I’m in the north woods where Internet is one bar...
...so blogging was not in the cards.
I’ve been saying to myself that I’d like to try a silent retreat. I drove the three hours with no music or podcasts. However ... It failed when I had to ask the snooty cashier at Holiday if they had live bait. She grunted, I repeated the question, and she grunted in some unintelligible way, “over there, duh.”
No leeches!
I got here Thursday night 20 minutes past sundown. By the time I got my stuff out it was dark, and with the warm weather, the mosquitoes were thick as... north woods mosquitoes get. Clouds of the fuckers, mostly no-see-ems.
Before I started setting up, I as greeted by the only other campers in this two- campsite spot. “We had a bear Cub come around at dinner.”
“Bear cub means mama is not far behind?”
“Maybe.”
I pitched my hammock, not bothering to finally measure how far the trees should be apart, and set it up precariously on the third tree combination.
Then I smoked a lot more cuz, you know, I want to be scared.
So, I set up my hammock and slept in there, listening to the sounds of the forest, must be locusts, and realized that if I turn my good ear to my pillow, my dead ear tunes all that forestry shot off completely. But then I wouldn’t hear the bear? I waffled from silence to on auditory patrol.
I woke to perfect weather for me and the mosquitoes but the big fucking horse flies hadn’t graced me with their presence yet. So the first thing I put up my new contraption to go over the car. With that and a hammock, I could travel light but not sleep in my car.
Needs some twerking but it’ll do. With a drizzle, I’m protected!Should save the netting part of my soon to be discarded, (wouldn’t wish this one to an enemy), gazebo.
The goal in traveling light is not what is in my car, but how much I have to set up.
Then I put up my last-time-to-use kitchen fly. (Bought a new one off Amazon.)
Climbed in the gazebo and whipped up some coffee, French vanilla creamer, and did the W&B before setting up the rest. Before long , and shortly after I approached the neighbors and said, “Hi, I’m on a silent retreat, they said, ‘cool,’ (pretty presumptuous of me to assume they did want to talk, but I didn’t want to sound rude. Before long, the neighbors left anyway.
The advantage in intermittent fasting is, if I don’t eat breakfast, other than my coffee and some water, that’s a healthy thing to do, so I skipped breakfast.
I got glamped out and went fishing.
Got skunked but the fish finder had them on the scope right at 13.5’ to 14’. Dropped my really cool anchor setup and tried to nailed those slimy bastards with worms. She told with only a hook and two beebee weights. Zilch.
Switched to a pink jig, two luscious worms dangling lively before their demise.
Zilch.
Wind turned to white caps but I paddled up wind, so I got skunked but was able to get a read on the lake contour. It’s mostly flat, mostly 11’ and I got skunked.
But the best part of all? I could beach Wendy, (stenciled on the side), and go do lunch!
Went back to camp, made two huge sandwiches, breaking fast, and went birch back harvesting.
Boiled it up, laid it flat, and woke to read that I should have worked with it, (pliable like stiff leather), instead of waiting until morning’s W&B, where I can try to work with this, or harvest more! I could dickey-smith with these pieces, and if they don’t work, cuz I’m bad, bad, bad at measuring, I can throw them away, cuz, you know, there’s lots more where that came from.
BEAR TIP
If you don’t want to get off your 66 year-old ass and put the creamer in the cooler, which is already in the car, boil up a pot of water, put the creamer right below it, (don’t forget to lift the nozzle on the teapot) and if the bear go’s for the creamer, she will get burned.
Then she’ll inevitably jump off the picnic table, get snarled in my netting, (cub’s claws are sharp, like big cougar kittens), and proceed to tear down the whole damn castle.
But that’ll teach them not to develop a taste for French vanilla.
On The Waterfront
Last evening, when the 40mph winds died down, I went paddle boarding on the leeward side, (nautical inland waterway term for out of the windward side), so it was glass smooth.
Since being off the new Rx, I’m able to balance without my knees going into the Charleston dance, and was enjoying the relatively relaxing ride as I came upon a reed bed, possibly wild rice, and some swirling water appeared to be hunting right along the shoreline, heading in the opposite direction, on the edge of the water where it’s no more than a foot deep.
I paddled closer and the swirls I saw out of my peripheral vision became a single swirl, a single, large slap and a swirl, (or beavers do synchronized swimming), then it/they submerge in perfect unison. POOF! But then a huge swirl again, moving away from Bark, (soon to be the main character), and me along the reed bed.
Remember, I’m on my paddle board, where I only recently realized it’s better to maintain my balance and perspective if I look 100’ in front of the board vs at the waves lapping over the front of Bark, (as she gracefully cuts through the small waves). Looking over my shoulder? At an unknown source of said swirls? Lesson three maybe? Or lesson four?
Then I hear the swirls getting louder. Is it a beaver slapping it’s tail? I couldn’t tell because it was on my left ear and, well, my dead ear, so I tried to turn to see what was a spawning? (Some jokes wrote themselves).
I laughed at myself for trying to skip right through lesson three, (I blame my dad), and did an amateurish maneuver of dropping hard on my Osgood Slaughters knee, (making a cool drum-like sound on Bark, almost like an out-of-tune timpani), and I went drunken-spinning swirling around to a seated position, backwards, (stern facing), as I checked my pulse.
It’s 128, what an adrenal rush!
The swirling, and possible tail-slapping, is moving my way, [gotta smoke more, I don’t know the ending yet 😎]
To review:
- I heard some swirling/slapping on the water, behind me, heading away from me.
- I tried to turn my head to see it, and smashed my knee when I failed in that post-mid-life-crisis gymnastic maneuver.
- I was now sitting backwards, weighing my options - how much more balance should I get before I retrieve my drifting away paddle, which is almost out of arm’s, (and soon leg’s) range.
- I got this. Take a deep breath, and plan my spin on the parallel bar/pommel horse-on-water-with-a-mermaid-stalking-me, and do it in one spin, albeit, both feet dropping over the side for balance.
- I’m now facing forward, with the serpent again over my left (dead-ear) shoulder, but the sound of the splashing/slapping echoes off the whole calm bay so I can hear it. Or was it coming my right? Or it changed. I was being surrounded! This was not in the Costco online manual. (Costco joke - there are no printed manuals, either there or at goodwill. #ILoveGoogle)
- Swirl at 7:00 - then 8:00, moving in closer...
- Water turns smooth, I sit frozen, digging on this adrenaline buzz, and the level of mindfulness an attacking sea serpent will give you, wether you like it or not.
- But if you’re a worrier like me, and have a half minute to think, you’ll visualize a half dozen ways you avert total disaster, and one visualizion, on repeat in 1/10th second intervals until it’s drilled into my muscle memory, (like normal people experience when you’re meeting with your final demise?)
- Nothing was spotted, but I couldn’t see a big fish from the top, it’s camouflaged.
[Fish anatomy; dark on top, light on the bottom; either pink, silver, or orange.]
- In one of my visions, I imagined a Muskie stalking me on Bark, (orange bottom). Which envelopes into a fucking self-fulfilling prophesy, (I hate when that happens).
- Suddenly, a swirl. But not from my left, (port-side), but from my starboard, (figure it out), side.
- Then it dove, swung around and played chicken with Bark, dove again, (cuz Bark didn’t back down), swung back around, (right below my right , (starboard), ankle, and bit into the side of Bark, about as far back as the gills would be on a predator that dwarfed the heretofore biggest fish on Sand Lake.
Let’s call her Lula.
I can imagine how that went down:
“Hey Lula, did you hear what the other grown-ups are saying?”
“No, Sparky, (irony), what did you hear?” (Fish have god ears, whales [mammal joke], can be heard for miles by fish with ears).
“There’s a really really big something-fish-with-an-orange-belly coming down the shoreline at a good clip.”
“So?”
“Lula, since Hakeem got speared, you da’ B.F.O.C.” Sparky blubbled. (Even fish talk funny underwater. All ‘blub blub’ this, and ‘blub-damger!-blub that.
“I’m a fish, Sparky, don’t lay that honky acronym (reverse racism?) shit on me. I’m a what, now?”
“B.F.O.C. Lula. Big Fish On Campus. Get it? Schools of fish? - in a school? You’re the biggest? And you gotta show intruders who’s B.F. on campus, and stake our claim to our reed bed.”
“I’m bloated with 19,000 eggs just bursting to became bass food.”
“Oh right, girly issues.” (#MeToo)
“I just got rid of that big Northern, eh, (Canadian humor), but they say this one might be one of them invasive species of Asian carp. (#AquaticDiversity).
“But this one’s even bigger, Yogi, ( don’t ask),” Sparky said.
“The motherfucking hell you say? They get bigger than fuck.” [paraphrasing]
Lula has been relegated by the school to get rid of the Communist Chinese invader(s)(#FoxNewsHumor?)
Lula would splash around it a bit, way back of Sirocco’s, (she’s a South-Asian Carp?), peripheral vision, (cuz, you know, fishes’ eyes are on the side of their heads) left side, pushing Sirocco away from their caviar, (Russian humor), to let “whomever” know this was our egg-plant, or whoever-it-was also hopefully would think the slapping was a beaver, and them beavers have chompers for teeth.
[Those fuckers can chop down whole trees, without breathing!](Gil humor).
She came on S’s [a.k.a. Scorocco’s(SP)] rear hind quarter (best part of a carp, next to the belly), at a 45 ° angle to the rear, off the port, (left) side, (shoreline side to scare S. out to sea.
That didn’t work and Lula noticed the sheer size of this Commie, (she doesn’t know her geography and, well, #FoxNews).
Sirocco was gorgeous, in a comrade sort of way. For a typical weight/length proportion she’d be definitely built like a Sumo wrestler, (geographically challenged), but instead, Sirocco had a lovely, shiny, deep-orange-with-yellow-stripes, elongated belly, (like the deep sunsets the turtles describe), tapering to a nice, non-protuberance of a beak.
Lula swung around all of her 60” bony-spined (not god to eat), body, one last slap on the water, (in case the rumors are true, Chinks (#AsianLivesMatter), are beaver-phobes), and dove right I’m, taking a warning-bite right where Big-Orange’s gills would be. But Sirocco’s gills were as streamlined as her voluptuous, (kidding, she was built like a brick shit-house), body, so Lula backed away, only getting a belly-wiggle out of Scirrocco(SP), so Lula instituted a #CodeRed.
Lula shit herself, (fish humor, they shit where they eat), called a school lockdown, (Columbine humor), [too soon?] and left Bark, and whatever was sitting on top, (with the black tentacles, (I was wearing my wetsuit), and the juicy white chomp-sized Lilly-white meat dangling out of its black scaled tentacles and over the side), to eat another day when his body guard isn’t around. But they never saw Bark again and had an Eewok-level party amongst the submerged, heavy trees, cut down by the raskly beavers.
Tonight was set aside to have an impromptu celebration, (school kids know how to party on the fly), to celebrate and make Lula king of the lake, (fish can be non-binary and there is no non-gender-free term for king), and because of Lula, they never saw Bark again. #BuildThatWall (virtual wall, you know, around the wild rice bed?) [too soon?]
- So, my foot is about a foot, (Imperial measurement joke) away from me as it, (and this is the first and only 💯% proof this fish isn’t a beaver with, and 💯% certainty’s not a mermaid cuz that was just drugs talking), and I scored an even bigger adrenaline rush, and peed myself in my wetsuit! (I’m kidding, once you pee in a wetsuit, it’s an aromatic gift that keeps on giving).
- Then she was gone. For now. But/if/and when the next strike would came, it would not be a harmless warning-bite.
- Then, briefly, it occurred to me cuz, you know, I’m a worrier - if that Muskie went for the gills, and thought she/her/non-binary-“they” missed, he-she could come back and bite a bit further back, where my feet were dangling precariously, but not for long. (Sometimes paranoia has a valid point).
- I checked my pulse and watched as it went down in corresponding fashion to my deep breaths while laying prone on my back. Then I’d hear another swirl, or slap on the water from a beaver, (slow learner), and watch my pulse skyrocket again.) Not to misdirect but it’s sorta cool watching an objective, real-time readout of a mild panic attack.
- Then I woke up, (had to pee) glanced at my watch (4:15), and listened for bear(s) with my dead ear on the pillow, as I leaned my worm, (fishing joke for guys with little worms), out the zipper, opened just enough to stick “it” out, and knowing any more then that and I was letting in mosquitoes.
[side-bar] I had a mosquito bite on my penis, only possibly attributed to peeing in a cloud of mosquitoes, attracted to my 1,200 lumen headlamp.I now have one with an infra-red switch. (I’m beginner to surmise horse flies are attracted to infrared lights).
I successfully peed, though I heard most of it pour down on my yoga-turned-floor mat, below me.
Sleep would allude me so my self-talk was how to remember this story long enough to write it down when I’m stoned, which is becoming more fun in seclusion on my silent retreat.
But I do miss my 🎶 tunes.
❤️
Stephen
On Jun 7, 2021, at 8:49 AM, Stephen Wigg <stephenwigg@hotmail.com> wrote:
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