It didn't even sound like me crying.
The teller was born in Bishop and raised in Mammoth Lakes, and has lived on the east side of the Sierra Nevada for almost twenty-seven years. When rents got too high they built out a van and have lived in it for a couple of years. They prefer remote spots well away from other people. They've had black bears try to break into the van before, and their habit is to bang on the window and yell until the bear leaves.
Driving back from Southern California, they decided to break the trip in the Alabama Hills, the rocky country below Mount Whitney, and spend the morning reading and exploring. They parked around half past midnight in a bare, rocky spot in Lone Ranger Canyon and were asleep by one.
At about 2:30 they half woke to birdsong, a lot of it, as if it were dawn beside a wooded creek. But there was no creek and no trees where they were parked. Puzzled and tired, they tried to go back to sleep. Then the birds seemed to give way to crickets, very loud, and they didn't remember hearing any crickets when they arrived.
They'd barely had that thought when they felt something lean against the side of the van. A deafening wail started up, part screech and part whistle, and the van began to shake violently.
They know what a prank feels like. A month or two earlier, five or six friends had rocked the van as a joke while they slept, and that had been a slow back-and-forth sway. This was violent. If it was an earthquake, they say, it was bigger than any they'd felt in a lifetime in California. They wanted to bang on the window and scream at it to stop, as they would with a bear, but they couldn't move. They started sobbing, suddenly and uncontrollably, in a voice that didn't sound like their own. They describe a terror that seemed to come from outside them and fill the air, heavy and oppressive. They were sure they were going to die.
It felt like it went on for minutes. Then the shaking stopped, and so did everything else. There were no crickets and no birds, just a dead silence they found worse than the noise. They lay under the blankets for about ten minutes before they could make themselves move.
Finally they dressed, grabbed a long trowel and stepped out with a flashlight to look for tracks. There were no bear prints, no fresh footprints and no fresh tyre marks, and they were sure they'd have heard a vehicle leave. They drove out fast. The dread followed them down Whitney Portal Road and through Lone Pine, and only lifted once they were heading south on the highway. When they had signal, no earthquake had been recorded in the area.
For someone who normally avoids crowds, pulling into a rest stop full of sleeping travellers felt like rescue. They checked the van that night and again in daylight. There were old claw marks from a bear years earlier, but nothing new. They posted hoping someone who knew the area might have an explanation, because they couldn't find one.