A Fine and Pleasant Misery, page 4
The tent was designed to sleep two grown men, providing they were both Pygmies and on exceptionally good terms with each other. We managed to crowd four of us into it, after drawing straws to see who got to have their heads by the air vents. The losers had to suck their air through bullet holes. If a loud sound suddenly reminded us of unfinished business at home, there was always a big traffic jam at the exit. Sometimes we would be about halfway home and still not out of the tent yet.
As a result of these drawbacks to the mountain tent, I was constantly on the lookout for some kind of portable shelter that would afford me a bit more comfort and protection. One day, poking around Grogan’s War Surplus, I found it. After sorting through the ever-present snarl of nylon rope, I discovered a canvas tube attached to dried batskin and mosquito netting. The mosquito netting on one side had a zipper running the full length of it.
“What is it?” I asked Grogan.
“That, my boy, is a jungle hammock,” he said. “This canvas is the hammock part, the mosquito netting is the walls, and then this tough and very attractive fabric here is the roof.”
Not having any jungles readily available, I inquired as to how it would work in our part of the world.
“Just fine,” he said. “For example, there’s some folks who don’t much care for slimy, crawly ol’ snakes sneakin’ into their nice, cozy 70-below down sleepin’ bags to get warm, and they like this here jungle hammock because it keeps ’em outta reach of the poisonous critters.”
I didn’t let on in the slightest to Grogan that he had just made reference to my kind of people. He nevertheless came to that conclusion because he scooped up the jungle hammock and carried it toward the checkout counter.
“How is it for bears?” I asked in a tone of complete indifference, following along behind him.
“Bears? Oh, it’s fine on bears. In bear country you just hitch it a little higher in the trees—say, about fifteen feet.”
The roof of the jungle hammock had some bad cracks in it, several of the ropes were frayed, the mosquito netting had small tears in it, and the canvas looked as if it were being attacked by at least four varieties of exotic mold. Grogan didn’t seem to notice though and let me have it for not much more than he would have charged for a new one.
I lost no time in getting the jungle hammock home and suspended between two trees in our backyard for a trial run. It looked so secure suspended up there in the air—a modest ten feet from the ground—that I decided I would spend the night there.
The family came out that evening to cheer me on as I climbed the stepladder to launch myself on my maiden voyage in the hammock. After they had retreated back into the house, muttering enviously I thought, I zipped up the mosquito netting, wiggled into my chicken-down sleeping bag, and lay back to contemplate the closing in of my ancient enemy, darkness.
After four or five hours of this contemplation, an unnerving thought occurred to me. I had not remembered to have the stepladder removed! It continued to connect ground and hammock like a boarding ramp for any ravenous beast that happened along. I leaned over to kick the ladder. As I did so the hammock flipped on its side, sending me like a shot through the mosquito netting, still encased in my sleeping bag.
As bad luck would have it, my crotchety old dog, Strange, had a short while before staggered in from a night of carousing and collapsed on the target area. Nothing in his experience, of course, had taught him to expect me even to be out at night let alone suspended in the air ten feet above him. Consequently, when a large, screeching shape wrapped in chicken feathers plummeted down on him out of the darkness, it was certainly reasonable for him to assume that he had fallen prey to some huge, carnivorous bird of the night. I, for my part, fully expected to be greeted by a hairy beast with fast, snapping jaws, an expectation that did not go unfulfilled. Within ten seconds we had fought ourselves to a state of total exhaustion, perhaps not surprising when you consider the fact that we had gone fully around the yard three times, failed in our attempts to climb several trees and a lilac bush, battered open the door to the house, and finally collapsed in a single panting heap on the kitchen floor. Both of us smelled of wet chicken feathers for days afterwards, and it was a full week before I could brush the taste of dog off my teeth.
After I had recovered from that night though, I couldn’t help chuckling over how I had put one over on ol’ Grogan. If Henry P. had known the mosquito netting on that jungle hammock was eaten plumb through with jungle rot he would have charged me twice the price that he did.
“Do I remember Henry P. Grogan’s War Surplus store?” I said to Retch. “Wasn’t his that high-class place with the sign that said SHIRTS AND SHOES MUST BE WORN ON THESE PREMISES?”
But he didn’t hear me. He was too busy blowing on the fire.
The Big Trip
WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG and the strange wild passion for mountains was first upon me, I wrote, produced, and directed for myself a magnificent, colossal, 3-D, Technicolor, Wide-Screen, Stereophonic fantasy—the fantasy of the Big Trip.
Whenever the jaws of tedium gnawed too harshly on my bones, I simply turned down the lights on the murk and grind of the world outside and projected the fantasy on the backsides of my eyeballs, each of which was equipped with a Silver Screen.
The fantasy was primarily an adventure story set in the vast wilderness of the Selkirk mountains. It starred You Know Whom, who bore a striking resemblance to a four-foot-eight-inch Gregory Peck. The basic plot was that the hero, a pack on his back, hiked far back into these beautiful mountains, endured great hardships, overcame terrible obstacles, and occasionally even rescued from perilous distress a beautiful red-haired lady. It was strictly a G-rated fantasy. (The R- and X-rated fantasies came later.) But I enjoyed it. In fact, with time, the Big Trip began to gain a strange sort of dominance over my life.
Several times the fantasy prevented my perishing from a loathsome childhood affliction: school. Once in a seventh-grade English class I stumbled into a nest of dangling participles. Had I not been able to get my fantasy going in time, those slimy, leechlike creatures would have drained me dry as a puffball in five minutes.
On occasion, Mr. Rumsdale, our seventh-grade English teacher, would unexpectedly break through the thick and buttressed walls of our indifference and start throwing parts of speech in all directions. Several of my friends were knocked silly by flying objects of the preposition, but long before there was any threat to my own cherished ignorance, the old fantasy would carry me to safety. I would be roasting a fresh-caught trout on the rocky shore of some high and distant stream, or maybe just striding along under the sweet weight of a good pack, and it would be morning in the mountains, with the sun rising through the trees.
Mr. Rumsdale once lowered the battering ram he used for a voice and told me that I had better stop this constant dreaming. Otherwise, he predicted, both he and I would probably die as old men in seventh-grade English.
Even I knew by then that the Big Trip, for all its utility as an antidote to boredom, could not endure forever simply as fantasy. One day I would have to turn it into the real thing. I would have to take the Big Trip back into the mountains and face great hardship and overcome terrible obstacles. To that end, I began serving an apprenticeship in the out-of-doors.
I practiced “sleeping out alone” in the backyard, my ears ever alert to the approaching footpad of some hairy terror, until at last I conquered my overpowering fear of the dark and the ghastly things that flourished there. I learned to build fires, using nothing more than a few sticks, a couple of newspapers, and a box and a half of kitchen matches. I studied the art of camp cookery, and soon could serve up a hearty meal of flaming bacon, charred potatoes, three-pound pancakes, and butterscotch pudding with gnat topping. After a longer time, I even taught myself to eat these things. Through practical experience, I learned that it is best not to dry wet boots over a fire with your feet still in them. I learned that some sleeping bags are stuffed with the same filler used in dynamite fuse and that it is best not to let sparks land on one of them, particularly when it is occupied by your body. Thus did the Big Trip shape my life and give meaning even to its failures and disasters.
As I grew older, I went off with friends on numerous lengthy trips into the mountains, thinking each time that perhaps at last I was making the Big Trip. But I never was. These were pleasant, amiable excursions, occasionally distinguished by a crisis or two, but I was always disappointed by the realization that they fell far short of the Big Trip of my aging fantasy. So one day in the summer that I turned seventeen, I decided I would at last, once and for all, plan and execute, or be executed by, the Big Trip.
When I announced and elaborated on my plans for the benefit of my mother and stepfather, there was great wailing and a gnashing of teeth already well gnashed from my previous and much lesser excursions into the wilderness. From then until the day I left, my mother could scarcely take time out from climbing the walls to make the beds and cook our meals.
The plans were indeed formidable, and in my unsure moments they even caused me to wail and gnash a little. The terrain I planned to cross looked on a topographical map like the scribblings of a mildly demented chimpanzee and spanned a distance of some thirty miles as the crow flies. If the crow walked, as they say, it was more like fifty. The area was unmarred by roads or trails. It contained plenty of tracks, though, some of which belonged to grizzlies. And as everyone knows, a grizzly, if he happens along at the right moment, can transform a quiet walk to a privy into a memorable experience.
Preparations for the Big Trip were remarkably simple, since by this time I knew that nothing destroys a Big Trip quicker than a surplus of comforts or a dearth of hardships. And a Big Trip is defined by its hardships.
These hardships, of course, could not be left to mere chance. A number of them had to be prepared in advance and taken along in the pack, so to speak, to be trotted out any time the going got easy. The basic formula for creating hardships is to take no nonessentials and only a few of the essentials.
One of the essentials you leave behind is most of the food. My stock of grub consisted of pancake flour, a slab of bacon, dried fruit, butter, sugar, and salt. For emergency rations, I took a bag of dehydrated chicken noodle soup, enough, it turned out, to feed an army of starving Cossacks for upwards of three weeks.
About the only gear I took was a sleeping bag, a knife, and a rifle. I carried along the rifle in case I ran into a grizzly, since my idea of hardships did not include getting eaten by a bear. Although I knew a 32 Special couldn’t stop a charging grizzly, I took comfort in the notion that I might be able to take the edge off his appetite on his way to the table. In the early days of my fantasy, I had conceived of building a stockade each night as protection against bears, but when you have a grizzly coming for you, no matter how much encouragement and incentive he might offer, it is difficult to get a stockade up in time to do much good. So I was taking the rifle.
At practically the last moment, I decided to take along a companion. In light of the other meticulous preparations for the Big Trip, it seems incongruous now that I should have selected my traveling companion so casually. Retch, as he will be known here, had just moved to town recently and was probably the only person of my acquaintance who had not heard of the Big Trip. This gap in his knowledge may be the reason that he was the only person I could find who was ready and willing to accompany me on the expedition. Perhaps in my last-minute desperation for companionship I skipped a few details and did not impress upon him the full magnitude of the trip.
“How would you like to go on a camping trip?” I asked him. “Spend a few days hiking around in the mountains, catch some fish, cook out?”
Retch said he thought he would like that. Somehow he got the impression we were going on an extended fishing trip and marshmallow roast. Later, under somewhat harsher circumstances, he was to reveal to me that never in his whole life had he nourished any fantasies about a Big Trip. I was appalled that a human life could be so sterile, so devoid of splendor.
Even by the time my parents were driving us to the jumping-off spot, Retch still did not fully comprehend the full portent of the Big Trip. My stepfather’s funereal air, my mother’s quivering lips, and my own grim silence, however, began to undermine his confidence.
“It isn’t as though we’re going to be gone forever,” he would say, attempting to console my mother. She would reply with a low, quavering moan. By the time we disembarked from the car, Retch was convinced that we were going to be gone forever.
As things turned out, he was nearly right.
For two pleasant days, the Big Trip did seem as if it were going to be nothing more than an ordinary camping trip, and therefore not a Big Trip at all. The sky was an impeccable blue, the firewood dry and fragrant, the trout in the lakes fat and hungry, the huckleberries sweet. I could scarcely conceal my disappointment at the good time we were having.
On the third morning I was awakened by a howl of anguish from Retch. “The deer got into our packs and ate everything but the bacon and chicken noodle soup,” he yelled.
My heart laughed up. This, finally, was a real hardship.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We can always live off the country.” Then I looked around. The country didn’t seem to be very edible. Perhaps the trip would be harder than even I expected.
Later that same day, we came across what we thought must be fresh grizzly tracks. Concluding that where there are fresh grizzly tracks, there are likely to be fresh grizzlies, we quickened our pace. Near the top of the next mountain, we slowed to a dogtrot, which we maintained for the rest of the day.
That night we camped on a barren ridge without water, and ate fried bacon and soup for supper. The soup, which wasn’t much good with water, was even worse without it. (The fact that the deer had not touched the chicken noodle soup proved to me once and for all that deer are animals of good sense and discriminating taste.) After dinner, we sat around the fire picking the bacon out of our teeth with noodles.
“I’ve got an idea,” Retch said.
“What?” I said.
“Let’s quit,” he said.
Our quitting then would have been like a skydiver’s quitting halfway to the ground. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It will be a lot easier from now on.”
Storm clouds were rising in the west when we crawled into our sleeping bags. Soon the heavy, black thunderheads were over us. Lightning licked the peak of our mountain a few times and then started walking down the ridge toward us. When it struck close enough to bounce us off the ground, I predicted, breathlessly, “It’s going to pass over the top of us. Next time it will strike down below …”
By the time I was this far along in my prophecy, it was evident that I didn’t have much future as a prophet. It didn’t seem as if I even had much future.
When you see lightning hit from a distance, it appears that the bolt zaps into the ground and that’s it, but when you are occupying the ground the bolt zaps into, it’s not that way at all. First, a terrible bomb goes off and you’re inside the bomb, and then streams of fire are going every which way and you’re going every which way, and the brush lights up like neon signs in Chinatown, and there are pools of fire on the ground and high voltage sings in the air. Then it’s dark again, black, sticky dark, and the rain hits like a truckful of ice.
The first thing I noticed, upon regaining consciousness, was that I was running to beat hell down the side of the mountain. I was wearing only my shorts. I do not know if I was fully dressed or not when the lightning hit.
Something was bounding like a deer through the brush ahead of me, and I hoped it was a deer and not a grizzly, because I was gaining on it. Then I saw that it was just a pair of white shorts, or reasonably white shorts, also running down the mountain. I yelled at the white shorts that I thought there was a cliff up ahead. The white shorts gave a loud yelp and vanished.
I found Retch sorting and counting his bones at the bottom end of a ten-foot drop. He said he might have been hurt worse, but some rocks cushioned his fall.
“You didn’t happen to bring an aspirin, did you?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“I didn’t think so,” he said.
While we were draining out sleeping bags (it was raining, remember), I made one last attempt at prophecy.
“Well, Retch,” I said, “think of it this way-things just can’t get any worse than they are right now.”
In the days that followed we were to look back upon that moment as a time of great good fortune and decadent high living.
The driving, ice-cold rain continued through the night. The next morning we crawled out of our sleeping bags, stirred around in the mud until we found our clothes, put them on, and with an absolute minimum of jovial banter, spent an unsuccessful hour trying to start a fire. For breakfast we stirred up some chicken noodle soup in muddy water. The muddy water improved the flavor and texture of the soup considerably, and by drinking it through our teeth we could strain out the larger pebbles and even some of the noodles.
On all sides of us, as far as a bloodshot eye could see, was a vast, raging storm of mountains. Our soggy map told us we were ten miles from the end of the nearest trail, more than twenty miles from the nearest road. Retch and I stared at each other across the pile of steaming sticks that represented our aborted effort at fire-building, and I could see a reflection of my own misery and despair swirling in his eyes. “What do we do now?” I thought.
Then I remembered a sure-fire remedy for predicaments of this sort. It was recommended to me by a fierce, old man who knew the mountains well and knew what they can do to a person. “When everything else has failed, there is only one thing to do,” he said. “You tough it out.”
