Day -258

I'm headed out to go fishing.  We go GA to ME.  Bombing up the coast with rubbermaid tubs of fish and then a respite at a campground in Maine before hightailing it back to FL.

Day -261

One of the traditional homecoming activities my mom enforces is Editing My Stuff.  I've always been a collector of things small and useless which have important symbolic, sentimental meanings.  I tuck them away in shoe boxes and suitcases and rubbermaid tubs piled up on the top shelf in the guest room closet.  Eventually these things (plastic skeletons, pens that have run out of ink, advertisement badges, ribbons of all sorts, notes scribbled on napkins:  "I was here, you weren't.  Call me!") lose meaning.  Mom doesn't like to store these boxes of garbage, but she's sensitive, so the getting rid of process has taken years.  This year my assignment was "Get rid of all those old t-shirts and boxes of crap upstairs"  Ok.  Turns out those boxes of crap were my old journals from about 6th grade on and all my papers from junior and senior English. The titles were things like "Connie Chatterley: A Woman Awakened"  or "A Journey Worth the Loss of Six Toes:  A Review of Pride and Prejudice",  in which I concluded Pride and Prejudice gives the reader a satisfaction upon actually finishing the book that I think can be compared to the satisfaction of a mountain climber reaching the summit of Everest...and though one may have lost six toes along the way, when asked why the journey was undertaken--why this book, why that mountain--"because it is there."  Oh boy. 


I also found these scrawled notes from the first backpacking trip my dad took me on when I was about 11.  [sic] througout

Fig. 1.  On the river age 11

It was a rough morning. Trees down all over the trail. Landslides and crawling up hills. But nothing as beautiful as this treasure goes ungarded. Lucious greenery. Thimble berries. The rambling of the river. The wind. The dew.



It is about 9pm. Everything is all buttoned up and ready if it rains. It rained earlier about 6 or 7. We can't go down the trail any further so we are going to hike out in the morning. We are spending the night on a little beach. Dad built a campfire. [blah blah blah nature is lovely and beautiful...unbridled 11 year old enthusiasm]

Day -263

"Hey!  What's this?"  My nephews have spotted my new hammock hanging between the porch and the garage at my folks' house.
"Oh, that's my new house, what do you think?"
"That's a house?"
"Sure, I'm going to live in that when I hike the Appalachian Trail.  Do you want to get in?"  The boys emit some excited squeals and flap their hands like ducklings--I pretty much feel the same way about the hammock.  The boys, ages 8 and 6, take to the velcro trap door like fish to water.

"What's the Appalachian Trail?"
"Well, it's a long trail in the woods from Georgia to Maine"  They nod, like they know what I'm talking about.
"So you're going to walk that whole way?"
"Yes."
"Carrying all your stuff?"
"Yes"
"How long will that take?"
"How long do you think it will take?"
"A few weeks?"
"No, more like five months.  Want to come?"
"Oh, yes! But only for three months because we can't miss school"  That's my 8 year old nephew, he is a serious student.










I talk them into going on a hike with me the next day.  I took them out to a little patch of forest north of town.  We explored a creek.  Found a frog and some sticks.  Climbed up a ridiculiously steep hill and walked for about 1/2 a mile before my 6 year old nephew expressed his dislike of "All this walking".  Maybe long hikes aren't in his future, but he does have an aptitude for plant identification and taught me a thing or two about the flora of the area.

Day -265

Fig. 1.  This is way better than the guest room

I'm half way through my yearly or bi-yearly trek to Idaho to visit the homestead.  I flew into Portland and hung out with some old Scout friends and drove my little buddy, Hopalong, down the coast to her grandparents' house.  On the way from Portland to Middle-of-Nowhere Oregon we stopped off at REI so that I could buy a new lexan cup to replace the old one I lost.  They didn't have the cup I wanted but I did manage to walk out of there with a Hennessy ultralight a-symmetrical hammock.  So much for the 6-moon net tent and poncho cape.  This baby's got it all.  It's a tent, it's a hammock, its a lounge chair.  And, I'll never have to look for spots to put my tent ever again.  I managed to figure out how to hang it and crawl into it with an armful of gear, though not too gracefully yet. Getting into a sleeping bag inside a hammock is another story entirely.  I've just got to figure out how to keep my backside warm in this thing.  Last night I threw an old coleman square bag in there as insulation and it worked well, but that won't be an option when I'm hiking.  I'll have to try it out with the Neo-Air and the z-rest to see which works best.

Day -270

Leaving to visit my west coast and Idaho families tomorrow, trying like mad to make some progress at work.  Had a dinner date with the scanner and now I'm trying to send myself some work through the internets so I can have it at home. 

I'm rereading Thru Hiker's Eyes.  It's a pretty funny book, if it were a movie it would be a cartoon.  There's seriously improbable things going on in there--like when a tent 'implodes' as someone packs it up without even getting out.  Ha!  I wish my some of my Scouties could learn to do that.  I think they TRY to pack the tent without getting out--that's what they tell me when I holler at them at 9am "Girls, we are packing up to leave.  Everyone else has their bags packed and you haven't even appeared outside  yet"  and they reply "We're Paaaaaaaaaacking!" 

Day -271

Number crunching and RNA-Fail today.  What I wouldn't give for a job where I can SEE what I'm doing.  Lab work is soul shattering.  Also, it may or may not be giving me cancer.

In other news:  Something new that I can no longer live without.

Net tent and Poncho Tarp:  at 19 oz for the set, how could I go wrong?

WORLDS LIGHTEST DOUBLE WALL TENT YOU GUYS!

Only thing I can't figure out is what the best way to set this up in the rain is.  Presumably, I'd be WEARING the poncho if it rains.  So how do you keep your gear dry while you set the poncho up?  Maybe you're meant to crouch down and peg the poncho out around you while you're inside?  Seems unlikely, though I'd love to see someone try that.


Or, I guess you could throw a ground cloth over your gear, put the tarp up and crawl inside.  The bug net may not be necessary in a storm.  Mosquitoes don't like rain, right?

Day -272

Grueling day at work, must have put in 3 miles around the bench. ha.

My iPod reminded me how much I love the song American Pie, probably because it is so long.

I had vivid flashbacks of one late night in the dining hall with the kitchen staff at Camp 4echoes, standing on benches under the wagon wheel light fixtures singing that song at the top of our lungs.  Because we knew all the words.  Because it was late and we were 16.  We had to be loud because everyone else was in bed and because it was finally dark.  In the old lodge there were these dusty corners where the shadows would pass the afternoons when we would sit and sweat and will ourselves to feel cool.  At night they would creep across the floors and spill out the single paned windows that were always open and roll across the lawn, under the starlight, down to the bay.  If we were up to see that happen, and if we were alone then we owned the whole tableau.  Now, it doesn't seem so strange that we were so into that song that summer.  Who didn't want to be a "teenage broncin' buck with a pink carnation and a pickup truck"?  We understood profoundly that "the half-time air was sweet perfume".   None of us were born anywhere near to a time where we might have understood the whole significance of the lyrics but we thought we did.  See that was our Kerouac and coffee shop summer were we came down with a case of 'too smart for our own good' that often infects high school kids, and it's a well known fact that everyone feels worldly at 16.  We were so grown up then, not at all like I am now.  And, American Pie seems like the kind of song that lends itself to dusty shadows.  They tore down that lodge this past winter, bummer.

Bohemian Rhapsody occupies the same Long Song space in my brain.  There was a canoe trip where both our party and the river ran out of water, we suffered group heat stroke and became marooned on a desert island with just that song and a deck of cards to occupy our minds.  Thunder bolts and lightning...