Ok, so just two days after kvetching about too much html in my diary entries, what do I do? Go and take a bunch more pictures. Because I like to make life miserable for myself. And I’m dumb. That’s why. And now I’ve spent the better part of my evening downloading them from the camera, formatting them, cropping and sizing the pictures, and then uploading them. And now I’m bitching about it. Because I’m in that kind of mood. Freaking gah.
So I went for another long solo drive yesterday, but spared you the big melodramatic entry. It was cold outside. Damn cold. The wind was coming off the bay in buckets, which doesn’t really make much sense because wind doesn’t really come in buckets, but don’t argue with me because I’ve apparently been dabbling in happy hour with many estrogen martinis and I don’t want this to turn into another mofo uterus entry, mostly because I’ve declared a moratorium on the speaking body parts. Yes. Save your emails. I don’t care. Don’t engage me when I’m in the mood either, missy. I don’t want to hear about it.
Just back away slowly. Weet is cranky.
And Weet is apparently taken with speaking of herself in third person.
So instead of hauling out the big words and the big ass sentences that all start with the same phrase, I brought my camera and took pictures. Because someone said they’d never seen a leaf. And that’s just wrong. Oh, and I don’t believe you, by the way.
As I was driving around, I realized that’s been a long time since one of our cabin retreats. Esteban and I used to have a fall getaway around this time of year. Last year, however, it turned into a whirlpool hotel room in De Pere over the Fox River, the day after I got the hunk of wood in my butt, so it was rather subdued.
I think our efforts were stymied by The Incident. It’s been five years since the incident and only now has the gag order been lifted and I have been freed to tell the tale.
I used to be a retreat coordinator at a summer camp, which had the added perk of renting cabins for the weekend at a reduced rate. One fall weekend in October 1997, Esteban and I went up with Kim V and her husband God. We arrived late Friday afternoon. Esteban and I then realized that we had left our clothing sitting on the bed, so he went back home and fetched our bag, foreshadowing our stupidity for the rest of the weekend. It was unnaturally cold and we delighted in the fact that I had knowledge of the super secret stash of camp staff firewood. When you opened the door to the cabin, steam would roll out into the clearer-than-clear night air.
We slept the sleep of the dead that night, each in our little camper bunk beds, blissfully unaware of the events that would haunt us from that point forward.
That morning, we awoke, took our showers in the camper bathhouse (The Green Latrine, if you must know), each of us locking the door to assure that the perennial camper specter of Jason, the Ax Wielding Maniac, did not slaughter us in our ablutions. Because when you’re in a cheap camp slasher flick, you just know someone’s going to die when they head to the shower with their bath gel in hand. It’s a given.
My sister Mo showed up with her boyfriend Mike. We snacked upon some bagels and then embarked upon a trip across the lake to the sliding rock, which was a natural rock waterslide. We had a few ways to get to the rockslide. We could drive, which would have taken us about five minutes. We could hike, which would have taken us about three hours. Or we could go over water, which fulfilled my need to have an LL Bean moment and made me feel tough.
Knowing that Esteban did not appreciate canoes (we actually owned one for a time and he forbade anyone from breathing too much, as he was certain we would tip over and be eaten by monster muskellunge, our toe bones being pulled by anglers for years to come), I opted for the safe paddleboats. I had seen senior citizens in these things. They seemed easy. And we had three couples, thus the pairing was perfect. After making sure that everyone was properly equipped with PFDs (that’s Camp Counselor for Personal Floatation Device, by the way. Camp Counselors love acronyms even more than computer geeks), we chose our respective paddleboats and embarked out toward the other side of the lake.
Well, the other two boats embarked. Boat 12, manned by Esteban and myself, limped weakly out into the middle of the lake. Mo began to laugh while she leisurely paddled along,. Meanwhile, my ass was actually raising up out of the seat in order to put some weight behind the strokes, yet we merely inched along. About half way across the lake, sweating and huffing profusely (seriously, we were cranking the paddling), the Burgermeister came forth. “Why are we going across the lake?”
“To go to the sliding rock.”
“But it’s too cold to swim.”
“It won’t be too cold in the stream.”
“And it’s across the lake?”
“By that dam up there, yes.”
“Damn!”
“That’s what I said.”
“This is ridiculous. I don’t care about a sliding rock.”
“I don’t understand why this is so hard. It’s not that hard! I’ve seen eight year olds do this!”
“Well, maybe we’re too heavy?”
“But I’ve seen four people on these!”
“This sucks. Bring me back! I don’t care about the waterfall! I’m going to read my book”
Thus we turned around and began our slow return back towards camp. Except that we were still moving backwards with the inevitable sureness of a glacier. It seemed as though our only progress had been due to the fact that the slight breeze and the pull of the current toward the dam across the lake. Our olympic paddling had been for naught.
I asked God and KimVee to go back to camp and get canoe paddles. They put it into high gear and actually sped across the water. Their speed mocked us in our drift towards the dam on the other side.
Mike and Mo considered the idea of towing us back. They grabbed the rope on the corner of our boat (the one that is used to tie it to the dock) and attached it to the corner of their boat. Then they towed us in a perfect circle. You see, you cannot link two boats by the corners, as they make a little circle. It’s physics or something. I don’t know. Then Esteban decided that we should use the other rope and tie it to the other front corner of the boat.
This is when the Greek chorus should have started warning us of deaths at sea and the Scylla and Caribdys.
First, he stood up in the paddleboat. I should preface this maneuver by explaining that my spouse is physically very similar to the Great Pyramid of Giza… if you stood it upside down. Micheal Barisiknakov he is not. I think his center of gravity is somewhere in his throat. I forbade him from playing volleyball with us because he would topple over whenever the ball came anywhere near him. The football coach at his high school still actually get misty and frustrated, citing Esteban as the “one that got away”, as he is the exact physical specimen desired in an offensive line, with the exception of the extraneous IQ points.
After standing, he then put one foot on the other side of the peddles. On the side that said ‘No Sitting Or Standing’.
‘Don’t, honey! You’re going to tip the boat.’
‘You can’t sink this thing. It’s a paddleboat. They don’t sink.’
‘No, look! Look at how close the front is to the wat&AO8AvwC9AO8AvwC9-
At that moment, he put his weight on his right foot and lifted his left leg to step forward. The entire front of the boat tipped forward into the lake and green 36 degree water started to pour into the foot area. I scurried up to sit on the backrest and leaned off the back of the boat, trying to right the thing. The native loons and wood ducks were frightened by the barrage of foul words which were impressively amplified over the water, the source of which was now standing in frigid water and soaked Levis. He quickly hurried back to the seat, which was covered in water.
‘You can’t sink these.’ He said softly, as if the very words themselves would make it so.
Mike and Mo rowed closer and tried to throw their rope to us.
‘No, don’t!’ I tried, but at that point, it was like lighting a match in a rainstorm. He was bound and determined to prove that you could not actually sink a paddle boat.
‘Don’t worry! This boat is made of Styrofoam! It’s not going to&AO8AvwC9AO8AvwC9- At that moment, he stepped to the fore of the paddleboat and again, the entire front of the boat dipped under the surface of the water, this time filling the seating area completely with water. I hung off the back of the boat, trying helplessly to right it.
The good people of Mountain, WI still talk about the cacophony of four letter words that colored their Saturday morning years ago. It’s the legend of ‘You Can’t Sink It!’
Just then, one of my fellow counselors rowed by in a canoe. This fellow counselor was actually a brilliant, sardonic guy who had tried unsuccessfully to talk me out of accepting Esteban’s marriage proposal. In fact, this moment was the first time he had ever actually seen Esteban and you could almost see his internal confirmation that my betrothed was an idiotic tool.
‘Having trouble?’ He said.
‘No, we’re fine!’ I said cheerily, as though I had complete and utter control of the situation and perhaps this was part of a ‘Trouble on the Water’ scenario during a boating safety course.
‘It looks like you’ve got a problem.’ He pursued, trying not to laugh at Esteban’s obvious state of anger at the fact that a paddleboat is indeed sinkable.
‘Just a stupid kind of problem. It’s fine.’ I countered. He shrugged and politely rowed away.
We drifted toward a little peninsula that extended toward the middle of the lake. Esteban looked down into the water and could see weeds.
‘It’s not that deep here. I could jump out and go get the motorboat, then we could tow it back to camp.’
‘No, you’re right. That’s maybe five feet.’ Mike agreed.
‘That’s just an illusion. That’s not the bottom, Esteban. That’s the tops of some very very tall weeds. You’re not’ don’t!’ But it was too late. Despite the fact that I knew the geography of that lake very well, Esteban lowered himself over the side of the boat, proving once again that in the time of crisis, a consensus of male opinions will trump a female with experience and knowledge. He lowered himself over the side of the boat.
‘Can you touch bottom?’ Mike asked.
‘N-n-n-n-n-no.’ He chattered, the cold water immediately soaking through his clothes and shoes.
And that’s when he remembered that he couldn’t swim. And that the almost freezing water after all that paddling was making his muscles seize up tighter than a spandex miniskirt on a skinny bitch. Rather than admit that he was wrong, he grabbed the end of the other paddleboat and had them tow him to shore.
KimVee and God then returned with two canoe paddles. I took one and proceeded to try to splash out the water. Finally, I used the paddle to steer myself more or less to the dock of someone’s cabin. KimVee jumped out and ran after Esteban to make sure he was ok while I sat on the dock and shivered, my pants wet up to my waist. I couldn’t see Esteban or KimVee, but I watched as the camp maintenance guy jumped into the motorboat and sped across the lake to the paddleboat.
‘Hey Weetabix’ trouble at sea?’ He grinned.
‘Yeah.’ I blushed. It was humiliating. I had a very in-charge persona at the camp, especially since I worked the weekends and was often the ‘in charge’ person, and to need to be essentially rescued was very embarrassing.
He hopped out of the boat and surveyed the paddleboat. With one impressive grunt, he lifted it out of the water and tipped the bilge into the lake. From my vantage point sitting on the dock, I got a lovely view of the underside of paddle mechanism, which was wrapped tightly with a ball of weeds, making the paddle completely worthless.
‘Want a lift back to camp?’ He asked, after hooking the boat to the back of the motorboat.
‘Nah, I’ll just walk’ I said, since our cabin was actually near the boarder of camp on that side of the lake and only about 75 yards away. Also, I could see the smug camp counselor sitting on the waterfront, waiting for me to return so that he could gloat over the fact that I was engaged to someone who subscribed to the White Star Line dogged optimism that a boat was unsinkable.
Thus, I trekked through the woods until only a smallish soupy bog stood between and the cabin. I could actually see the tartan print of the interior of my sleeping bag through the window. Luckily, there was a moss-covered log that spanned the wet ground.
No problem.
Once again, a Greek chorus would have been nice here.
Using a willow branch to steady myself across the soft somewhat rotted log, I made my way out across the bog. Once away from the 2 centimeter twig, however, my confidence was blown. I tentatively stepped out and my wet Ked shot off the moss and into the bog. And kept going. Until my right leg was submerged up to my thigh in dense black humus and my left leg was contorted and still hanging on the log.
This was not good. Right there. Not good at all.
It is at times like these that humans have been known to find extraordinary strength. Mothers have lifted cars off their children. Firemen have carried their partners out of burning buildings. And faced with the decision between either calling out for help and having someone find me submerged up to my muddy ass in what could possibly have been a plot on Gilligan’s Island or actually giving up the ghost and dying right there of shame, I somehow found the strength to hoist my ass up out of the sucking filth and back up onto the log. To this day I honestly don’t know how I did it. I mean, I could feel the cold wet earth in places only a female bikini mud-wrestler would understand, but apparently my left leg is one force to be reckoned with.
Once back on the relative safety of the mossy log, I had to make a choice. I could attempt to cross the log really fast by running across it, but with one wet shoe and one shoe which was now completely obliterated with black sludge, I was pretty sure that I’d simply make a rather spectacular dump into the mud, which already had a taste of a Curvy Round Sex Goddess and most assuredly wanted a second chance at claiming me for its own. Or I could walk all the way around the bog. Which I did, walking through dense brush and making a wide circle back to the cabin. Gah.
There I found Esteban, cranky but now changed into dry clothes, nestled in front of the fire reading his book. He wanted to do nothing but that, while I felt responsible for the other folks and was determined to not wallow in self-pity over the Drama On The High Seas. Thus, I threw on a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt and then led the crew to the archery range where we tried our hand at target shooting and archery. Shooting old Mountain Dew cans is excellent therapy. After that, we decided to do horseback riding. God opted to join Esteban in the cabin for some reading and fire time, and the rest of us went horseback riding, which was incredible. Then we all went to a nearby restaurant that was recommended by our horseback riding guide. There, we proceeded to get hammered on the local custom of Exceptionally Strong Old Fashioneds while we waited for a table. KimVee actually requested a plain glass of soda to mix into her drink and was met with the response ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’ Needless to say, I don’t remember much of the actual meal. But it was good. And I don’t remember much of the rest of the weekend. But that was good too.
And thus, the prime players of that fateful weekend have moved onward. Mike and Mo are no longer an item. God and KimVee got married and had a baby. Neither Esteban nor I have ever ventured into another paddleboat. But yet all of us carry the marks of that day somehow. Perhaps it is the root of a nightmarish dream of weeds and cold water. Perhaps a subtle shiver when passing a muddy field. But it’s there with us. Always. Waiting to shock us. The heart is a lonely paddleboat and the subconscious is a dank pit of wet earth that wants to bite you in the ass and give you mud babies.
Oh! The official winner of the Banner Contest:
John Howard and his fluttery rainbowy Chubby Tink, as seen here. I’m very flattered that the highest ranking man in Austrailia went through so much to make me a banner ad. Maybe he doesn’t realize that this won’t get his picture on a box of Weetabix. Because, you know, I have no power over such things. Anywhoo, congratulations Mr. Howard!
I’ll probably run at least one other of the entrants as well because I’m the judge and this is America and what do you think, the popular vote counts for anything? Ha! I’m thinking Chauffi 2, because it’s a big poop joke. And I do love me a good poop joke.
