jeffvrabel.com I humorist and music writer

Island Packet — Two nights ago, at a little after midnight, we discovered that our 4-year-old son was not in his bed, which was bad, but not nearly as horrifying as finding, soon after, that he was also not in the house.

Jake, at some point between the last time we checked on him and 1:40 a.m., which was when my wife’s 911 call went out, woke up, got out of bed, went down the stairs, found his way to the back door in the dark, located two blue Crocs in a basket full of about 90 pairs of shoes, unlocked the sliding glass door, opened the sliding glass door, and went outside.

Those are all the facts we have in the case. But using skills that I have sharpened over several years of “CSI” viewing and reading a bunch of Sherlock Holmes, we’ve come up with this conjecture: Having closed the door behind him, Jake turned around into a warm, cloudy evening, ventured through the backyard to the road by the garage, turned left, probably tried to get down to Lexi’s house, got spooked, started running, got more spooked, started running some more and made it an impressive quarter-mile down the road.

At this point Jake was sprinting as much as ridiculous blue rubber shoes will allow, according to the two young guys who intercepted him, who, as near as I can figure, are the only two reasons Jake is not currently wandering around Yemasee.“I thought, ‘Yeah, that just ain’t right,’ ” one of them told me later. (I’m putting quotation marks on that, but I have no idea what he said; he could have been offering detailed schematics of the Starship Enterprise for all I heard.)

Anyway, these guys were youngish, probably twentysomething each, and by the time I got there they had Jake rather adorably seatbelted into the front seat and wrapped up in a blanket, which, coupled with the lights of the police car that pulled up right after I got there, made it seem like Jake had been street-racing with someone else’s sedan with a strange blanket, but at least he’d remembered to buckle up.

Jake was quick to offer an explanation for himself. “I was just out looking for those guys,” he said while being desperately scooped up by me, and though I’m pretty sure that was not the case, it did show an impressive skill at improv that he probably shouldn’t have at 4 and will be extravagantly terrible when he’s 15.

Going to meet Brendan and Kevin was only the first of Jake’s litany of reasons for why he felt it necessary to take a midnight sprint through the neighborhood. Reason No. 2 was that, and I’m quoting, “Alpha Pig goes for walks by himself,” which is the exact kind of inscrutable and brilliant 4-year-old argument that leaves you completely and utterly powerless, because your only recourse is staring your son in the eye and saying something deeply meaningful like, “But son, you are not Alpha Pig.”

The following morning, however, we learned it was possible that Jake heard the Polar Express, which actually makes a lot of sense. We watch “The Polar Express” a lot, we watch like the survival of the family line depends on it, which is funny, because my standard problem with “The Polar Express” is its central message seems to be: If a strange man in a magical locomotive pulls up to your front yard in the middle of the night, you better damn sure go with him and get on that train.

So two nights ago I was sprinting around with a flashlight chasing a 4-year-old who wandered into a cold dark night despite being cripplingly terrified by parts of “The Tigger Movie,” and tonight he’s once again snoring securely in his room (in a cage that’s suspended in midair and guarded by monkeys, which is where he’ll sleep for the next eight years, but in his room). And I can’t muster up any more important lessons from all this than 1. “The Polar Express” is probably responsible for most of what’s wrong with America, and 2. Two people whose names are possibly Brendan and Kevin are close to entirely responsible for Jake, right now, being asleep at home.