July 2005 Archives

Netflix delivered some oldies-but-goodies the other day: the first two discs of The X-Files. Thanks largely to David Duchovny, the show was once one of Kelly's big obsessions, though I was certainly pretty involved when it was in its heyday. (And no, Gillian Anderson's not on my list, though cracker-eating in bed wouldn't be an issue, either.) It's odd to see the early episodes before the complex government-conspiracy arc got so thoroughly baroque, involving black oil infection, bees carrying genetically altered viruses, multiple cover stories, and weird semi-human baddies who could only be dispatched with a needle to the base of the skull. At this point, it's basically just Mulder talking to a guy about shadowy goings-on in the Defense Department. (Granted, in recent years, DOD shadowiness has seemed more and more the norm in real life...) Some of the early eps don't come off very well, though--the Jersey Devil bit was a clunker, and the killer computer idea hasn't really changed much from 2001 (or for that matter, from "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" or even Colossus: The Forbin Project.) Still, there are glimpses of cool--the remarkably creepy Mark Frost score for "Squeeze," for example. But man, wouldn't it have been nice, just once, for Mulder's hunch about the supernatural explanation to be totally wrong? You know, he gets all worked up over crop circles and it turns out to be three drunken Iowa State students with a protractor and some free time? Ah, well.

Alas, one thing we'd forgotten is that some of the episodes are just too scary for tender eyes, leading to a moratorium on watching The X-Files after dark unless you're over thirty-nine.

The other treat from Netflix: the first six episodes of The Young Ones, a gleefully anarchic BBC comedy from 1982-84. The basic premise was tissue-thin: four university students share a house. What made it work was the terrific blend of characters--well, three of them, anyway--played by young Brit comedians who would go on to great things (well, small great things) in minor roles in Blackadder, among other things. Rik Mayall played Rick, a hyperactive and hypocritical sociology student with an immature streak a mile wide; Nigel Planer played Neil, a glum, limp-haired hippy with suicidal tendencies and something of a lentil fixation; and Adrian Edmondson played Vyvyan, an ultraviolent punk medical student with piercings galore and a hamster he abused horribly; (The fourth flatmate, Mike, played by Christopher Ryan, wasn't terribly interesting, but Mr. Balowski, the landlord, played by comedian Alexei Sayle, would sometimes create hilarious bits, often as fourth-wall-breaking monologues.)

The interactions between the characters were fun, but a big part of the humor was the willingness to go more or less randomly wherever the whim might take the writers. This made for some extremely uneven shows, granted, but the same could be said of Monty Python's Flying Circus; it's the bits that work that stick in the memory. For example, when an unwelcome born-again missionary gains entrance to the house in one episode, the boys are rescued when she's accidentally crushed beneath a gigantic sandwich, dropped from above by one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. During a flood, the lads play a game of hide-and-seek which involves Rick's room being set on fire, Mr. Balowski being turned into an axe-wielding homicidal maniac, and Vyvyan ducking into a wardrobe and ending up in a sleigh with a Turkish Delight-bearing White Queen. You just don't see that kind of thing on Must See TV, y'know?

The other delight in watching The Young Ones is the knowledge that most of them turned up in what I now must consider the best British sitcom ever, Blackadder. I can say that with confidence now that I own the DVDs of the complete series, which the boys gave me for Father's Day. Mayall created the role of Lord Flashheart, the oversexed egomaniac who singlehandedly stole at least two episodes outright (and provided one of my favorite lines ever: "Nursie! Am I glad to see you, or did somebody slip a canoe in my pocket?! WOOF!") Planer was the foppish Lord Smedley in Blackadder the Third's Scarlet Pimpernel episode, while Edmondson played Baron von Richthofen in Blackadder Goes Forth.

The guest turns are great, but the real strengths of the four series are the razor-sharp writing (by Richard Curtis, Ben Elton, and Rowan Atkinson) and the delightfully nasty title characters played by Atkinson, whether in medieval times, the Elizabethan era, the Austen era, or World War I. The various Blackadders have their differences; Edmund, Duke of Edinburgh, from Series I is a sniveler, something you can't say about Queen Bess's court favorite Lord Edmund (Series II), Prince George's loyal butler Mr. Blackadder (Series III), or Captain Blackadder (Series IV). The latter two, being commoners, carry a certain amount of class resentment, which the former two, being nobles, do not possess. Mr. Blackadder, however, is the only one of the family operating with no real authority figure to control him, since Prince George (played by Hugh Laurie) is too idiotic to know he has power; Edmund has the fearsome King Richard IV (Brian Blessed) to contend with, and Captain Blackadder must work around the pompous General Melchett (Stephen Fry) and the suspicious Captain Darling (Tim McInerney), but the best authority figure of them all is Queenie herself, mad as a hatter's pet hare, and played to the limit by Miranda Richardson.

Given such traction to work with, Atkinson is able to create remarkable stretches of complaint, invective, and planning (which is inevitably described as "cunning.") He is especially good at belittling the intelligence of his mini-brained servant, Baldrick (the brilliant Tony Robinson), but he can work up highly imaginative and insulting phrases for almost any occasion:

(on the wallets of his Puritan relatives) "They're as capacious as an elephant's scrotum, and just as hard to get your hands on."

"I've got a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel."

"She's got the worst personality in Germany, and that means she's up against some pretty stiff competition."

So yeah, I've been chuckling a lot lately. I just hope the boys can figure out when not to imitate Lord Flashheart once school starts.

5:11 AM

Sure, there's plenty of national news to talk about--a new Supreme Court nominee, the gradual (and gratifying) excoriation of Karl Rove, the bizarre saga of Larry Brown and the Detroit Pistons--but if you're a regular reader of this journal (I'm still not sure it's technically a "blog") you'll know that I'm occasionally compelled to discuss wild visitors to my yard: the migrating Rose-breasted Grosbeak that turns up on the feeder every spring, the occasional Pileated Woodpecker that lands on the weeping cherry tree, the annual reappearance of the Indigo Buntings. This entry is no different, except that the subject is not feathered. Nor is it exactly desirable.

We've got skunks.

The striped skunk is certainly native to the central Virginia area, as I've known for years, but it was extremely unusual for me to lay eyes on one. In truth, it's unusual to see wild mammals of any sort; they're not brightly colored, they're usually silent, and most are nocturnal (or at least crepuscular), so the typical American sees more roadkilled mammals than living ones. The only mammals ever to turn in up our yard, other than Homo sapiens and Canis familiaris, have been grey squirrels, house mice, and eastern cottontails. That's it. I don't doubt that we've had some rats pass through, but I've never seen one, and I'm fairly sure that the dumpster next door has drawn the occasional raccoon, and a few bats have flown overhead, but none have touched down. I've seen a red fox running across the golf course, but not around the house yet. Oh, and we have no trouble hearing cows, particularly in the weeks after the calves have been taken away. But in general, the joint's not exactly packed with mammals.

Imagine our surprise, then, to come home from a long evening walk with the dog to discover two low-slung critters snuffling around in our front yard. At first, in the dim light, we thought that perhaps our next-door neighbors' cats had gotten out and were playing with some small defenseless creatures in the grass. As we got closer, however, it seemed these things were too big to be cats. I was baffled, but then one of them turned sideways, and I realized that the animals' enormous bushy tails made them look twice as big in the dim light.

I don't know which of us made the identification first, but it was definitely lucky that it wasn't Harlan. I pulled his leash short and held on tight, because we've learned from experience that he's completely controlled by his huntin' dawg training and/or instincts. Had he spotted them, he'd have been off like a shot, dragging me behind him, like as not.

Kelly and I, however, were now close enough to the bigger of the two to see the high-contrast pattern in the fur: the black body and head, the thick white stripe down the back, and the explosion of white fur along the tail, just about as long again as the animal itself. It was, without question, a striped skunk.

Despite plenty of experience with the namesake of Loudon Wainwright III's biggest hit, I'd only seen one live skunk before that night. That skunk turned up on the grass of Woodberry's golf course, and it wasn't a pretty sight. For one thing, I saw it in broad daylight; I was trotting down the hill to a gathering of students behind the Barbee Center, and was thus not expecting to encounter a nocturnal member of the weasel family on the first fairway. For another, it was in obvious distress; its hind legs didn't seem to be working, and it was dragging itself along by its forelegs. I saw no obvious signs of trauma--no blood, teeth marks, tire tracks, etc.--so I immediately saw the problem as neurological, and around here, the combination of "mammal" and "neurological problem" spells R-A-B-I-E-S. I immediately ran to the administrative master and informed him that we had a potentially rabid skunk on the course, then went back to fend off any students who thought it might be fun to tease it. (Yes, sad to say, we do have a few students who would look at a rabid polecat as something to play with.)

Since then, the only skunks I'd seen were of the in-the-middle-of-the-road-stinkin'-to-high-heaven variety, but that vision of them in our front yard would be only the first of the summer. Over the last week and a half, we've spotted one or more in our yard, in the neighbors' yard, in the trees beside the JV soccer field, on the Bengal football field, and trundling across the sixth fairway. They've apparently decided the area is a good one, despite the scent of hound dog, but I don't know why they've done so at this particular time. They appeared at the same time the grackles all swarmed in to go after the June bugs, so perhaps they're here to dine on beetles. Or maybe on grackles. We've thus far avoided any close contact, though last night the one we surprised in our front yard was close enough and nervous enough to turn its back and raise the plume of its tail in our direction--a highly visible warning, and one we took seriously.

Still, you know the weird thing? With the long peacock-like fan of their tails... with their surprisingly active snuffling and trotting... with their starkly contrasting fur... they're actually kind of pretty.

But remember, I don't have much of a sense of smell.

2:50 PM

LBJs:

*They're a little late, but the June Bugs have been swarming all over the Forest over the last week, and the Common Grackles are swarming right along with 'em. Dozens, hundreds, thousands, all over the fields and pastures. There are a dozen Grackles under my feeder right this second. The young ones are a sooty brown, not quite as pretty as their glossy fathers, but they're all feeling the heat; most walk around with beaks gaping, which makes me think they must sweat the way dogs do--from their tongues. They look a little goofy, honestly, but thermoregulation isn't always pretty. You should see me after a long session on the elliptical machine.

*Speaking of exercise, we need to hit the gym today. I've done reasonably well at staying on the exercise kick lately, but I need to be doing more on the elliptical, as opposed to the lighter workout inherent in walking an excitable 70-pound dog.

*Kel and I saw War of the Worlds yesterday, despite our personal disdain for Tom Cruise, and I'm not sure what to make of it. The first part, when the tripods are first uncovered and begin their assaults, is pretty compelling--the crowd scenes, and the horrific results of the heat-ray attacks, provide a real sense of panic. As Tom and family head out of town, the continuing sequence of tension--build, release, build higher--continues beautifully. Cruise (who's a pretty good actor when he tries, as in Rain Man or Born on the Fourth of July)gives a worthy performance here. He comes across as an ordinary guy trying to cope with horrors that would knock anyone for a loop and a half, much as New Yorkers and Pentagon workers must have seemed on 9/11. So the first hour or so, which is mostly about people in general, and the horrors they've witness, and the horrors they're willing to commit, works really well; as Kelly said, it's a sort of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" approach. Unfortunately, when Tom & Co. are holed up in the basement, hiding from the invaders, something goes wrong. I'm not sure what, but I suspect it's the script. We're suddenly focused too much on one foxhole, rather than on the battle as a whole; it's not that the foxhole's events aren't significant, but we can't really interpolate the bigger picture from them. Up until this point, Tom & Co. have shown us the invasion in microcosm; now they're no longer connected to the rest of the invasion.

Also (SPOILER ALERT!), I see no point in the last-minute revelation that the invaders are drinking human blood; what, like they weren't evil enough just blowing up our cities and vaporizing us with heat rays? It seems nothing more than a way to get Tom close enough to a tripod to do some damage--and of course, as Wells set it up, that little heroic gesture is utterly ineffective. It's not grenades that stop the invaders anyway, so the whole thing comes off as little more than an incompetent attempt at a suicide bombing--and then Spielberg chickens out on that comparison, not only by having the whole basket o'humans survive the blast that levels the tripod, but by having the basket fall into a tree, leaving the whole bunch unhurt. And of course, the final revelation of Robbie's safety only compounds the feeling that, all in all, a promising start finishes with a failure of nerve.

*Having come to Harry Potter early--we got a UK copy of the first book on the strength of several glowing word-of-mouth reviews and a good blurb in the Chinaberry catalogue--I have to say I'm a little floored by the recent Pottermania and its attendant excesses. Midnight madness is for something sensible--the opening of college basketball season, say--rather than the release of a book whose first printing was 10.8 million books. (Yes, look at that figure, folks. Ten million copies. Hardbacks. For perspective, the four printings of The Verb 'To Bird', a modestly successful title, totalled about ten thousand copies, hardbacks and trade paperbacks combined. And each of those retails for over twenty bucks.) With ten million copies printed, there is one hardback available for every twenty-five people in the U.S. And not everyone in the country's going to read it, y'know? Thus, obtaining a copy of HP and the Half-Blood Prince will not be in the least difficult; it is most certainly not a collector's item. So why the rush? They couldn't sell out if they tried. Wait a couple months and you can have them at a massive discount. In the meantime, dress your soul in patience, or snag one of the library's copies. (The Orange County library system has twelve, if you're curious.)

FYI, Kel brought a copy home from the library. I think I'm fourth in line.

*For our anniversary (#19), Kel and I were fairly subdued, having spent the previous weekend in Asheville eating like kings (thank you, Laughing Seed, Mayfel's, Shangri-La, and Tupelo Honey) and lounging in bookstores (thank you, Malaprop's) and art galleries. We settled for exchanging CDs. I got the new Coldplay, X&Y, which is growing on me quickly, particularly "Fix You" and "Swallowed in the Sea," while Kel got a live disc of the Dresden Dolls ("Coin-Operated Boy" is of course the highlight) and a used copy of the long-coveted They Might Be Giants kids' record, No!, which has one of their catchiest songs in years (and that's a significant achievement, folks), "Fibber Island." We are happy.

*New local development: a new radio station is now broadcasting in our area, with a surprising format: there's apparently not a format. It calls itself Sam, 105.5, and it plays damn near everything within the broad expanse of pop music from the last forty years. I've heard everything from Lenny Kravitz to Ruper Holmes (yes, it was "The Pina Colada Song") to Outkast to the Beatles. It's not always something I really want to hear, but it's refreshing not to know what's coming next. When I listen to WWWV, 97.5, I can expect an AC/DC tune within an hour, a Led Zeppelin song within 40 minutes. It's a pretty slick station, and I suspect this may be an attempt by Clear Channel to prove that it's not in a rut (which it is, as I can testify by having heard the thirty-year-old "Dancin' in the Moonlight" four times in the last two weeks--in three different states). But hey, any radio variety is good in my book. Especially if it means we don't have to wake up to Toby Keith for a few months.

7:10 PM

PC’s OUTWARD BOUND JOURNAL

Part III

Tuesday: Another damp morning, another long uphill hike through the woods--joy. I was wrapped in a coil of rope during the climb to the ridgeline, ferrying it to a place called the Devil’s Cellar. It’s a crack in the wall on the north side of Table Rock, and there we set up two rock climbs and a rappelling site. The rocks were wet, and I was long past my peak of strength and coordination, so I didn’t make much of a climber--I doubt I got more than a dozen feet up before I stalled, unable to find a reliable handhold, and decided not to beat my body up any further. Instead, I circled around to the top of the rappel, which was about eighty feet in all, down into a crack in the rock called the Toilet Bowl. For me the stress of clipping into the system at the top of the cliff was far greater than the actual difficulty of lowering myself over the edge, but it was definitely a thrill. Of course, it was a little nerve-wracking to discover that the Toilet Bowl isn’t just a crack, but an actual hole. It’s bigger around than I am, thank god, but not by quite as much as I might have hoped. About ten feet below the hole, I finally came to rest and unhooked my piping-hot rappelling device. Would it have been as easy if I hadn’t done the ropes course the day before? I’ll always wonder.

Wednesday: A day indoors, working through some sessions with educational consultants Andy Mink and Billy O’Steen. We met in the NCOB base camp’s dining hall, which has a commons area full of overstuffed chairs and sofas, as well as a guitar. After our sessions were over, I picked up the latter and strummed a bit, and Bob requested a song: “The one with… ‘Good morning, America, how are you?’” I smiled outwardly and inwardly, as “City of New Orleans” happens to be a song that I’ve worked up for performance with my buddy Paul Vickers, and it’s one I know well. I played it, and Kelly and a few others joined in to sing, and we waited out one last thunderstorm. That night we finished our final dinner, had our final ceremony, and prepared to hike out the next morning.

Thursday: We broke camp, hoisted our packs again, and walked down to the clean-up area. Mark and I drew dish duty, which suited us both fine, and we cheerfully ran all our cooking gear, water bottles, and compasses through three tubs (of suds, rinse water, and bleach water, respectively). The breeze was up, the rain was gone, and the clean scent of bleach filled our nostrils. Better still, once cleanup was done, we were free to use the camp showers! For the first time in over a week, I was able to spray hot water onto myself; it was luxurious. Unfortunately, I’d left my change of clothes in my car at the Asheville airport, so I had to climb back into my grungy shirt and shorts. Luckily, we went immediately to the NCOB camp store, where I immediately bought a clean new t-shirt, a hat, and the book of readings we’d used during our meetings. We took pictures, circled up one more time, said goodbye to Kelly and Travis, and boarded the van for the airport. Before we’d gotten far, though, Anna produced Kelly’s final surprise: a big bag of M&Ms. If there’s one thing that can bring a close-knit group a little closer at the end, it’s chocolate.

And so we scattered, back to Chicago and Massachusetts and Abu Dhabi, but I don’t think we’ll forget the gathering. We’ve got each other’s email addresses, and I’ve got two CDs of photos to share, and who knows, one of the people reading this might be from our group. Sarah was the one who named us, either in irony because of our early uncertainty, or maybe just from a desire to pun, but the name is now emblazoned on the handmade flag that flew in the wind of Attic Window and through the rain at Utopia. I don’t know if Kelly or Travis has it now, but I hope they’ll occasionally look at it and remember the Compass Pros.

3:44 PM

PC’s OUTWARD BOUND JOURNAL

Part II

Sunday: A little sleep-deprived and disoriented, we were nonetheless ready to push up to the top of Table Rock. Unfortunately, this required a long, steep climb of over 2000 feet in a little less than two miles. Worse, the trail was now dampened by a light rain, and the going was exhausting along the muddy slope. Sarah and I were the day's trail leaders, a pairing that put a dedicated runner and sometime marathoner alongside yrs. truly, who believes stamina is something that happens to other people. I therefore exercised my authority by calling halts every 15 minutes or so until we hit the top of the ridge. Once there, we quickly descended to a little hole-in-the-wall site called Attic Window, where we shed our big packs, hid them from prying eyes, put on our day packs, and blithely hopped another few hundred feet up to the summit of Table Rock for lunch. Fog obscured everything, but a dark bird flew up and over us; at first I thought it was another raven, but the pointed wings quickly revealed it as a Peregrine Falcon. We oohed and aahed, and then suddenly there were three of them, all cavorting and stooping in the winds that finally began to break up the fog. As the sky cleared we could suddenly see Hawksbill and get some idea of our route down it, and far below we got a glimpse of the NCOB base camp. We returned to Attic Window and set up camp for the night; the site includes several overhangs for storing packs, a small cave, and a cliff with a beautiful view to the south. I laid out my bag about a dozen feet from the cliff (though Kelly demanded and got the outside position, for safety's sake), but it was not to be: at roughly midnight, the rain came back, harder this time, and drove us all into the cave. The night there was uneventful, except for Iva's discovering a small rodent in her hair, and Erica's sitting bolt upright and crying out "Oh my god!" in her sleep.

Monday: we awoke in the rain and the dark, loaded up, and were down at the parking lot below Table Rock in twenty-five minutes. There we met our course director, Keith, who'd been shadowing us on and off for several days, and it was determined that it was too wet to rock climb, so we'd have to hope it would clear up in the afternoon, which would allow us to use the ropes course. No sooner had Keith driven off for base camp than the thunderstorm hit, sending us into the indignity of “lightning drill.” As long as lightning and thunderclap are separated by a count of twenty, all is well, but if they get closer together than that, the team must move into lightning drill: each member must get to low ground (away from exposed ridges and peaks), separate by at least twenty feet (to avoid current “bouncing” from one to another), lay his/her pack on the ground (for insulation), and sit on top of it without touching the ground until the lightning moves away. We thus found ourselves strung out along a steep woodland path down into the hollow, cowering below bright bolts of lightning and deafened by the ensuing booms, while rain pounded on us and turned the path into a torrent. And there we stayed for roughly forty minutes. Conversation was impossible, bodily comfort almost so; after about twenty minutes I remembered that my Crazy Creek chair was attached to the outside of my pack, so I could pull it out without touching the ground, and I was finally able to shift my legs out of their pseudo-lotus position. Once the drill was over, we staggered to the ropes course, met Keith for a brief consultation, and then marched uphill for “three hundred yards”--ha!--to the “Utopia” campsite on the eastern side of the mountain, where we set up our tarps--in the rain. The good news was that we would remain there for the next three nights, and we could finally remove our big packs and store them.

We returned to the ropes course--three hundred yards my ass!--for lunch and got ourselves into harnesses and lobster claws--basically two short ropes with carabiners to clip onto the safety lines. The NCOB course is built into a stand of living trees, centered on an enormous tulip tree, and comprises about a dozen different elements--a cargo net, a rope bridge, several cables for walking, a zip line, and a balance beam, among others--which go as high as 70 feet. You’re clipped into safety lines the whole time, but it’s still somewhat stressful to sidle out and walk to another tree, all the while knowing that there’s nothing under your feet but a half-inch cable. The fifth element, the balance beam, is basically a telephone pole lying sideways between the tulip poplar and a big pine tree, and I was responsible for guiding and cheerleading Iva as she made her way across it. It didn’t look too hard. I discovered, however, once I got onto the course myself, that it was far easier to watch than to do, and I got a little nervous when I discovered that the rope “Burma Bridge” was both steeper and wetter than I’d expected. Nonetheless, I’m a faculty instructor for Woodberry’s ropes course, so I’d felt compelled to set myself a challenge beyond merely completing the course: I was going to walk the balance beam no hands.

Kelly was clipped onto the branch at one end of the beam, and when I approached, she asked what my goal was. I made the mistake of telling her, which came back to bite me on the ass when I was unable to go more than a few steps without clutching my safety lines for comfort. I made it across, though, gripping the sticky trunk of the pine with a surprising fervor. And then Kelly said, “You’ve got time to do it again, no hands.”

Caught, I had no choice but to go back along the beam (holding my lines), turn around, and face the abyss again. I started tentatively, sidling out, not putting one foot in front of the other, but gradually gained a little confidence and started taking real steps. About halfway along the forty-foot span, I slid a bit and touched my lines, but that was it--from there I stepped forward smoothly, finishing with a rush of ten straight steps. From that point on, I felt entitled to grab any damn safety line I wanted, and after negotiating the Hourglass, the Houdini Trap, and the Heebie-Jeebie, I found myself back on Kelly’s branch for the final element: the Swing.

On the same tulip poplar branch as the balance beam there is a small flat wooden seat. It has a seat belt, so that you can sit in relative comfort and safety while the instructor attaches your lobster claws to the two swing cables. Beneath you is--well, nothing. About forty-five feet of air, and then ground. Kelly hooked me in and told me to visualize something to grab as I went over the edge. Honestly, it wasn’t as hard to pitch myself forward as it had been to walk that damned beam; it was just a roll forward, like off the edge of a high dive, and then a brief moment of free fall. Then my harness caught me, and I found myself swooping out and up, my eyes on the dappled sunlight that came through the leaves above me. I bellowed a big laugh of relief and triumph, and for a few moments, I did something I can’t remember doing: I stopped thinking. I wasn’t unconscious, but I was completely focused on the moment, on the experience of swinging, on the light and the leaves and the wind against my skin. I wasn’t narrating the experience in my head, just absorbing it all. I haven’t felt a moment of that kind of freedom in--I don’t really remember the last one. Maybe there wasn’t one.

To be concluded

5:49 PM

PC’s OUTWARD BOUND JOURNAL

Part I

Thursday: After gathering at Asheville Regional Airport at 1:30, we boarded a minibus for a two-hour drive to Bark House, just to the east of Linville Gorge, "The Grand Canyon of the East." Conversation was spotty during the drive--we still didn’t really know each other--and it wasn’t until we reached the Bark House campground and met our instructors, Kelly and Travis, that we started feeling more at ease with each other. Gigantic packs and piles of equipment and food were waiting for us there, and we spent over an hour getting introduced, discussing our goals for the course, and divvying up the team’s goods. Fully loaded, the packs were somewhere between sixty and seventy pounds, but if you adjusted the straps properly--which I didn’t--the weight was distributed fairly comfortably onto your hips, butt, and chest; on Day One, however, my shoulders were doing most of the work. The afternoon was wearing on, so we helped each other lift our packs into position and hiked into the woods, promptly getting confused about our location thanks to our 1994-vintage maps. We turned off the road at the proper creek, but we soon found ourselves crossing other streams of uncertain provenance beneath an increasingly dim sky. Darkness fell before we reached out targeted campground, so we set up camp in a handy deer meadow, using our headlamps to help us learn the details of the taut-line hitch and girth hitch, both of which Travis taught us as we rigged our tarps. A gorgeous orange moon rose over the trees at about the time we got our dinner ready. We went to bed sore and a little confused, but it would all be okay; in the morning, we would discover that we were actually camping in the place we’d planned to camp all along

Friday: I was the first awake, and after taking the opportunity to dig the group’s first cat hole, I was entitled to christen the short-handled shovel we’d used to pound the stakes for our tarps; naturally, I chose the name “John Henry.” (A while later, Erica used it without knowing I’d already done so, and she picked the name “Emily.” We compromised on “E.J.”) Breaking our fast, I discovered that all the bagels we had were cinnamon and raisin--an abomination, but I opted not to take the trouble to pick the raisins out--and then broke camp. We soon encountered a crossroads that might or might not have been on the map, scouted the options, and determined to head uphill. I adjusted my pack, which took some of the load off my aching shoulders and put it on my hips and butt, but it was still a long climb through the rhododendrons to the Sitting Bear campground, a grassy and luxurious site on the saddle between Sitting Bear Mountain and Hawksbill. There was a huge fire pit in which gas cans, Miller Lite cans and even a blue plastic tarp had been blackened by previous campers (or possibly a group of teenaged orcs), but we cleaned it up, lit a small fire, and were surprised when Kelly broke out a stash of marshmallows. (I like toasting them, but I don't eat them.)

Saturday: We marched south along the wooded ridge, turned up the "Stairway to Heaven," and emerged on the rocky summit of Hawksbill, where we got our first clear look at the gorge. Even in the haze, it was beautiful, with the Linville River throwing occasional gleams up from the bottom, and the silhouettes of Table Rock and the distant Chimneys promising intriguing climbs to our south. We took a while to lie around on our own, and while I lay on a boulder in the shade of a little maple tree, soaking as much cool as I could into my overheated skin, I heard an unfamiliar bird song. I'd been hauling my new Bushnell 8X21 binocs around for two days with nothing more than a couple of towhees to show for it, so I got up and sought out the source of the song, which turned out to be a small grey-and-white bird with a yellow and olive head: a young female Black-throated Green Warbler, life bird #314. From the summit, where I saw the trip's first Northern Raven, we did a "bush push," leaving the marked trails and finding our way down the gneiss slabs and through the rhodo patches on the south side of the peak. Despite some wandering (and Erica's close encounter with a rattlesnake), we eventually hit the road that follows the ridge line, which soon deposited us at the Little Table Rock campground.

I bathed and rinsed some clothing in the nearby creek, enjoyed a good dinner, and then heard Kelly announce that we'd be soloing that night. Travis took each of us to a semi-private camping site (though other sites were visible through the foliage) where we were to set up our own tarps and be self-reliant until he and Kelly came to get us at 9:00 a.m. We were to hand over our knives, our watches, and our reading material, and we were to maintain silence until take-out. I managed to use my new hitches to rig my tarp in a roof-like fashion over my sleeping bag, and I spent the rest of the day's dwindling light writing in my journal. I slept pretty well, but unfortunately I woke up in the middle of the night and had no idea how long it was till dawn. Before I could get back to sleep, I had to sing to myself the entire soundtrack of "Once More with Feeling," the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

To be continued

4:45 PM

I'm back from western North Carolina, and boy are my arms tired.

No, really. I'm sitting here at home, watching a somewhat bedraggled catbird on the porch rail, but my arms feel like some of the tendons are still attached to something near Asheville. I think perhaps the eight days of humping a sixty-five-pound pack, or maybe the four days of kayaking, or maybe even the rock climbing, has contributed, but man, my shoulders are aching. And I've learned that a week of kayaking in the rain will give you a case of dishpan hands like you wouldn't believe.

All in all, though, the trip was great. Not only that, but while I was gone, some cool things happened online; here's a link to my Chicago Tribune review of several new birding books, including Tim Gallagher's The Grail Bird, Simon Barnes' How to Be a (Bad) Birdwatcher, and Dan Stoeppel's To See Every Bird on Earth. And here's a link to Colleen Mondor's piece on TV2B and related books, which is pretty much the perfect review for my purposes, in the new issue of Bookslut.com

As for the trip itself, I'm not a lot more confident in a kayak than I was before I spent four days at a Nantahala Outdoor Center clinic, but at least now I can say that I've flipped over in a real river (the Tuckaseegee), and that I've swum through a Class II rapid hanging on to my boat. I can also do a roll, at least when I'm not dropping my paddle or nursing a sore shoulder, and when I'm in flat water. Can I do a "combat roll"--righting myself when I've flipped in a real river environment? Well, I haven't managed it yet, but at least now it's imaginable.

The first week of the trip, however, was the real treat. I stopped on the way and spent the night with my old friend Gilly, his wife Brenda, and their kids. They live on a farm in the mountains of Ashe County, NC, about fifteen miles south of the Virginia line and about fifteen miles east of the Tennessee line, and the demands of the place--feeding chickens, milking cows, clearing pasture, etc.--mean they don't get away much, so I hadn't had a chance to see them in a looooong while. This is a shame, as Gilly has been a central figure in quite a few of my life's episodes, not least my wedding, plus assorted youthful escapades involving sex, drugs, and rock & roll. We had a great visit this time, though, and I got to both milk a cow and try my first raw milk--yum! (No, I didn't try the squirt-straight-from-the-udder method; I drank it from a bottle in the fridge.) Two startling revelations came up, though: first, Gilly and I realized that we've known each other for nearly thirty-five years, which scared us a bit; second, I realized that though I've known him since we were in elementary school, I always picture him with his mustache. Go figure.

From Way Out Farm, I headed south for the big ticket item on this trip: an eight-day Outward Bound course. The nine of us on the trip were all educators, which gave us a certain unity of outlook that helped us get along very well, despite the fact that our backgrounds and career experiences were extremely varied:

*Erica, 31, teaches English as a Second Language in Hendersonville, NC, and was the closest thing we had to a local
*Dave, 55, a thirty-year veteran of public schools, is now teaching phys ed at a private school in St. Louis
*Sarah, a 43-year-old mother of two, is an assistant principle at a tiny K-12 school in western Massachusetts
*Laurie, 24, just finished her third year of teaching science at a private middle school in Philadelphia
*Mark, 36, teaches science in an international school in the United Arab Emirates, where he's been since he wrapped up five years teaching in Turkey.
*Anna, 31, is a special-ed teacher at a school in Chicago
*Bob, 50, teaches phys ed and nutrition and coaches soccer in Pennsylvania
*Iva, 43, teaches science and math and a public middle school in Kingsport, Tennessee

Our instructors, Kelly and Travis, had educational experience as well; Kelly earned her Ph.D. in information science at UNC, teaching undergrads along the way, but she gave up academia to become an OB instructor, a decision that got her out in the world where she loves to be. Travis, who's been working with kids in experiential education for years, is actually heading to Maine to get his master's degree in social work this fall. They were a terrific pair of guiding lights, and complemented each other beautifully; Travis is enormously knowledgeable about every facet of the outdoor life, from knots and camp set-up to rock-climbing skills and pack management; Kelly has tremendous skills in leading group discussions, as well as in encouraging individuals to expand their horizons, and she's a mean campfire cook to boot.

To recount every detail of the trip would be exhausting at this juncture, but I'll try to provide a rough account over the next few days. Let's just note that I've now seen (and heard!) Peregine Falcons at play above Table Rock, logged my first Black-throated Green Warbler, crossed a balance beam, no hands, at an elevation of forty-five feet, and learned to rig a tarp using taut-line and girth hitches. I'm in better shape, too--I'm telling you, my calves are cut--and Kelly and I got to spend a weekend in one of the coolest cities I've ever visited: Asheville, NC.

But finally, I've got to give a big shout-out to the littlest member of the Cashwell family: my newest nephew, Benjamin Cashwell, who arrived on Tuesday morning, July 5th, at a weight of six pounds, thirteen ounces. He and his mom are doing fine, and sibling Samuel may even be more excited about being a big brother than he is about being a cousin to Ian and Dixon. It's a big, fascinating world, little Benjamin--I can't wait till you can get out into it and experience it up close.

But that said, never forget this, either: it's great to be home.

1:41 PM