You call this camping?
| July 8, 2011 | Posted by Chin.Musik under camping |
I drove down from the North country with a belly-full of pancakes. That morning, I’d shaved my head. In my haste with the clippers, I’d missed a few spots, and so my hair looked clumpy and uneven.
I had designs on camping, and was full of lofty ideals to “go and come with the strange liberty of Nature,” as Thoreau put it. I thought the solitude would provide clarity.
Edith bought me three hours of sleep, not enough to get right in the head.
East of Cairo on Route 23, there’s about 100 ice cream joints. But I didn’t want no any dairy – I had a six-pack of Sam Adams in tow.
I set up camp, and set about the task of making wallets on the picnic table.
At dusk, I tried starting a fire, but it didn’t catch like I wanted – too wet, perhaps, from the previous night’s rain. The kindling burned too fast, and didn’t ignite the mid-sized pieces. I nursed it along. I got her going.
On my car radio, C.C. Sabathia rode a 6-0 lead into the 7th inning. He’s struck out 8. Granderson went deep, twice.
Smoke burned my eyes. I started tugging at the fleshy part of my newly exposed earlobes. I’d heard somewhere it only takes 14 lbs. of pressure to rip a man’s ear from his head. I tried to imagine walking around without any ears. Then I moved onto my nose, twisting the cartilage this way and that. I thought, would I be pulling at my face like this if my marriage hadn’t ended so?
The fire wasn’t a picturesque Yule log, not by a longshot. It jutted out at odd angles, smoldered and popped less than is desirable from a campfire. Branches shot off like ganglia in all directions.
By and by, the fireflies appeared. I saw spots.
I turned in about 10:30. Before I did, I heard some rustling in the woods. I flashed my headlights, and was tempted to shout “Hark! Who goes there?” but thought how strange it’d look for a man to shout, anachronistically, into the dark.
The old threadbare blanket didn’t work by a considerable stretch, and my thoughts bum-rushed me all night. It was like the quality of sleep I’d gotten the night my friends and I ate mushrooms. That was the night Scott had Rick convinced he was the Devil. He held his hand up in the dim light and said look, it’s a tiger’s paw, and Rick believed him. Exhausted, I went back to my apartment, and heard people screaming in my sleep.
In the morning, I packed up camp. I drove to New Baltimore, intent on leaving a can of boiled peanuts on my wife’s car seat.
[...] recently took a look on google maps, because Randy wrote about camping in Cairo. Last I checked, the resolution on their upstate NY maps was roughly Commodore-64-grade, which [...]