupid kid sister shadowing us. Getting close to throwing water balloons. Just cause she did that before.”
“If you didn’t get a good look how did you know it was a kid?”
“Because it was small!” my kid explained, though that wasn’t helping much. “What I mean is, at first I thought it was behind a little bush. It was way too small a bush to hide a grown-up. That’s why we thought it was probably Tony’s sister.”
“But you didn’t actually see Tony’s sister?” I asked.
“Nah,” said one of his buds. “And now that I think about it, that bush was probably too small for his sister too. It would have been silly. Like when a cartoon character hides behind a tiny object.”
“That’s why we think it was just in our heads,” explained the other boy, “That and the pole.”
“Yeah,” my son said. “The park on 14th and Taylor?” That was just a little community park, a single city block. Had a playground, lawn, a few trees, and some benches. “Anyway, we were riding past that, took a right on Taylor. And we were talking about how weird it would be if somebody really were following us. That’s when Brian thought he saw something. Behind a telephone pole.”
“I didn’t get a good look at it either,” the friend, Brian, “explained. Just thought I did. Know how you get up late at night to use the bathroom or whatever and you look down the hallway and you see a jacket or an office chair or something and because your eyes haven’t adjusted you think you see a ghost or burglar or something? Anyway, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned there wasn’t anything there.”
“Yeah, it was just like sometimes that happens, except this time it happened twice on the same bike ride, is all,” the other friend explained.
“And you’re sure there was nothing there?”
“Sure we’re sure,” my boy said. “We know because that time we checked. We each rode our bikes around the pole and there was nothing. Honest!”
“Hmmm,” I said. The whole thing seemed reasonable and nothing to be concerned about, you’d think.. The boys seemed to relax at my supposed acceptance. “Alright, sounds good. Hey, just let me know before you leave the house again, alright?” They all rushed to seem agreeable as I left the room, then quickly resumed their snacking and preceded to play their games.
I kept my ear out, just in case. My boy, at least this time, dutifully told me his friends were about to leave. He wasn’t very happy with me when I said they wouldn’t be riding home on their bikes, I was going to drive them home. The other boys didn’t complain, but I suppose it wasn’t their place, so my boy did the advocating for them, which I promptly ignored. I hate doing that, ignoring my kid’s talkback. My dad was the same way. It didn’t help that I struggled to get both of their bikes in the trunk, and it was a pain to get them back out again. My boy sulked in the front seat on the short ride back home. Arms folded on chest, eyes staring straight ahead, that lip thing they do. He seemed embarrassed for having what he thought was an over-protective parent. I suppose he was angry at me as well for acting, as far as he knew, irrationally. Maybe he thought he was being punished for some infraction he didn’t understand.
Well, it only got worse when we got home. I told him he wasn’t allowed to go out alone on his bike anymore. I’d only had to do that once before, when he was grounded, and back then he’d known exactly what he’d done wrong and he had it coming. Now? Well, he was confused, furious, maybe betrayed, probably a little brokenhearted? I can’t blame him. He tramped upstairs to his room to await the return of his mother, who was certain to give a sympathetic ear. I can’t imagine how upset he’ll be if he checks the garage tomorrow and finds I’ve removed his tires, just in case.
I wish I could explain it to him. I don’t even know how.
Where should I even begin? The town?
When I was about my son’s age I had just seen that movie, The Goonies. It had just come out in theaters. I really liked that movie, felt a strong connection. A lot of people do, can’t blame them, sort of a timeless classic. Except I wasn’t really into pirate’s treasure or the Fratellis, what really made me connect was a simple single shot, still in the first act. It’s right after they cross the threshold, and leave the house on their adventure. It was a shot of the boys, from above, maybe a crane shot or a helicopter shot, as they’re riding their bikes down a narrow forested lane, great big evergreen trees densely growing on the side of the road, they’re all wearing raincoats and the road is still wet from recent rain.
That was my childhood. I’ve spent my whole life in the Pacific Northwest. People talk to outsiders about the rain, and they might picture a lot of rainfall, but it’s not the volume, it’s the duration. We don’t get so much rain, it just drizzles slowly, on and on, for maybe eight or nine months out of the year. It doesn’t matter where I am, inside a house, traveling far abroad, anywhere I am I can close my eyes and still smell the air on a chilly afternoon, playing outdoors with my friends.
It’s not petrichor, that sudden intense smell you get when it first starts to rain after a long dry spell. No, this was almost the opposite, a clean smell, almost the opposite of a scent, since the rain seemed to scrub the air clean. The strongest scent and I mean that in the loosest sense possible, must have been the evergreen needles. Not pine needles, those were too strong, and there weren’t that many pines anyway. Douglas fir and red cedar predominated, again the root ‘domination’ seems hyperbole. Yet those scents were there, ephemeral as it is. Also, there was a sort of pleasant dirtiness to the smell, at least when you rode bikes. It wasn’t dirt, or mud, or dust. Dust couldn’t have existed except perhaps for a few fleeting weeks in August. I think, looking back, it was the mud puddles. All the potholes in all the asphalt suburban roads would fill up after rain with water the color of chocolate milk. We’d swerve our BMX bikes, or the knock-off brands, all the way across the street just to splash through those puddles and test our “suspensions.,” meaning our ankles and knees. The smell was always stronger after that. It had an earthiness to it. Perhaps it was petrichor’s lesser-known watery cousin.
There were other sensations too, permanently seared into my brain like grill marks. A constant chilliness that was easy to ignore, until you started working up a good heart rate on your bike, then you noticed your lungs were so cold it felt like burning. The sound of your tires on the wet pavement, particularly when careening downhill at high speed. For some reason, people in the mid-80s used to like to decorate their front porches with cheap, polyester windsocks. They were often vividly colored, usually rainbow, like prototype pride flags. When an occasional wind stirred up enough to gust, the windsocks would flap, and owning to the water-soaked polyester, make a wet slapping sound. It was loud, it was distinct, but you learned to ignore it as part of the background, along with the cawing of crows and distant passing cars.
That was my perception of Farmingham as a kid. The town itself? Just a typical Pacific Northwest town. That might not mean much for younger people or modern visitors, but there was a time when such towns were all the same. They were logging towns. It was the greatest resource of the area from the late 19th century, right up until about the 80s, when the whole thing collapsed. Portland, Seattle, they had a few things going on beyond just the timber industry, but all the hundreds of little towns and small cities revolved around logging, and my town was no exception.
I remember going to the museum. It had free admission, and it was a popular field trip destination for the local school system. It used to be the City Hall, a weird Queen Anne-style construction. Imagine a big Victorian house, but blown up to absurd proportions, and with all sorts of superfluous decorations. Made out of local timber, of course. They had a hall for art, I can’t even remember why, now. Maybe they were local artists. I only remember paintings of sailboats and topless women, which was a rare sight for a kid at the time. There was a hall filled with 19th-century household artifacts. Chamber pots and weird children's toys.
Then there was the logging section, which was the bulk of the museum. It’s strange how different things seemed to be in the early days of the logging industry, despite being only about a hundred years old, from my perspective in the 1980s. If you look back a hundred years from today, in the 1920s, you had automobiles, airplanes, electrical appliances, jazz music, radio programs, flappers, it doesn’t feel that far removed, does it? No TV, no internet, but it wouldn’t be that strange. 1880s? Different world.
Imagine red cedars, so big you could have a full logging crew, arms stretched out, just barely manage to encircle one for a photographer. Felling a single tree was the work of days. Men could rest and eat their lunches in the shelter of a cut made into a trunk, and not worry for safety or room. They had to cut their own little platforms into the trees many feet off the ground, just so the trunk was a little bit thinner, and thus hours of labor saved. They used those long, flexible two-man saws. And double-bit axes. They worked in the gloom of the shade with old gas lanterns. Once cut down from massive logs thirty feet in diameter, they’d float the logs downhill in sluices, like primitive wooden make-shift water slides. Or they’d haul them down to the nearest river, the logs pulled by donkeys on corduroy roads. They’d lay large amounts of grease on the roads, so the logs would slide easily. You could still smell the grease on the old tools on display in the museum. The bigger towns had streets where the loggers would slide the logs down greased skids all the way down to the sea, where they’d float in big logjams until the mills were ready for processing. They’d call such roads “skid-rows.” Because of all the activity, they’d end up being the worst parts of town. Local citizens wouldn’t want to live there, due to all the stink and noise. They’d be on the other side of the brothels and the opium dens. It would be the sort of place where the destitute and the insane would find themselves when they’d finally lost anything. To this day, “skidrow” remains a euphemism for the part of a city where the homeless encamp.
That was the lore I’d learned as a child. That was my “ancestry” I was supposed to respect and admire, which I did, wholeheartedly. There were things they left out, though. Things that you might have suspected, from a naive perspective, would be perfect for kids, all the folklore that came with the logging industry. The ghost stories, and the tall tales. I would have eaten that up. They do talk about that kind of thing in places far removed from the Pacific Northwest. But I had never heard about any of it. Things like the Hidebehind. No, that I’d have to discover for myself.
There were four of us on those bike adventures. Myself. Ralph, my best friend. A tough guy, the bad boy, the most worldly of us, which is a strange thing to say about an eight-year-old kid. India, an archetypal ‘80s tomboy. She was the coolest person I knew at the time. Looking back, I wonder what her home life was like. I think I remember problematic warning signs that I couldn’t have recognized when I was so young, but now raise flags. Then there was Ben. A goofy kid, a wild mop of hair, coke bottle glasses, type 1 diabetic which seemed to make him both a bit pampered by his mother, who was in charge of all his insulin, diet, and schedule, and conversely a real risk taker when she wasn’t around.
When we first saw it…
No, wait. This was the problem with starting the story. Where does it all begin? I’ll need to talk about my Grandfather as well. I’ve had two different perspectives on my Grandfather, on the man that he was. The first was the healthy able-bodied grandparent I’d known as a young child. Then there was the man, as I learned about him after he had passed.
There was a middle period, from when I was 6 to when I was 16, when I hardly understood him at all, as he was hit with a double whammy of both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's. His decline into an invalid was both steep and long drawn out. That part didn’t reflect who he was as a person.
What did I know of him when I was little? Well I knew he and my grandmother had a nice big house and some farmland, out in the broad flat valley north of Farmingham. Dairy country. It had been settled by Dutch immigrants back in the homesteading days. His family had been among the first pioneers in the county too. It didn’t register to me then that his surname was Norwegian, not Dutch. I knew he had served in the Navy in World War II, which I was immensely proud of for reasons I didn’t know why. I knew he had a job as a butcher in a nearby rural supermarket. He was a bit of a farmer too, more as a hobby and a side gig. He had a few cattle, but mostly grew and harvested hay to sell to the local dairies. I knew he had turned his garage into a machine shop, and could fix damn near anything. From the flat tires on my bicycle to the old flat-bed truck he’d haul hay with, to an old 1950s riding lawnmower he somehow managed to keep in working order. I knew he could draw a really cool cartoon cowboy, I knew he loved to watch football, and I knew the whiskers on his chin were very pokey, and they’d tickle you when he kissed you on the cheek, and that when you tried to rub the sensation away he’d laugh and laugh and laugh.
Then there were the parts of his life that I’d learn much later. Mostly from odd passing comments from relatives, or things I’d find in the public records. Like how he’d been a better grandfather than a father. Or how his life as I knew it had been a second, better life. He’d been born among the Norwegian settler community, way up in the deep, dark, forest-shrouded hills that rimmed the valley. He’d been a logger in his youth. Technologically he was only a generation or two from the ones I’d learned about in the museum. They’d replaced donkeys with diesel engines and corduroy roads with narrow gauge rail. It was still the same job, though. Dirty, dangerous, dark. Way back into those woods, living in little logging camps, civilization was always a several-day hike out. It became a vulgar sort of profession, filled with violent men, reprobates, and thieves. When my grandfather’s father was murdered on his front porch by a lunatic claiming he’d been wronged somehow, my grandfather hiked out of there, got into town, and joined the Navy. He vowed never to go back. The things he’d seen out in those woods were no good. He’d kept that existence away from me. Anyways…
Tommy Barker was the first of us to go missing. I say ‘us’ as if I knew him personally. I didn’t. He went to Farmingham Middle School, other side of town, and several grades above us. From our perspective, he may as well have been an adult living overseas.
Yet it felt like we got to know him. His face was everywhere, on TV, all over telephone poles. Everybody was talking about him. After he didn’t return from a friend’s house, everybody just sort of assumed, or maybe hoped, that he’d just gotten lost, or was trapped somewhere. They searched all the parks. Backyards, junkyards, refrigerators, trunks. Old-fashioned refrigerators, back before suction seals, had a simple handle with a latch that opened when you pulled on it. It wasn’t a problem when the fridges were in use and filled with food. But by the 80s old broke-down refrigerators started filling up backyards and junkyards, and they became deathtraps for kids playing hide-and-seek. The only opened from the outside. I remember thinking Tommy Barker was a little old to have likely been playing hide-and-seek, but people checked everywhere anyway. They never found him.
That was about the first time we saw the Hidebehind. Ben said he thought he saw somebody following us, looked like, maybe, a kid. We’d just slowly huffed our way up a moderately steep hill, Farmingham is full of them, and when we paused for a breather at the top, Ben said he saw it down the hill, closer to the base. Yet when we turned to look there was nothing there. Ben said he’d just seen it duck behind a car. That wasn’t the sort of behavior of a random kid minding his own business. Yet the slope afforded us a view under the car’s carriage, and except for the four tires, there were no signs of any feet hiding behind the body. At first, we thought he was pulling our leg. When he insisted he wasn’t, we started to tease him a little. He must have been seeing things, on account of his poor vision and thick glasses. The fact that those glasses afforded him vision as good as or better than any of us wasn’t something we considered.
The next person to disappear was Amy Brooks. Fifth-grader. Next elementary school over. I remember it feeling like when you’re traveling down the freeway, and there’s a big thunderstorm way down the road, but it keeps getting closer, and closer. I don’t remember what she looked like. Her face wasn’t plastered everywhere like Tommy’s had been. She was mentioned on the regional news, out of Seattle, her and Tommy together. Two missing kids from the same town in a short amount of time. The implication was as obvious as it was depraved. They didn’t think the kids were getting lost anymore. They didn’t do very much searching of backyards. The narratives changed too. Teachers started talking a lot about stranger danger. Local TV channels started recycling old After School Specials and public service announcements about the subject.
I’m not sure who saw it next. I think it was Ben again. We took him seriously this time though. I think. The one I’m sure I remember was soon after, and that time it was India who first saw it. It’s still crystal clear in my memory, almost forty years later, because that was the time I first saw it too. We were riding through a four-way stop, an Idaho Stop before they called it that, when India slammed to a stop, locking up her coaster brakes and leaving a long black streak of rubber on a dry patch of pavement. We stopped quickly after and asked what the problem was. We could tell by her face she’d seen it. She was still looking at it.
“I see it,” she whispered, unnecessarily. We all followed her gaze. We were looking, I don’t know, ten seconds? Twenty? We believed everything she said, we just couldn’t see it.
“Where?” Ralph asked.
“Four blocks down,” she whispered. “On the left. See the red car? Kinda rusty?” There was indeed a big old Lincoln Continental, looking pretty ratty and worn. I focused on that, still seeing nothing. “Past that, just to its right. See the street light pole? It’s just behind that.”
We also saw the pole she was talking about. Metal. Aluminum, I’d have guessed. It had different color patches, like metallic flakeboard. Like it’d had been melted together out of scrap.
I could see that clearly even from that distance. I saw nothing behind it. I could see plenty of other things in the background, cars, houses, bushes, front lawns, beauty bark landscape.. There was no indication of anything behind that pole.
And then it moved. It had been right there where she said it had been, yet it had somehow perfectly blended into the landscape, a trick of perspective. We didn’t see it at all until it moved, and almost as fast it had disappeared behind that light pole. We only got a hint. Brown in color, about our height in size.
We screamed. Short little startled screams, the involuntary sort that just burst out of you. Then we turned and started to pedal like mad, thoroughly spooked. We made it to the intersection of the next block when it was Ralph who screeched to a halt and shouted, “Wait!”
We slowed down and stopped, perhaps not as eagerly as we’d done when India yelled. Ralph was looking back over his shoulder, looking at that metal pole. “Did anybody see it move again?’ he asked. We all shook our heads in the negative. Ralph didn’t notice, but of course, he didn’t really need an answer, of course we hadn’t been watching.
“If it didn’t move, then it’s still there!” Ralph explained the obvious. It took a second to sink in, despite the obvious. “C’mon!” he shouted, and to our surprise, before we could react, he turned and took off, straight down the road, straight to where that thing had been lurking.
We were incredulous, but something about his order made us all follow hot on his heels. He was a sort of natural leader. I thought it was total foolishness, but I wasn’t going to let him go alone. I think I got out, “Are you crazy?!”
The wind was blowing hard past our faces as we raced as fast as we could, it made it hard to hear. Ralph shouted his response. “If it’s hiding that means its afraid!” That seemed reasonable, if not totally accurate. Lions hide from their prey before they attack. Then again, they don’t wait around when the whole herd charges. Really, the pole was coming up so fast there wasn’t a whole lot of time to argue. “Just blast past and look!” Ralph added. “We’re too fast! It won’t catch us.”
Sure, I thought to myself. Except maybe Ben, who always lagged behind the rest of us in a race. The lion would get Ben if any of us.
We rushed past that pole and all turned our heads to look. “See!” Ralph shouted in triumph. There was simply nothing there. A metal streetlight pole and nothing more. We stopped pedaling yet still sped on. “Hang on,” Ralph said, and at the next intersection he took a fast looping curve that threatened to crash us all, but we managed and curved behind him. We all came to the pole again where we stopped to see up close that there was nothing there, despite what we had seen moments before.
“Maybe it bilocated,” Ben offered. We groaned. We were all thinking it, but I think we were dismissive because it wasn’t as cool a word as ‘teleport.”
“Maybe it just moved when we weren’t looking,” I offered. That hadn’t been long, but that didn’t mean anything if it moved fast. The four of us slowly looked up from the base of the pole to our immediate surroundings. There were bushes. A car in a carport covered by a tarpaulin. The carport itself. Garbage cans. Stumps. Of course the ever-present trees. Whatever it was it could have been hiding behind anything. Maybe it was. We looked. Maybe it would make itself seen. None of us wanted that. “OK, let’s get going,” Ralph said, and we did so.
I got home feeling pretty shaken that afternoon. I felt safe at home. Except for the front room, which had a big bay window looking out onto the street, and the people who lived across it. There were plenty of garbage cans and telephone poles and stumps that a small, fast thing might hide behind. No, I felt more comfortable in my bedroom. There was a window, but a great thick conical cypress tree grew right in front of it, reaching way up over the roof of the house. If anything, it offered ME a place to hide, and peer out onto the street to either side of the tree. It was protective, as good as any heavy blanket.