This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/scarymaxx on 2026-08-16 19:53:11+00:00.

---

When I was young and nothing scared me, I used to camp in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes I went by myself, but more often I’d drag whatever guy I was dating out with me. My version of a perfect day was to find a little-used path, park at the trailhead before dawn, and hike as far as we could before setting up camp by sunset. If things went according to plan, we wouldn’t see another soul the whole time.

I worked as a hostess at a middle-of-the-road Asian-fusion restaurant at the time, and I’d developed a dim view of people. I spent all day getting hit on, condescended to, and falsely accused. I witnessed a thousand petty tantrums over incorrect seasonings and insufficient amounts of ice in drinks. To me, going a full weekend without seeing a stranger equaled bliss.

My boyfriend at the time was Caleb, a few years older with a CS degree. He wasn’t your typical tech bro—just happened to be good with code. If you met him, you’d clock him as a barista or the bartender at a dive bar. He had a great vinyl collection, a dozen tattoos, and a tongue ring. Beyond all his hipster affectations, he also loved getting out of the city and melting into the quiet of dense woods, which made him a perfect match for me.

Caleb would spend the week grinding out twelve-hour days writing code for a game company and then show up at my house late Friday night with his hiking bag meticulously packed, ready to escape civilization for as long as possible.

After about a year of dating, we’d hit most of the best local spots multiple times. A four-day weekend was coming up, and we decided to head east into Utah, the next state over, and camp in the desert where we could escape the winter cold. I’d read online about large basin that was almost totally flat for miles in all directions. It was a potentially miserable, sun scorched hike, but this was the right time of year to tackle it. It also promised total solitude and a view of the Milky Way worth writing home about.

The drive was long and surprisingly warm once we hit the state border. Caleb had a decent car, but the AC was out, and he’d been putting off getting it fixed since we were in the middle of January. We were sweating most of the way. Even so, the vibe was good. Caleb had put together a playlist full of my favorite songs—even obscure ones.

“How’d you know I like old surf rock?” I asked.

“You mentioned it on our third date,” he said. “While we were eating that caprese salad that you hated at Lucia’s.”

“I didn’t hate it,” I said.

“You called it ‘overly wet.’”

I couldn’t help smiling at him.

“You’ve got a big brain, you know?” I said. “You shouldn’t waste it on remembering my salad opinions.”

“It’s hard to imagine something more important that your salad opinions,” he said, shooting me a coy smile.

I liked the flattery, I guess. If you’d asked me at the time, I guess I would have said that Caleb was one of the only people on earth who didn’t annoy me, which was pretty stellar praise coming from me.

We got off the highway somewhere on the edge of Utah. We took surface streets, then dirt roads until we go to an overlook that abutted a seemingly infinite expanse of desert. The ground was cracked mud—little islands of caked red-white earth that broke underfoot when you stepped on them. Caleb knelt and broke some of the dried mud with his fingers.

“It does that when it floods and then gets real dry, real fast,” he said. “Pretty cool, right? Like walking on graham crackers.”

We didn’t have a trail so much as a direction. We walked vaguely northeast toward the center of the vast empty place, actively seeking the middle of nowhere. We didn’t talk much, which I appreciated. The winter sun hung low in the sky, slinging long shadows. With my backpack on, mine looked like a strange stilt walker in the circus. I almost tripped several times looking at it.

We’d gone maybe two miles when I first heard the hum. It was faint enough that I dismissed it at first. It was like a concert playing ten miles away, the soundwaves muffled by distance.

“You hear that?” I asked.

“What?”

“Like a sound,” I said. “Sort of like ummm, hmmm, ummm, hmmm….” I was no singer, but I think I did a pretty good job. It was two distinct notes, each playing for a second or two in an endless repetition.

“Maybe tinnitus?” he said. “Didn’t you say you had that back in high school?”

“That was different,” I told him. “That was like…a. constant eeeeeeeeee. This is more like music. Distinct notes.”

“Huh,” he said. “Could be wind?”

“What wind?” I said, gesturing. “There’s no wind.”

“Oh, I meant like, maybe wind far away? And you’re just hearing the sound it makes?”

“So why aren’t you hearing it?” I asked.

“I dunno. I’m five years older than you. I listened to my music way too loud in high school. I probably fucked my eardrums.”

He stopped and took my hand.

“If it’s a problem, we can just go back to the car,” he said. “We passed that little motel with a hot tub, free HBO.”

“No, no,” I said, looking out into the distance. The mountains around us had started to disappear into the horizon. The flat extended endless in all directions, like we were on the surface of an Earth-sized ping pong ball, totally smooth. I wanted to go deeper into the nothing. And, in truth, I’d begun to like the music.

He tried to hold onto my hand as we continued on, but I dropped it. I had the sudden wish that I hadn’t brought him. Not because of anything he’d done. Just because he was.

We went on like that for a few more miles. The sun grew lower, the shadows longer, the music louder. I couldn’t believe he didn’t hear it. I found myself walking in rhythm with the notes. The brittle ground crunched beneath my sneakers in a pleasing way, all in 4/4 time.

I had taken piano lessons as a girl and often found myself hypnotized by the metronome when I tried to practice. I never got any good. I was her again, eight years old, tapping my feet to the steady rhythm around me.

As the sky went from blue to orange, I began to notice strange movements on the ground. Little black dots poked out from under the ledges of the nearby broken clay. The movements were so slight that they may have been nothing—dustmites against my pupil, something like that. The music had grown noticeably louder.

“You still don’t hear it?” I asked Caleb.

He didn’t respond.

“Caleb?”

Nothing.

“Caleb!”

He looked over at me, as if waking.

“Sorry,” he said. “Got a lot on my mind.”

“Did you see anything on the ground?” I asked. “Little black things?”

“Like bugs?” he asked.

“Maybe?”

He shook his head.

“I was just thinking though, when I looked at pictures of this hike there were, like, little plants everywhere. Like, little half dead patches of grass, that kind of thing. Not a lot, but—” he gestured around. “Now there’s nothing. Not even dead twigs.”

“Maybe it all washed away?” I guessed. “You said maybe it flooded?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Probably.”

“You didn’t see the black things?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“I remember reading about locusts once,” he said. “This was maybe a hundred years ago. They found them in the desert a few miles from here. They’d been storming through the countryside, eating field after field. Somehow they ended up a few miles that way. Must have run out of food. People found the whole swarm dead, baking in the heat. Insects stacked almost a foot deep.”

“Gross,” I said, because what else could you say?

He looked up at the sky, just realizing how late it had grown. “We should put up the tent while we can still see.”

*

We made camp. Soon we had the tent up and a little camp stove going. We ate canned chili topped with goldfish crackers then popped a couple of edibles each for dessert. Stars bloomed over us. The music played like a magnificent orchestra.

We undressed and made love, and the stars seemed to swell and twitter.

“I love you,” said Caleb. “I’m sorry I’ve been so distracted. I’ve just been, you know, gathering courage, I guess.”

Naked, he fumbled in his pile of discarded clothes and came out with a box. It vaguely dawned on me that he was proposing.

“Well?” he asked. Had he asked the actual question? I’d been so enthralled by the music, I hadn’t been listening.

“Yes,” I said, feeling I couldn’t answer anything else. But the more I thought of it, the more I realized I could never marry him, or anyone. Even the idea that I’d soon have to share a tent with him suddenly repulsed me, made me want to run miles through the desert back to the car.

He slipped a ring on my finger. I held it up and saw what might have been a diamond or maybe the reflected light of stars.

“I love you,” he said. I was still on my back, looking up at the night sky. The stars winked in and out.

“Is it cloudy?” I asked. “Is a flock of birds passing overhead?”

He looked up.

“Huh,” he said. Then he turned back to me. “I love you,” he said again.

“The stars shouldn’t wink like that,” I told him. “It isn’t right.”

“You’re right,” he said. “And we’ll talk about it. But first can you say, ‘I love you’ back?”

“I love you,” I said.

Caleb took a deep breath in. There were maybe half as many stars in the sky now. Maybe a third.

“Okay,” he said quietly.

“What?”

“It’s just, it didn’t seem very sincere,” he said.

“I’m worried about the stars,” I said. “Something dark is moving over them. And the music is like, really, really loud.”

“Forget it,” he said. “I’m tired. We should get some sleep.”

We got dressed and got in the te...

---

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1vq6t3a/if_you_hear_the_desert_hum_its_probably_too_late/