Day One: Illustrations

In those old children’s books, there is always a story with the page of illustrations in the middle.  The pictures are identified with a quote from the story.  That is how this works.

Day One: Part 2

Eventually, we gave up and decided to canoe anyway. 

Canoes are very heavy. 

This curious fact of life was exacerbated by other circumstances, such as the carriage of heavy bulks upon our backs, and the mud on the ground.  There was much rejoicing.  Ok, not in actuality.  But my writing style grows more eccentric by the moment, drawing me to the conclusion that I should go to sleep and finish this part of the story later.

Ok, I am back.  I think I started out carrying a canoe with Sarah, but I ended up canoeing with Meg.  Anyway, we had to push the canoes through this really grassy part of the lake – a slough made of sharp grass.  Fortunately I was wearing rain pants so my legs didn’t get scraped.  We finally got to clear lake and got into the canoes.  We attempted to paddle.  There was one canoe that was always really far behind and we had to wait for them, but I don’t remember who was in it [Editor’s Note:  It was Christine and Jana.  Thanks for reminding me, Christine.  I’m sure you really wanted this in the story! : )].  It started raining again.  The scenery was beautiful, and there were flowers floating on the water that looked like water lilies.  Meg told us the names of the white ones and the yellow ones, but I don’t remember what they were.

            We canoed in the rain for a long time.  Eventually, the lake narrowed into a shallow and winding stream.  We drifted under a wooden footbridge and had to duck.  It became so shallow that we could no longer canoe, so we got out and pulled the canoes through the water.  Wading upstream while dragging a canoe is much more difficult than it sounds.  I was very thankful for my new tevas.  The bottom of the stream was rocky and slippery.  Once we saw a dead fish on the bottom, and somebody was trying to pick it up with a stick, or something.  I think. 

            Eventually, we got to the end of the stream and a bridge with an actual road on it.  We carried the backpacks and the canoes across the road to where the lake continued.  A guy carrying a very small girl walked over to say hi and see what we were doing.  It had stopped raining by now, and we learned that if there is enough blue sky to make a pair of pants, then the rain is going away.  Maybe.  But questions were raised:  enough blue sky to make the fabric as if you were sewing the pair of pants?  Or do you hold a pair of pants up to the sky and see if it is the same size as the blueness?  No conclusions were reached. 

            We kept canoeing.  I was getting hungry, and I began to wonder when we would stop.  Then we went around a turn and there was more of that weird grass growing in the water.  It looked like we were canoeing through a meadow.  Then, finally, we stopped.  But when a couple girls went to scout out the camp site, they found that it was unusable.  So we went on.  But only a little ways more.  Then we stopped again; this time there was a building and an outhouse.  We pulled the canoes up onto the shore and carried the backpacks past the outhouse into the woods a little ways until we came to a clearing.  If it could be called a clearing.  How were we supposed to camp in a grove of ferns?  Apparently, the answer was to step on and crush said ferns.  We were hungry, so the first thing we did was to take out the snack bag.  This is when I discovered the little crunchy sesame stick things.  As I write this, I am gazing upon my very own (large) bag of these sesame sticks which I purchased during my last visit to Trader Joe’s.  Now I am sleepy again; this is really taking a long time to write.  I shall return to my story upon the morrow.

            Our first task was to gather firewood.    Because of the rain all that day, the wood was wet, so we would have our first experience of wet-wood fires.  We also had to keep an eye out for birch bark to use as kindling, and pine snaps.  Pine snaps are, as we were told, the tiniest twigs that pretty much look useless.  But they catch on fire easily, thus their usefulness.  We gathered firewood for a long time.  Then we still didn’t have enough, so we had to gather two more armloads each.  Then we learned how to dig the fire pit – first, the plug.  Dig a rectangular outline with the shovel, approximately 3 shovel-widths by five.  Then go back around the rectangle with the shovel, digging up the bottom of the plug until you have successfully removed the top layer of dirt.  At least two people will need to lift the top layer off to insure its removal in one piece.  The plug is set to the side and will be replaced later.  Then we dig the fire pit deeper and find two Y-beams and a cross-bar.  That part is pretty self-explanatory: a Y-beam is a stick shaped like a Y that is sturdy enough to support a cross-beam holding four billies of water.  A cross-beam is a stick sturdy enough to hold four billies of water and long enough to reach across the fire pit to each Y-beam.  The Y-beams are stuck into the ground on the far ends of the fire pit. 

            At this point, we got to experience the joys of a wet-wood fire.  We had to strip the bark off of all the firewood.  Some of us worked on this, and others learned how to set up shelters.  I went with the latter group.  There are two different kinds of tents, I learned.  There is the kind set up between two trees, and then there is the One-Tree Wonder.  This kind of tent is made with one tree, which is a wonder.  We learned that we should never make a tent with a dead tree; this is known as a widow-maker.  Then we started making the shelters.  First the bug net is tied between two trees and the four corners are anchored to the ground.  The twine is attached to the bug net by getting a handful of leaves, putting it on the inside of the bug net and pretty much making what looks like a Halloween ghost.  This is called a ghostie.  The twine loop is tied around the ghostie. 

            “With so many ghosties,” I commented, “it must be a haunted tent.” 

            Christine elbowed me. 

            “Sorry, that was bad,” I said.  Because it was.  Possibly my worst pun, and the others are pretty bad.

            “But it was funny," said Christine.

            Whatever.  She was just being nice.  We continued to set up shelters.  When the bug net was up, we then tied the tarps over them in the same way, but the tarps could not touch the bug nets anywhere, or else water could get through if it rained. 

            By now, it was dark and we were hungry.  People were now working on starting the fire, but with no luck.  Everything was wet.  I went to help strip bark off the firewood with my pocket knife.  Alas, it is very difficult to find a way to hold a flashlight with a stick in one hand and a knife in the other.  Fortunately, Christine had a super-bright head-lamp with enough light for the both of us.  The fire was still refusing to burn.  I don’t know how long we sat there in the dark, stripping bark off of wet sticks and hoping that we could eat supper anytime in the foreseeable future.  Somehow during that time, Sarah and I started talking about hand sanitizer, and she said that she had two bottles and would give me one of them.  I put it in my pocket.  That bottle is now on my desk, and every once in a while I open it and smell it.  The smell reminds me of… well, I’ll get to that later.  Right now, we are still waiting for the fire.  Now the fire has been lit!  People are carefully putting wood on.  Darn – it just went out again.  They try again.  Back to stripping the wood.  If I were an editor, I would kill me right now.  Too many sentence fragments, and is this is past or present tense?  Eh, who cares.

            Finally, after what seemed like eternity, the fire was lit.  Sometime around now, we had first and second drinks.  I don’t remember where exactly this fits into the scheme of things.  One of the drinks was grape.  It was a little bit gross.  Once two billies of water were boiling, we had our first chance to make supper out of entirely dehydrated… stuff.  There was meat that was not meat, but actually dehydrated vegetable protein, dehydrated vegetables, dehydrated starch (pasta or potatoes), and a powder base.  I think this time we had chicken with potatoes and a sour cream base.  I was so hungry I thought I could eat a lot, but after I got about half-way through it I couldn’t eat another bite.  But I had to finish it, so I did eventually.  Fortunately there was a spice kit with salt, pepper, sugar, garlic powder, and a mix of a few different spices called Wazi spice.  But the way Wazi was written (with a sharpie on a piece of tape) made it look like it said Nazi spice.  When we finished eating, we had to rinse out our cups with water.  Then we put the kitchen tarp over all the food bags and put our cups on top of the tarp.  That way, if an animal tried to get the food the cups would fall and rattle. 

            Now it was time to get ready for bed.  Meg and Lara said we should get used to changing in the open, but a lot of us walked down the path to the port-a-potty we had passed earlier.  It smelled really bad, but at least it was private…  Right next to the stack of toilet paper was a stack of fern leaves.  Ominous foreshadowing.

            We spread out our tarps in the shelters and unrolled our sleeping bags on top of them.  I had a little bug net that my mom had given me to go over my head.  I doubt it worked.  Once I woke up in the night and I was too tired to care about bugs, so I took it off.  It was a little bit of an uncomfortable night because I was sleeping in very close proximity to people I didn’t even know, I was outside in the middle of nowhere and in the presence of bugs and swarms of mosquitoes.  But I managed to fall asleep anyways.

The Actual Day One: part one

The first day

Guess what....