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Thursday, August 16, 2007
What I Did on My Vacation
Politics, the so-called "war", the local and international news, and several people I've encountered recently have all conspired to cause me to post a bunch of negative shit here of late.
I'm tired of it now.
Instead, here's a picture of my kids parking kayaks at our campsite last week:
Those kids make me nuts. They are so fine. They are much better people than I ever was, at their age or any other time. I try to settle myself into pure, comfortable curmudgeonhood, and they screw things up by being so utterly, blindingly luminous. Bother.
Looking left (downstream) from their spot, you would see this:
Here's the view upstream:
It was a very pretty place, but hot as hell. Nearly 100F every day, and very humid. On the other hand, the river was cool, and full of trout. We couldn't catch the trout, you understand, but that just meant that everybody lived happily.
We lounged around, and walked, and swam, and fished, and paddled around until late, so we made dinner after dark every day. The night that we cooked beans and rice on a propane stove, and made cornbread in a dutch oven in a campfire, it drove the raccoons crazy. They mounted disciplined, well-coordinated attacks on our campsite - they were deadly serious about getting some of that cornbread. It was a kind of seige.
I read on your internetz that the densest raccoon population in NY state is within NY City. Raccoons almost certainly mug people there.
If you paddled upstream from our camp for a bit, taking the side channel behind the old bald cypresses, you came to a place where water has fallen out of the hills in wet weather for a long time. This is a place that doesn't much care about politics. People can stomp around and shout here, and nothing happens.
Quite a bit of the area is made of this stuff:
I haven't a clue about the geologic science that explains the sharp division between the dull, homogenous rock below, and the white, crystalline quartz above, so I'm free to interpret it as a message from Gaia, or Bob, or Het-Heru, or someone.They inform me that instantaneous transformations are possible, maybe even routine in nature.
If you think things are not as they should be right now, that may be a comforting lesson. If you're happy as a pig in shit, it may give you pause.
I got chigger-bit.
- posted by de Selby @ 10:08 PM
