Day -249

Night Noises

Whenever I'm on an overnight with Scouts I make sure to anticipate their fears or worries.  A big one on the list of 'things that make Scouties go Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!' is Night Noises.  Before we go to bed, or during campfire we try to come up with as many sounds as we can that we might hear in the middle of the night.  "What noises might you hear tonight?"  The kids usually do a pretty good job of coming up with night time forest sounds (traffic, loud music from the neighbors [we camp inside the city sometimes], owls, coyotes, etc etc etc), and I make sure to add the ones they might not anticipate.  For instance, peacocks at 2 am can be terrifying for the uninitiated.  It gives the kids a chance to think through the noises they might hear, and a chance for the Responsible  Adults (tm) to explain that it's No Big Deal (ie: don't wake me up!).  "There now you've heard all the night noises so you won't be scared!"

Why are we talking about Night Noises?

So last night I'm laying snug in my bed asleep at a time when normal people are sleeping--oh, say 1am.  Slowly I realize that I'm not actually sleeping anymore because there's this really strange noise coming from my bedroom window.  Ping.  Ping.  Ping.  Ping.  Somewhere in my foggy brain I know exactly what this noise is.  Someone is throwing rocks at my window.  But my brain doesn't latch on to that because WHO DOES THAT?  Second option, and obviously the logical one is that I'm experiencing PARANORMAL activity.  (Did you see Insidious?)  I'm sure there are ghosts outside of my window.  I'm scared, but I crawl out of bed to look anyway.  There's no one there.  That was a little disappointing.  I drug myself all the way out of bed and to the window and there's no ghosts or John Cusacks with boom boxes and Peter Gabriel or anything.  Boring. 

Since I'm up anyway I decide to hit the head before going back to sleep.  When I walk out of my room towards the bathroom I hear the softest of knocking coming from the front door.  Robbers don't knock and my dogs aren't barking.  I figure my dogs can't hear spiritual apparitions.  Now I'm sure it's a ghost.  I tiptoe across the living room towards the glowing outline of the front door.  I peek through the peep hole.  Nothing. Can't be anything but a ghost.  I consider fixing the chain lock before opening the door but I figure that the ghost can slip through any gap.  I open the door. 

It's my roommate.  She's not tall enough to show up through the peep hole, or apparently savy enough to take her keys with her when she leaves the house.

Night noises folks.  Scarytown.

Day -251

Happy 4th of July.  Ideally, I'd be at a baseball game with a nice cool beverage.  In reality I'm at work, moving tiny amounts of clear liquid from one tube to another.  The good news is that I'm working on this most hallowed day because I spent the last week in the field! Hurrah!

The fish that I study lives along the entire eastern coast so once a year I get to drive from Florida all the way up to Maine in what I like to pretend is a warp-speed thru-hike.  There are many similarities. 

There's the 'green tunnel' of highway 95.  Driving 4,000 miles in 7 days along with fishing at 6 sites is definitely an endurance event.  


We sleep wherever we crash--rest stops, camp grounds, friends' houses.  On this trip I hung my hammock between trees in Maine and between the support beams inside an old cigar factory.

We obsess about food.  My lab mate and I made up songs about the food we were looking forward to eating ("Chimichanaga chimichanga chimmichanga, yes yes yes") and experienced extreme exhaustion while always pushing to the next site.  ("Are we supposed to be going north or south?")

We encountered wildlife.  I saw my first bear along highway 64 in eastern North Carolina.  It didn't look scary at all tossing its head back and forth watching traffic. 

We experience 'road magic'.   All of our fishing sites were easy except our last one in southern Virginia.  We had to abandon that one and move down into NC--which we'd never fished before so we were not familiar with the area.  We got down to the Outer Banks around 11 pm and realized that it was 4th of July weekend and we'd never find a hotel with 1. Vacancy or 2. rates < $200.  No Bueno.  We drove inland a bit and realized that we weren't going to find another hotel within 50 miles.  We pulled off at a gas station to buy ice for our fish.  There were some cottages behind the gas station.  I said "Hey, that looks like a hotel, but there's no sign or office"  My lab mate called his girlfriend who did a quick search of the internet for us (She's a keeper, it was like midnight and I'm sure he woke her up)  "There's a 'White Store Hotel' somewhere out there, but nothing else for miles" he relayed.  I pointed out the cottages and my lab mate agreed to drive around back and check it out.  At that exact moment, the house keeper was getting something out of the utliity closet.  I spotted her, jumped out of the van (It may have still been moving), flashed a smile and showed just a little leg.  In that manner we procured the LAST ROOM EVER IN NORTH CAROLINA for a mere $70.  The housekeeper didn't have access to the office or even a room key to give us but she let us in and made us promise to pay on our way out in the morning.  We did.


All that fun work has put me behind in my dreary-lab-work.  So here I am.  Ahh, the centrifuge beckons.

Fig. 1.  Field work is fun.

Fig. 2.  We study mummichogs, they love dogfood and will gladly swim into a trap to get it.

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!"