Ten minutes on July 12, 2008

Ten minutes on July 12, 2008

Yampa, Part 2

Of course, for every object in light, there is a shadow, and often it is in the shadows that we find the rest of the story, or another story altogether. So, for example, I could mention the complexity of the organizing of the Yampa trip, in which our intrepid and charismatic organizer invites his close friends to come, hoping to make numbers for the tour, and ends up with too many people, and drama ensues. Before the moment when we put our things in dry bags and hop into the rafts, easy peasy, there is energy expended getting people interested in the trip, money to be asked for and given, plane tickets to buy early or later (with the resultant unpleasant surprise about the cost of plane tickets these days), bags to be packed with things appropriate to camping at some altitude, rides to be arranged or offered, lodgings to be reserved or hoped for…and this doesn’t include the actual trip planning by the Holiday people.

But in this case I will allow those details to remain in the now semi-shadows. (Watch this space for possible musings on the dynamics of organizing small groups to vacation together; process junkies, you know who you are!). Instead I want to explain why I named my trip the Kindness of Strangers Tour.

In preparing for the river trip, I think I used about 4% of my brain. This, strangely, is exactly the amount of knowledge that the theory of the Law of Attraction asserts we harness without using the miraculous knowledge contained in the workshops, life coaching, and books promulgated by those who believe in the Law of Attraction. The other 96% of my brain/attention were being spent on: figuring out where Bailey was going to be for the days I’d be gone; worrying about Margann’s daughter Liz and her two dogs on their way to Los Angeles and suddenly housing-bereft when a water main broke and flooded their home-to-be; watching Euro 2008 soccer games; seeing big-ass wildfires break out approximately every couple minutes in my county, including smoke rising directly over the hill that rises from our cohousing community up toward UCSC and Martin Road, smoke then drifting on winds blowing more or less at us; hanging out with my B daughters, just home from college (watch this space for what a B daughter or son or parent might be, and how you yourself can be one for fun and profit); walking my dog Cliff and wondering when more people will come up to me and tell me I look like my dog, who looks like a cross between a skunk and a prospector; trying to spend time with my lovely but overworked tri-wife, and succeeding at about the same rate that our government succeeds in taking bold steps to reduce global warming; and so on.

So packing was successful to the extent that I had a tent (brand new, with the mesh through which you can see the night sky), a sleeping bag, warm clothes, new Tevas specifically named Star Gazers, and so embedding a vision of walking with my new product and talking knowledgeably about constellations.

At the start of the Kindness of Strangers tour, I called Wanda to beg a ride from the airport and a place to stay on the back end of the trip and a ride to the river. I think I threw in a promise to be (attempt to be?) amusing. I got off the little Delta puddle jumper jet and collected my bag and found Kevin and Wanda deep in conversation about the Law of Attraction. At first I hoped they were talking about me specifically, but soon I learned that this Law of Attraction discourse is one of those New Age crossed with Madison Avenue type products:

“Breakthrough Discovery Reveals
The Revolutionary ‘Secrets’ About
The Law Of Attraction And How To Manifest Anything You Want
In Life... Like Magic!”
 
Long-Lost Secrets Never Before Explained
About How To Apply The Law Of Attraction
To Create The Life Of Your Dreams
Finally Revealed In Startling Materials!

Neither Kevin nor Wanda was enthusiastic about this discourse. I felt happy to be picked up from the airport and even happier to be in a car where two of my favorite people in the world were tossing a hapless set of ideas back and forth and whacking it with verbal tennis rackets. The mountains were out and snow capped, the traffic was light, and it was fun to listen to ideas like:

1. Why any belief in lack, scarcity, or limitation is false, and the many ways in which such a belief
        can hold you back in achieving your dreams.
2. Discover what cause and effect really means. Most people get this all wrong. But if you know
        how to really apply this to your life, you'll be able to reap the benefits much more effectively.
3.  Learn about the #1 secret you need to be aware of if you want to avoid fooling yourself into
        believing you’re doing things right, while actually you're doing things wrong entirely.

We drove to Wanda and Howard’s Salt Lake neighborhood, which is lovely and tree lined and reminiscent of the America of television in the 1950’s, and Kevin and Claire and Lina packed and left for the river, and Paul and Anna came and picked up Wanda and me, and we drove to Vernal, where we would spend the night and then wake up early to drive to the put-in.

Originally Wanda and I were going to camp near town, but we got a late start and with one thing and another, including eating dinner with our friends, we ran out of light and so asked Paul and Anna if we could crash in their hotel room. Little did I know that this would be the theme of the trip for me.

The next day we drove in vans to the put-in, went through the PFD talk (personal flotation devices – I guess “life jacket” was too much of a buzz-kill in terms of marketing, implying as it does the possibility of death), floated down the river for a short time, decamped on a beach a couple hours down the river, set up tents, drank Nora’s Lemon Drops and Kevin’s gin and tonic with nice fresh lime juice, at a dinner that couldn’t be beat, fought the First Battle of the Mosquitoes, and went to sleep.

Here I discovered, in rapid succession:
1.    It can get cold in the mountains on a river.
2.    I had purchased a tent to look at stars through, and so chose to omit the fly; it turns out that mesh walls are to cold what the straw walls were to the Little Pigs’ wolf.
3.    I had cleverly left my warm Patagonia jacket in my car at the airport in San Jose.
4.    I had left my cozy long underwear in Paul and Anna’s car back in Vernal.
5.    I had not brought my three season down REI sleeping bag under instructions from friends who said it made no sense to bring down to a river; what if it got wet? Instead I had grabbed what can only be described as a zero season bag, polyester, thin and aged, good for a sleep over in a warm house with wall to wall carpeting.
6.    The combination of two gin and tonics, one lemon drop, dinner with salsa, and the extreme shivering of my body in the Antarctic conditions I’d prepared for myself, were unkind to my poor stomach.
7.    Walking to the portable bathroom on the beach at 2 a.m. was a revelation; a dense pattern of bright stars in a sky cut out like a jigsaw puzzle piece by the canyon walls hovered over the rafts, the sand, the tents and brush and water.
8.    Sleeping for ten to fifteen minutes at a time, waking up shivering for twenty minutes, and repeating, allows for a wide range of topics to be mulled over: eternity, prayer, the living conditions of the first, unhoused humans, the high quality of contemporary camping clothing and equipment, nostalgia for poly pro and things with the words REI and Patagonia on them, the hallucinatory possibilities inherent in sleep deprivation, Homer’s description of rosy fingered dawn and its relation to the present glacial rising of the pale Utah canyon sun.

Note: searching the internet I found a free essay from a site called 123helpme!.com, addressing the needs of Western civ students struggling with writing on Homer without having read much if any of the original. In this essay we find that “throughout Odysseus' journey, the metaphor of the dawn symbolizes his odyssey from immaturity, maturity, and fulfillment.” I love this sentence, since it is both terrible (odyssey from fulfillment?) and, therefore, also sounds authentically like the kind of thing a mediocre undergraduate might write, not something cadged from the internet. The essay goes on to argue, if argue is the word I want here, that rosy fingered dawn represents Odysseus as inexperienced ruler, to be replaced by later epithetis like "gold-throned dawn" and "bright-throned dawn." My favorite parts of the site? The big button that says “report plagiarism” (you can say if you think one of these abysmal free essays was written by someone other than 123helpme!) and the small print below the essay:

Important Note: If you'd like to save a copy of the paper on your computer, you can COPY and PASTE it into your word processor. Please, follow these steps to do that in Windows:

1. Select the text of the paper with the mouse and press Ctrl+C.
2. Open your word processor and press Ctrl+V.

Company's Liability

123HelpMe.com (the "Web Site") is produced by the "Company". The contents of this Web Site, such as text, graphics, images, audio, video and all other material ("Material"), are protected by copyright under both United States and foreign laws. The Company makes no representations about the accuracy, reliability, completeness, or timeliness of the Material or about the results to be obtained from using the Material.


Suffice to say, my camping is at about the same level as the Material produced by the Company and pasted into countless word processing pages by countless inmates of the Educational-Industrial-Complex. I was watching the rosy fingered dawn and wondering, how on earth am I going to gather life-sustaining warmth to myself in the next black-fingered nights?

Hence the Kindess of Stranger tour. I woke up in an amazingly good mood, my stomach took in nourishment without complaint, the sun warmed me nicely, just as it warmed those proto-humans I felt I had come to resemble. By using those handy little things I call “words” I let my nearest and dearest know I was in grave need of basic survival gear. In so doing, I found myself engaged in research on what extra gear various people brought, and it turns out, everyone brought at least one extra bit for outliers such as myself. And so by nightfall I found myself with:

1.    Warm wooly hat from Morgan our river guide;
2.    Cozy poly pro long underwear from Wanda;
3.    A sweet fleece jacket from Dirk;
4.    My tent fly, from myself to myself.

Obligingly, the weather was much warmer, almost balmy, that night, so my zero season bag couldn’t suck all the delicious heat out of my body and give it to the ground. And as I lay there that night, with a full stomach, encased in things that said REI and Patagonia, I felt like I embodied, literally, the kindness of strangers. Well, perhaps not strangers, exactly, but you know what I mean.

For the rest of the trip I noticed all the ways people did for each other. Some people had clearly spent a great deal of effort preparing for the alcohol and mixed drink needs of their comrades, and spared no effort in inventing new drinks (Nora’s Gin Flip with macerated wild juniper berries) and in the laying on of social lubricants. Laura brought Wizard, the card game that became the kid-and-adult joining activity of each evening; Tycho brought both superior insect repellent AND, crucially, an aloe-lidocaine cream. Each night people would approach him, beg in various ways, and then stand while he sprayed them, or go off with handfuls of insect-bite deadening goo and slather their angry bites with it.  Three of us had the foresight to buy quantities of Double Shots, which doubled as a kind of legal tender, and I found all the kids approaching me when word got out via Lina that my soothing spray spf 45 Neutrogena sun block was the bomb.

Full disclosure: when I moved to Santa Cruz in 1979 I got interested in Tarot readings. Not that I felt these were somehow magical; I just liked the excuse to make up stories, and to play the role of soothsayer. Try saying sooth sometime; it is quite enjoyable. Anyway, forever my own card has been The Fool (I can hear you guys snickering out there, so stop that immediately!!). The Fool is the first card of the Major Arcana; he is shown in the Waite deck as a young man dressed gaily with a bag on a stick over his shoulder and a little dog by his side, walking blithely over a cliff. The first card signifies the power of innocence; not knowing what dangers surround him, he simply goes forward, and improbably, the universe supports him. He hitchhikes with his girlfriend to a concert, sleeps on a porch, and the next day hitching he meets a woman who takes the couple to her house and lends them her car for two days. The Fool card is first, and last is the Mage or Magician, who has learned to know and manipulate the principles and powers in the world that the Fool, in his folly, simply experiences through lack of fear.

You may notice, in this last description, an amusing element. My folly results in my being taken care of, which results in a knowledge of my friends that could not have happened if I had come prepared, which results in more love, affection, and appreciation of the social economy of gifts. It’s like an O Henry story, like the Gift of the Magi, but where you get to keep the comb and the watch.

It’s like the new law of attraction.