Today I was out for a bicycle ride. Despite that May is one of the prime bicycle riding months in Montana, other commitments have kept me too busy to do anything but a bit of commuting. So today was the first day in a while that I was managing to get up into the mountains. Getting into the mountains of Montana means that my reception would be cut off, and a few minutes before it did so, my phone rang. I picked it up, thinking that perhaps my mother was calling me to remind me of something. But the area code was 559, an unfamiliar area code to me.
I talked on the phone, as well as I could considering that I was getting to the edge of my reception. After a few seconds, I told the person they had reached a wrong number and hung up.
About a minute later, the phone rang. Same wrong number. From what I could gather, the callers were in Madeira, California and had received a phone call from my cell phone 5 minutes ago, and were wondering why. I told them that my phone had been in my pocket and I hadn't called them. We then parted again.
So why is a wrong number on a cell phone worthy of a daylog?
The road I was bicycling up was called Sleeping Child, which sounds like a peaceful enough name. It is named after the creek that it follows, a rushing mountain stream that towards its top, goes through a valley steep enough to be a canyon. I have recently learned that the name "Sleeping Child" was a corruption or alteration of "Weeping Child", which comes from a Native American (probably Salish) legend that travelers in the area would hear the sound of a weeping child. When they approached it, it would seem like a lone, weak child that would come to them for comfort. And would then proceed to start sucking on their fingers, and continuing to do so until their stripped skeletons were all that was left, to be found by later travelers.
Slightly less peaceful and bucolic.
Although the connection is a bit of a stretch, I did find it a bit eerie to have someone calling out to me, even if it was over a cell phone and not as a child's voice in the bushes. And of course, I also have noticed the connection between the legend of the Weeping Children and other legends of creatures who are described with the adjective "Weeping" and a noun of something beautiful and innocent, who are voraciously hungry.
So, make something of it or not, that was today's oblique brush with the supernatural.