Category: Mixed Messages

I never had the patience for upscale backpacking food. In my younger days I ate an embarrassing amount of Dinty Moore stew, mainly because it could be heated right in the can. No need to dirty a pan and waste precious water cleaning it.

Add some smashed bread, bruised fruit, and a warm can of beer: dinner was served. I also routinely took a half-pound bag of bag of Peanut M&M’s; protein and chocolate in a convenient, tidy pellet.

Once I spent a few hours in the sun on a small cliff in Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest, legs kicked over the edge, reading Thomas Pynchon. Occasionally I would tip some M&M’s from the bag into my mouth and wash them down with a swill of water.

At some point I may have noticed a bitter taste. Maybe I chalked it up to the novel.

And what a pointless death. They couldn’t possibly have breached the hard coating. Or could they?

I’ve read Aristotle. I’ve read Proverbs. I’ve read some Voltaire. I’ve nodded over Descartes, and stifled laughter at the alleged prose of Ayn Rand. I’ve sampled Emerson, seen Ben Kingsley play Gandhi, watched at least one episode of Oprah.

I’ve read Malcom Gladwell. I’ve pondered the inspirational slogans of Nike. I’ve picked up a Tony Robbins book, skimmed the blurbs, put it down. I’ve been in the same room with a Hang in there baby! poster. I read bumperstickers.

Yet the words I live by, the words that seem more relevant each day, were in the first two lines of the B-side opener of the first Elvis Costello record, the only words I ever considered getting tattooed:

September of 2000, and I am south of New Orleans, paddling a rented canoe up a long narrow body of water, a sort of canal. I now know it is called a bayou. I grew up picturing a bayou as a swamp. Rather, a bayou will often be surrounded by swamps, or will connect swamps, and for hours I have been admiring tiny alligators sunning themselves on fallen trees. Then, less than ten feet away, I notice a snout, almost submerged, and a pair of eyeballs tracking me. Big eyeballs. A big snout.

On a theoretical level, of course, I understood that little alligators must grow into larger alligators. But here is this thing, evidently longer than a Cadillac, floating between me and the take-out spot. It has a blank look. It appears to have no thoughts whatsoever, except for an urge to bite down on something.

By this point I have been canoeing for years, sometimes in middling whitewater. I have never fallen out. The bayou is placid as stale beer, yet I suddenly feel a great sense of – what? – focus.

I had rented the canoe from a tight-lipped guy who’d posted a flyer in a Treme laundromat. I arranged to meet him at a boat ramp. He unloaded it and minutes later drove away in his van, after promising to return in four hours. Like most rentals it was heavy aluminum, battered, and stable. Hot to the touch.

Now I can smell my lunch warming on the metal and suspect the snout can, too. I think of those clueless tourists who pose next to bison and bears.

Later, a ranger tells me this particular gator is 16 feet long, including tail. Standing side by side, if such a thing were possible, my head would be approximately even with its belly. Which is exactly the point. Later still, and for years afterward, PBS will run a station ID showing a crocodile launching itself like a Trident missile from a muddy watering hole and clamping on to a careless antelope. Which, again, is exactly the point.

I heard these AM radio ads for a clinic called Sound Pain Solutions and I got all excited till I realized it won’t protect me from “Welcome to the Jungle” or free jazz or backup beepers or crazed terriers or Megabass or jackhammers or livid toddlers or melisma or leaf blowers or even Tucker Carlson. Apparently, it’s a Puget thing.

So the kitchen tap was dripping under the sink but I couldn’t fit under there to loosen the nuts to replace the gasket so I went into the bedroom and cut a hole in the drywall to stick my hand through but it turned out the fitting was PVC glued to old metal pipe so I decided to upgrade that section but then figured I might as well do the bathroom while I was at it which connected to an outdoor spigot so what the hell but that meant prying off a length of siding which splintered as it came loose and it was 80-year-old siding and I knew I’d never get a replacement to match so I peeled off the whole south end but then I noticed a crack in the foundation and…

Funny thing is, that guy Dale on the YouTube fixed his leaking sink in 12 minutes.

At age 12, soon after Christmas, a major snowstorm hit, nixing school. My neighbor Virgil and I, both at home alone, trudged across the nearby golf course in high spirits, him sporting a pricey shearling coat, his main gift.

The course was bounded by a creek, which we found to be frozen. Or partially, as we realized when Virgil crackled through and plunged to his chest. I extended a tree limb to drag him out.

The trudge back was subdued. Only my legs had gotten wet, but I was shivering uncontrollably, and Virgil’s white fleece trim, now caramel, had frozen solid. At home he discovered he was locked out. I had my key, but our place had no laundry dryer, and he was in a panic about the coat. Luckily, he knew a way to break in.

Our houses, built at the end of the Depression, each had a long-disused metal door, roughly three feet wide, built into the foundation at ground level. In those earlier times a guy would deliver coal by shoveling it through the opening and down a chute to a boiler, now long gone.

Virgil managed to pry the hatch open but hesitated to squirm through on his belly and cause even more damage to the coat. Then he hit upon a solution: He would lay face up on a cheap toboggan and carefully scooch forward until he could reach an overhead water pipe in the basement and swing his legs inside.

I was still deciding where to grip the wet plastic for support when he shot through the hatch with a shriek and crashed to the concrete floor. He landed on his head yet broke his leg.

It took me several minutes to squirm inside without stepping on him, and another ten to get him upstairs, where he phoned and asked his no-nonsense father to leave work early. He wouldn’t let me wash the coat, and there was nothing else I could do, really.

The next time I saw Virgil his cast was covered with signatures and due to come off any day. He never told me how he explained the incident to Dad.

We’re parked at the Picture Rocks trailhead in Saguaro National Park, sorting water and supplies into a backpack for a hike in the 85-degree midmorning heat.

As we’re finishing, a grizzled older man parks a pickup and unloads a noticeably hissing, sealed five-gallon bucket from the bed, along with aluminum snake tongs. I ask, Is that a rattler? It is. Sounds big. A big one, he confirms, and sets off on foot.

A few minutes later we follow down the trail, which quickly narrows into a canyon. A quarter mile along we find him rising from a crouch, the bucket now empty. He gestures to spot roughly three feet off the trail, indicating a shadowed cleft at ankle level. Indeed, we can see eyes and a flickering tongue. A head as large as my fist.

While hiking, it occurs to me that neither his truck nor clothes specified any official status.

Hours later, at a visitor center packed with kids, I can’t help but wonder what made a seemingly competent local guy bypass dozens of roadside turnouts spread across thousands of acres to release a big one on a trail popular enough to be included in every guidebook.