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Tuesday, August 5, ‘03

11:55 a.m.-

EZ is sitting facing the Child Development Lab, vibrating and twitching, raptly watching it like a kid at a circus. But circuses show twirling and bucking and fire shooting high under animals dancing. This building she was excited about displayed none of that, no little children in the fenced-in pen juggling midgets or swallowing swords. It was unmoving, though pretty in a governmentally safe sort of way with speed-bumps and signage directing democratic rules, although a pretty young woman emerged with a good juggling act and got into her car. EZ’s eyes didn’t track her at all.

She leapt out of the car ten minutes ago and romped around the college field--a magnificent and uncommon eighty-acre green, treeless and undulant. She rollicked and ran, then halfway across stopped, starred back toward the car with the boat trailer attached, and trotted to the edge of a knoll near the building and sat, fully engaged with something there.

I hear talk on public radio--and I think recently Newsweek--infrequently about dogs’ possibly knowing things we don’t. Them getting active after a day alone just before their companion human arrives home from work. Sensational proof like that, that dogs have an extrasensory understanding.

Chelsea was inside, volunteering her time to develop unfortunate toddlers for an hour or two. EZ hasn’t been told that. She’d never been here before, except on the distant other side of the field to pee when I’d let her out of the car after class. She has no familiarity with the place.

12:01 p.m.-

Chelsea walked out the door, down the handicapped ramp, and unlatched the kennel gate. EZ launched out of her “stay” and hurled across the parking lot throwing kisses and salutatory greetings along the way.

1:05-

Not a very charming weather day. Not crummy, or cold, just bland, disinterested in giving us an enjoyable show. But we put the boat in and loaded it with camping equipment and grocery bags of food, then stood on the dock and looked down into it, wondering cheerlessly where the hell anybody would sit.

Passing out into the main channel Chelsea got grossed out by a nose-bleed of EZ’s and demanded that I wipe off the droplet of blood from the top of her muzzle that a deerfly had overlooked after sucking. I tore off a tear of paper towel from the kitchenware camping bag and handed it over. After coaxing from me--”just wipe it off!”--she threw it back at me after and wouldn’t touch it again in the same way she has refused to ever touch the P-pipe again.

We are going camping overnight. Glitter Beach is the site.

We curve into Sonbeam’s Secret Channel. She screams at me to toss her the fly swatter. She taps it on EZ and swats at the air threatening circling hundreds of swept-wing fighters swirling in for the kill yelling “They’re everywhere, they’re everywhere.”

1:45-

Glitter Beach. Chelsea rises just as I gun the motor to push us up on shore. She falls backward onto the seat and gives me a look.

An eagle feather is floating at shore, a twelve-inch long thick collagen--like translucent plastic--stem and black feathers tipped with white.

“Shut up,” she mutters walking back from the overgrown tent site. “They’re annoying.” (She was talking about crickets, God’s gift to August outdoors, they chirp and sing and scratch coarse-hairs coated with resin, a violin symphony no horse-hairs with rosin could tune a man better.

Chelsea has been away at camp for two weeks. She’s learned to build a fire better since last year and puts wads of color advertising newprint on top of the square, log cabin construction.

2:35-

A girl in a kayak rounds the bend suddenly. EZ leaps into the water and swims out to greet her. The girl, set back by a paddling hard and grinning fiendishly dog coming right toward her, strokes hard, then stops when I say “She’s our attack dog,” just being friendly I thought. Kayak girl might be safe inside an orange plastic shell. But EZ is a dog with teeth bared and swimming fast, five-, four-, three-feet near. I whistle her away. The girl glances back over her shoulder upriver, a clear tactic to indicate that others are near behind, a big meaty brother or two maybe, or parents who know how to handle vagrant river hill-billys and their vulgar deadly dog.

2:42-

“The bug spray isn’t working,” says Chelsea with a Miss Piggy swipe at her hair.

2:43-

Chelsea is pounding a stiff stick onto the tall grass trying to make it lay down, as some sheep herders do with their flock. I’d seen the campsite grass from the water in the last week and contemplated what to do to hack out a space from the four-foot high growth. Had briefly thought of bringing up a lawnmower a day or two in advance and really doing it right. Not natural enough. Considered buying a grass whip but don’t have the money to waste so freely for a one time use. The electric weed whacker would work if I bought a gas-powered generator. (Could’ve borrowed a gas-powered Weed Whacker from work, but didn’t think of it until just now as I write two week later. Could’ve even brought it along when Caleb and I camped, but that was two days ago.)

The best way to open a campsite is by hitting it with a stick, walking over it, dragging a heavy cooler across it. Stubble is not a problem then against soles of bare feet. But cut-grass is.

Chelsea’s fire thrived. She softly sang lullabies to it, and it grew. She sat on my folding canvas camp chair (she forgot hers even though I’d said to bring it) and picked up the video camera, idly filming her rainbow-painted toenails--closeup, a snow-white moth with intricate black detailing on its body while clinging to a stalk of grass, the inside of the cooler, droplets of water dripping off EZ’s long fur from one strand to the next, and me peeing in the river while I had my back turned and didn’t know what she was doing.

She told me later about EZ’s fur dripping, droplets growing big, letting go and landing on another lower layer, coursing downward, pooling on laid-over grass.

Searching for firewood--

It has come to my attention that deadwood hanging out over the river would make fine or finer firewood than deadwood rotting inside the forest. Less insect fuss, less hauling, less trouble if I angle the boat just right to let gravity drop the sawn limbs straight into it.

“This first one’s yours,” I tell Chelsea who, with EZ rampaging up front with her, might feel a bit cramped. She gamely holds out her hand for me to hand her the saw as I nudged the bow into a crotch overhanging air. And river. She saws screeching, EZ is alarmed and sits panicked, but Chelsea learned how to do it last year.

“Okay. I’m like trying to sit on it, trying to cut it, and trying not to push the dang boat out of the shore.” The tip, twelve-feet away, wiggles bigger, dips, binds the blade.

“This is absolutely ridiculous,” she says.

“You’re doing it just right.”

The bank end falls “clunk” against the gunwale. She drops the saw, grabs the balancing dead tree, and slides it toward her, lifting, pulling, pulling it back through the crotch until lays it perfectly in the boat, front to back. Confidence is gained. A morsel added to the plus column of life.

With the river this low the boat stops ten feet from the opposite “inside cuve” bank. Shoes off and in shorts I get out into soft mucky sand and pull it closer, then give Chelsea--in jeans and shoes--a piggy back ride to shore, then point out good candidates for her to saw while I stand in the water and wait to haul her work back. But she needs help with a stubborn trunk leaking “maggots” into her socks. (It was ant eggs, but of little consolation to her.)

I step up the bank through tall skinny grass and don’t like the feeling stinging between little toe and other toe next to it. Cut grass is narrow. It efficiently slips between toes unnoticed then saws with its minute barbed teeth edges into skin before a man of commendable intent knows it. Between the mud all he can see is normal skin and, looking right at the high-singing sting, he can’t see red blood oozing or guts spilling out. But he knows he’s been wounded and hops around wimpishly sawing what the daughter didn’t see.

3:16-

“Screw you fire, stinkin’ piece of crap,” Chelsea said when we got back with the new wood.

3:17-

Frogs are here this year. At least one is, sunk into the Glitter Beach sand.

4:03-

Chelsea holds the Lady Gillette, ready to shave when we get down to Grand Sandbanks. Shaving is a new pastime, nearly fifteen and ready to be part of the popular ninth-grade crowd that frowns on hairy legs, though none of her peers are here. She’s got on the swim suit she wore last year--the blue speckled modest one.

She immediately sits on the stones and shaves.

I blow up the air mattress and she drifts in the whirlpool. Then we both drift in the circular current and contrive animals in solid clouds overhead.

8:15-

The air bed, set high and light atop grasses to dry, isn’t dry. Condensation has soaked the underside and the topside (flocked and soft) didn’t dry so well as intended. I wipe the smooth plastic side and cram it into the tent wet side down. Chelsea builds a Teepee tower of small sticks and I take the boat across river to set up the tripod while it’s still light.

It’s the oldest trick in the book, and I fell for it again. I motor the bow against the high shore, shut off the motor and step to the front and lower the anchor. It descends into ten-inch deep water and sets on the sand. Good. I step onto the bank with the tripod and set it up, solid, right height, for later after dark when I’d be more prone to accident and miscalculation. Perfect.

The boat is backing away, six feet from shore and gaining momentum, anchor not in the water or even touching the water, but dangling uselessly in bare air. I step down the three-foot high bank into the river and wade peevishly and pull it back, making sure to appear to a dog and a daughter that this is how setup for night photography is supposed to look. And my squishy noisy New Balances and socks are supposed to sound like that.

9:45-

We played Yahtzee, of course, on the tote top. Then she wanted to eat and gets out the food cooler and Porgie Pie iron. (Father’s Day gift. It’s a Pudgie Pie cooker if a chef puts buttered bread and pie filling inside and sticks it in the fire, a Porgie Pie iron if the same buttered bread is given ham and cheese.)

Chelsea empties American cheese and round chicken sandwich meat, the butter knife and tub of IT’S BUTTERIFIC!, the Ziplock of melted ice and Hershey bars, EZ’s open can of Alpo and a small baggie of relish. The vacuum-packed pouch of ham she ignores, stuffs it back, lifts the cooler off the tote and sets it on grass in the dim pool of battery-powered light. She pauses, considerately, holding the lid before shutting the food up, “You gonna’ have bologna?”

“Am I gonna’ have what?”

“Bologna?”

“NO! That’s ham. I did not bring bologna.”

She opens the cream bread (round loaf, sliced perfectly, what God imagined when he invented Porgie Pie irons), smooths BUTTERIFIC! on two slices, and laboriously builds her supper sandwich. Satisfying “clink” as the two halves of the iron are seated back together and locked at the handles, she sets it in blistering flames and sits back down to wait.

Five minutes later I suggest she might want to turn it to burn the other side too. She becomes indignant at my disrespectful implication that the redolent soot I am smelling might not be firewood, but charring animal parts inside her Porgie Pie cooker. She flips it and sits back down to talk about boys.

The black chunk was chucked into the dark river and she started over with new ingredients and swearwords.

Wednesday morning-

Towels and swim trunks and a brassiere top hanging in trees.

Empty cans and bathing suit bottoms, American cheese wraps and the bag of Cool Ranch Doritos (wide open to the dew) and remains of Porgies cast away in the dark wait for someone to get up and organize the debris.

I have to work at noon and it’s already 8:15. Chelsea’s still sleeping (she was told yesterday that we must leave by 9:00) and I drink coffee from the Thermos, boiled just before noon yesterday, remarkably still drinkably hot.

“Good morning campers let us zip-zip-zip, let us sing a song to start the day,” I sing carefully. “Good morning campers let us zip-zip-zip, you’re certainly looking gay.”

No response from the tent. Though I watch through the open flaps, hopefully.

EZ walks there and looks in. She walks away.

I try a religious song, to the tune of “I’ve been working on the railroad.” An arm flops up, then falls dead, inside the tent.

“Yabba-Dabba Dew!” is performed classically. So is William Tell Overture about an apple balanced on a guy’s head.

8:23 a.m.-

Chelsea is laying facing out with her chin on her hands. The screen flaps are open, from me letting EZ in to roust up a girl. Disgust is on Chelsea’s face.

“Why do we have to leave at 9:00?! It’s three frickin’ hours ‘till you have to be at your frickin’ dumb job.”

9:55-

Black Box at Grand Sandbanks. Half-hearted interest in learning.