Wednesday, August 14--
8:16 a.m.-
Chelsea
is snoring in the tent.
EZ
is knee-deep in the river, noodling catfish and clamshells with her toes and
her nose since being freed from the tent fifteen minutes ago. Dew is showering
from the trees in transient cascades as air begins stirring the leaves. A fleet
of ephemerous bugs, hatched only moments ago with a life span of minutes is
looping and diving over the water--OOPS, a dragonfly just grabbed one for
breakfast. Strands of silk are flagging horizontally, streaming in perfect
agreement, shooting sunlight along their lengths.
8:29-
Chelsea
is rousing. Now not, because I let the tent flap close and stopped singing
"GOOD MORNING CAMPERS, LET US ZIP ZIP ZIP, LET US SING A SONG TO START THE
DAY" as my father tormented me on early mornings. A blue jay is
disagreeing with itself and EZ is chewing grass.
It
was a restless night. We lay down inside the tiny tent shortly after ten.
Darkness pressed hard in the meager low space saturated with damp dog and
soaked clothing and too little air. The air mattress had too much air, and
Chelsea's search for comfort persistently bounced me around, just for fun. Her
breathing finally deepened around quarter-to-twelve when EZ growled low in her
throat. Then muttered again.
Quiet.
"HAAGHH,"
close to my side of the micro-thin nylon.
I
may have involuntarily uttered a base guttural sound. Thudding cleft hooves and
deer huffs retreated into deep foreign blackness. Earlier, as we played cards
by the fire, some nocturnal creature practiced gross gnarly sounds and drew our
attention across the river; crunching noises as crocodiles make while crunching
bloody human skulls into bleach-white dust. Chelsea beamed the flashlight over
the water but no grisly animal showed itself. This noise went on during the
night except when EZ arose around two a.m. to crunch her own sounds down inside
her food dish.
9:19-
After
a modicum of torment from Dad--"get up! The day's half over"--Chelsea
is up and laying a fire. (Why are young people and some females so averse to
playful fellow campers before noon?) After suddenly craving hot melted pizza
and yeasty Crazy bread portions from reading a full-color flyer for Little
Caesars she wads up the newspaper and stuffs it strategically under three or
four heavy chunks of tree trunk.
"Can
I use your lighter?"
She
lights an edge of newspaper.
"You
need some real tiny sticks." (The newspaper is mostly burned up.)
"I
have tiny sticks. Right under
there." She pokes at the pile, pulling it apart.
"Just
leave it alone. Let it burn."
Big
sticks are dumped on top, weighing it down. Flames disappear. Chelsea prods at
the demise, as though stirring will change its mind.
Yesterday-
We
got on the water shortly after 1:00, after a trip back home for the bow saw.
The Weather Channel promised the morning's rain would be gone by noon. It was,
but not the clouds.
We pitched the tent on Glitter Beach's bend in the river. Chelsea laid
out the tarp, then the flat yellow and green nylon tent, and on knees twirled
the sectional aluminum poles like a majorette. I instructed by pointing, "put
the pointy end through that peak tab," (a rumple of green tent.).
"The pointy end goes up."
She stares at me, glances back and forth at each end of the pole, stares
back, holding it like a javelin and rotating it counter clockwise, then scratches
her left eyebrow.
"Oh.
You need a stake first." I get one rusty bent wire out of the cloth bag
and toss it over, gesturing vaguely at one corner of tent-ropes and knots
frazzled in disarray.
She
stares back with a flummoxed vacant face, not abandoning her optimism, but
close.
It's
an illustration of crummy communication. I know exactly how to set up the tent
and what goes where when. No big deal. Oppenheimer knew how to explode atoms.
No big deal. And I was trying to, with a paucity of finger points and grunted
technical jargon like, "just stick it right there," explain nuclear
fission to a 1950s housing-development wife. Chelsea'd never even seen the
tent, except as a three-year-old running away from bugs.
2:55-
"Are
you serious, Dad? You really don't have the pump? Why didn't you bring
it?"
"Because
it's character-building to blow up our own bed before sleeping on it."
She
lays out the flat air bed then slumps into a collapsible camp chair, pokes at
the nozzle and squints into the hole, blurts "UUUH," waves away flies
from her face, and says, "I don't care if we have a mattress. I like to
sleep on the ground. Honest. So if you want it, you blow it up," she tells
me after her seventh brief child-labor huff. "I'm already dizzy."
4:06-
Downriver
in search of firewood we found a lavish cache of standing deadwood on a bank
high enough to step out onto land. (Well-seasoned wood is ready for burning if
it makes musical tones when clunked together.) Chelsea had nothing but
tribulation from the saw until I thought to mention that she needn't push down,
just drag it back and forth and let the saw do the work. It's what my father
taught me forty years ago and I forgot that it is a learned skill.
We
worked as a team. One cut and tossed, the other loaded the boat. Then we traded
duties. The boat darkened with bark, and woody debris too that will slowly
disappear as it diminishes into powder down into the carpet.
Then
we dashed around another two bends to Grand Sandbanks to pick up an assortment
of clamshells to bring back to camp to secretly flip into the shallows for EZ.
(She
discovered this diversion a couple of weeks ago while at Grand Sandbanks, where
the river bottom is covered with stones and a sparse scattering of clamshells.
I became aware that she was becoming more intent and more daring about
submerging her head and emerging dripping with treasure in her jaws. Clamshells
began to appear on shore. I picked one up, flipped it back into six-inch deep water.
Then looked later and saw it bleaching in the sun six feet up on shore.)
Chelsea
rolled up jeans cuffs and poked the river with a stick and EZ picked up
shells--"BLAM." A gunshot startles.
Chelsea's eyes and mouth widen, EZ freezes and stares, a scene of slow-motion
startle, jerky blurred motion. An appalling intrusion, antithetical to the
soothing quiet, cricket "chirrings" shattered by gunfire.
I
mutter swear words. The clam pickers resume with tense lips and hunched upper
neck muscles.
Four
more explosions in five seconds. Chelsea expresses her indignance through
hip-shot body language then, scanning the lip of the sand cliff, she and EZ
hurry back to the boat.
A
man wearing a hillbilly hat appears at the steep hill. So do a young boy and an
old woman looking like Irene Ryan. They stand and watch us pulling away from
shore, whisper guffaws, then back away and disappear. Our campsite is on the
other side of the river.
So,
back to our shallow sandy beach with a boat full of wood and a half-dozen EZ
shells. It's what she's doing now as she's done since yesterday afternoon. She
carries them out; we flip them back in when she's not looking. The live clam on
shore was her own find.
6:55-
The
jumbo bag of Cool Ranch Doritos has just been given a sifting of sawdust.
Chelsea sawed a stick in half over it.
7:07-
Yahtzee
on the tote top, like a bass drum. Chelsea Yahtzee'd for the third time. All
aces--the ultimate insult.
EZ
stayed in the river coordinating clam activity, every-so-often coming up to give
us a douse from her tail until told, "go away."
7:52-
Treetops
across the river are painted with gold, like each tree has been uprooted, tips
dipped in gold light and replanted for us to gush over. An astounding sight
after a day of infrequent sun.
Night-
"A
man in oily coveralls gliding through the trees carrying a red railroad
lantern, I'll bet. Seemed it was moving this way too," is what I said when
we sighted a red glowing light swaying through the swamp. "Thought I heard
a drastic clacking sound too, like false teeth gnawing bloody bones."
My
daughter's shoulder pressed warm into my side. Her grin was sickly and eyes
glowing like ice were not in the least forbearing about what they had seen.
"What
should we do?" she pleaded, withdrawing a scroll and a quill and quickly
jotting her will. Her movements betrayed alarm, quite sure of great harm.
I
chuckled a sadistic chortle before saying it was truck taillights departing a
farm.
Later
night, misting-
An
inchworm is buckling across our table. The light rain we've enjoyed up in the
leaves has begun a lenient, though distracting, drip on our cards.
10:56 a.m.-
We've had a swim. It's what we did on the count of "three"
and resurfaced screaming in Arctic water and did everything to back out of
it quick. I scrubbed my hair with a bar of soap then, committed to not spending
the rest of the day with more sticky white lather on my head than usual, voluntarily
dove back in to rinse it off. Chelsea lovingly diverted the icebergs. Now
she's towel-wrapped by the fire and I'm writing this--dried off--in jeans
and parka.
Naw, it's not so bad. I panicked too early. Temperature is seventy
with a pleasant breeze twirling over us and through the south grasses.
11:14-
There
is an age of a person when blowing bubbles from a jumbo 79-cent bottle of
MIRACLE BUBBLES, with MIRACLE WAND INSIDE, (Ages years 4+) is considered gauche
and unprofessional. The team of dedicated lawyers, who determined the legal
minimum age of less than 4, forgot to exclude 13-year-old girls from the
warning label. Bubbles blown by the wind is an old guy thing. And a childish
thing. But when little children get to an age, somewhere around Chelsea's age,
they consider it an asinine chore. But when some people get to an older age,
it's no longer a bore. My father taught me that. He contrapted devices out of
string and wire at the shore of his cottage and giggled with glee when gusts of
wind blew colossal rainbow bubbles out over the lake while his son grimaced in
horror inside the cabin.
A
dog called to sit nicely while a man blows bubbles in her face ought be a fun
enlivening affair for it. But she only turns her face slightly to one side as a
big bubble bursts on her nose and splashes soap in her eyes. Bubble-blower man
puts on a pout then remembers that she'd rather be elsewhere, back in the river
attending to mothers of pearl.
11:26-
"Don't
call me moron," my beloved daughter retorted, after I called her a moron
and tossed out her soaking towel from the tent where it'd been wetting my bed.
12:36-
"Looks
like one of those kind of clouds that's like 3-D and you can grab it. Just go
up there and like cut a little piece off and carry it around. It's so big and
poofy. Like a pillow." Chelsea's arms gesture, hands dip and swerve,
explaining her feelings for a summer fluff cloud.
We're
parked six feet from shore in six-foot deep river playing Yahtzee. EZ is
confined to the front but arises often to be reassured she's still loved and
part of the crew. High cirrus clouds dissipated during the morning. Summery
bright cotton clouds are now blooming against deep cerulean space, uprising air
currents morphing faces and zoo animal caricatures in the wisps of mist.
12:44-
"That
one looks like a pig with no legs. Long snout, fat tummy," Chelsea
describes, splayed fingers dragging up her cheek.
12:49-
"Civic
leaders and tyrants alike are scheming their schemes and smoking their pipes.
All the while such beautiful things are happening up above us all the time, of
massive importance. They'll never see it, nor does it matter. They will never
know or care and think such matters empty dross." Chelsea draws her pillow
up and peers one eye at a father whose mind has gone bad.
"They're
mating on my pillow."
Locked together a dragonfly pair jounces and bucks uphill on her pillowcase,
her tail locked onto him just behind his head. Six inches upwards and further,
nudging onward up close to Chelsea's eyes.
"Okay!" she blurts, widening her eyes and grinning abashed.
"Hope
they don't leave a mess on your pillow."
Chelsea,
in horror, swipes a hand across her eyes.
"Do
you hear anything?"
"Dad, shut up. It's in the shape of a heart."