The golden mantles are now so close to tame they’ll come right up to us and beg. Or, if you leave your oatmeal bowl sitting next to you, they’ll come right up and help themselves.
Note: they only do this when The Squirrel is not around.
I am the minnow whisperer.
For the second day in a row we went out on the boat, cruising around the lake, trying to use up the last of the fuel. We stopped at Part Time Point again (still an island), and took a swim out to the buoys. Last time we were there I found a small fish which seemed to be living in or around the buoy. I wanted to see if it was still there. After sitting quietly for a few minutes, the fish appeared and swam around me. Yay!
My compatriots were at the next buoy out. As I swam over to join them, I saw a bug, trapped on its back because it’s wings were stuck on the surface tension of the water. I wasn’t sure what to do about this because I couldn’t tell if it was a bee or a bee mimic. (A type of fly that looks like a bee.) I was trying to get a better look when all of a sudden a small fish came up from the depths, and mostly swallowed the insect in question. I say mostly swallowed, because the butt end (where the stinger could possibly be) was sticking out of it’s mouth. And then the little fucker turned and swam straight at me.
Suffice to say there was a LOT of screaming and flailing. (I’ve never been stung by a bee and I don’t intend to start now, thank you very much.)
At that point I was done with the water, but the fish weren’t done with me. A small german speckled trout decided I was its new home, and spent 50 yards or so hanging out in the crook of my arm, in my cleavage, and being shooed away from my nether regions. Any flailing resulted in the fish disappearing for a moment, before it came back to hang out again. It was very cool.
We put out peanut butter for the rodents. They lost their fluffy little minds.
The cabin comes complete with its own local fauna, and mornings begin with “The Chipper Show”, where the Gentleman in the Red Shirt sets out handfuls of peanuts, and we watch the local fauna lose its collective mind.
There’s an assortment of blue jays, a couple of robins, and the occasional tiny beautiful birds that flit past making lyrical little cheeps. But the real highlight of the cabin fauna is the rodentia. The primary players are The Squirrel, an assortment of golden mantle squirrels, and a handful of chipmunks (chippers).
The Squirrel is some sort of grey ground squirrel and it is the king of the roost, announcing its presence with a loud series of barks, which it seems to use as a way of indicating its territory, telling off blue jays and other rodentia when they get too close to the peanuts, and telling off the humans when there are insufficient peanuts. The Squirrel is a complete psychopath, chasing off other rodents, (we’ve seen it come damn close to catching a chipper), as well as the birds. And when I say chase off the other birds, I mean it climbs up the tree they’re sitting in, and leaps, barking, onto the branch the bird in question is sitting on. When the bird flies away, it will occasionally leap from branch to branch trying to follow it, screeching as it goes.
The chipmunks are the smallest players in The Chipper Show, and some years they’re the predominant rodent population at the cabin. This year there are only a handful, and in their place we have hordes of the slightly larger golden mantle squirrels. The golden mantles are smaller than The Squirrel, and mostly not as aggressive.
The first day I was present for The Chipper Show, a golden mantle decided it wanted some of the peanuts, and tried to go and grab one, but half way across the back deck, it got startled, and froze. For 20 minutes. The Gentleman in the Red Shirt and I made all sorts of jokes about it having a kernel panic, a blue screen of death, and other assorted computer lock up issues. After 20 minutes, the golden mantle finally turned around and left. Over the next couple days we saw this performance repeated, and it became evident that this is some sort of golden mantle survival strategy.
It also became evident that there were a bunch of golden mantles running around, which got named as we became able to identify them. In order of size from largest to smallest: Segmentation Fault (Seg Fault), General Protection Fault (GPF), Kernel Panic, and Core Dump. Kernel Panic is sort of a catch all for the ones that we can’t identify. We’re pretty sure Core Dump is an adolescent, and Seg Fault is pregnant.
My trip got better as we found more non-Nature intensive things to do. Like driving around on dirt roads, looking at old gold mines, and exploring an abandoned town with old graveyards. (Oddly enough, one of the graveyards had tombstones going back to the 1850′s and tombstones as recent as the late 1980′s. Who came back to bury these people?)
As the weather cooled down and made lake involved activities less appealing, I finally began to relax. A couple days were spent driving down to Quincy for supplies (and, admittedly, the cell reception). A couple afternoons involved a beach I’d never known about before, that didn’t involve a boat or a hike through the woods. (The beach wasn’t even on a rock outcrop!)
Eventually I’d settled in enough that when the Gentleman in the Red Shirt suggested a foray into creek walking, I actually agreed. This time I started smart, I took my Klonopin before I left. (Yes, I took to tranquilizing myself before my forays into Nature.) The whole thing went very well, with me climbing up and down embankments and tromping through both the creek and the woods. Real woods! No road, no trail, just me, trees, and dirt comprised mostly of rotting deadfall. It was AWESOME.
That’s right boys n girls, I hiked, I tromped, I climbed, I got dirty, I got scratched, and god dammit, I didn’t cry. This could be the start of a non-aggression pact with Nature. (Maybe.)
All through the miracle of “better living through chemistry”.
We’re supposed to try a field trip back to the lake and the boat today. I’m bringing my Klonopin with me.
The following day the masses voted to try Nature again. I think it’s because they hate me.
This version involved the boat. Usually the boat gets us out to a place we call Part-Time Point, so named because half the year the rock point is an island. Until this year, I’d never seen it. Usually by August the lake is low enough that there’s a sandbar attaching the rocky outcrop to the mainland. This year it was an island. (Yes, while the rest of the country is having one of the hottest summers on record, here in California we’re having one of the coolest summers ever. Hello global warming!)
Long story short, a loverly time was had by all, until it was time to get out of the boat and return to the car. Because the day had gone so well, I got cocky and decided I could be the first one off the boat and haul it up the beach some with the others still in it. (I’ve done it before. Probably not in 10 years, but I’ve done it before.)
I got one leg out, but then my foot got sucked into some mud… while the boat began drifting away from me. My other leg immediately got caught in the boat, as I went further into the splits position, and the boat began to tip, and take on water. No shit. I was sinking the boat.
Once again, the Gentleman in the Red shirt (who is, thank god, very strong) bailed my ass out, by pulling me back into the boat. I tried to get out again, with, yet again the same result, only this time I got my foot caught under a rock. (Later, when the adrenaline wore off, I realized I’d cut my foot in a couple of places on the rock. At the time this was lost on me. Probably because I was more interested in the fact that I’d almost sunk the boat yet again. And lost my other shoe trying to free my foot.)
As fucked up as this sounds, the whole thing was actually comical, once I realized I hadn’t actually sunk the boat. I was actually giggling during parts of it. So while I still think Nature won this one, at least I had a good experience.
Oh, and I caught a 1/2″ toad that was lichen green, as well as a 2″ long fish. (I let them both go, I just wanted to hold them for a moment.) Really, if it weren’t for fauna, I’d hate Nature.
Because the prior day’s field trip into Nature was so much fun, the group decided to do it again. Because my personal philosophy is “live and don’t learn”, I decided to go with them.
At least I asked a few of the right questions first: How far is The Hole in the Rock from the road? The Gentleman in the Red Shirt replied that it was about 300 feet from the road. That sounded like my kind of field trip. I also asked how steep it was, and he said that it was steep enough that he went up semi-crawling, but that it wasn’t too bad.
This should have been setting off warning bells, but as I said, “Live and don’t learn.”
We drove out a windy dirt road until we came to a pair of bridges crossing a small river. One bridge was drivable, the other a relic from the mid 1800′s. There was a small pullout just past the bridge where we stopped.
I knew I’d made a mistake when I saw the trail going down to the river. I wasn’t sure I could get down (I’m scared of heights, and specifically scared of falling down stairs, etc.), and I wasn’t sure I could get back up. But I am a prideful thing, and rather than admit defeat and go hang out at the car, I cried for a while, then sat down on my ass and slid down the trail.
(Yes, there’s been a lot of crying on this trip. Most of it has to do with forays into Nature.)
There was more crying by the time I reached the bottom of the trail. 1) I was pretty sure I couldn’t get back up the way I’d come down, 2) I’d scraped and bruised the ever-living shit out of the back of my left thigh, and 3) somewhere along the way the crotch of my shorts had gotten caught on a rock, and I’d acquired an extra 4″ of ventilation in my nether regions. At least this round of crying was semi-private: by the time I’d gotten down to the river, most everyone else had climbed up to see The Hole.
Apparently The Hole was made to allow a river to be diverted while they built a bridge over it in the mid 1800s. And apparently when you come out the other side, there’s an amazing view. I say apparently because I never saw the view: I could barely get my fat ass down to the river, let alone 20′ up a water-washed sloped rock face. At one point it was literally perpendicular to the ground.
The others explored The Hole. I explored the river at the bottom of The Hole. It was actually very pretty, and I found a frog which made me inordinately happy. I was doing pretty well until people started coming back from The Hole, which meant we had to climb back up to the car. I looked up the trail I’d slid down and realized there was no way in hell I was going to make it back up. Particularly not while free-balling it in a pair of overly ventilated shorts. (Clearly, going on this trip wasn’t the first bad decision I’d made that day.)
I was positive they were going to have to airlift me the hell out of there.
Fortunately my girlfriend is wonderful, and found another route that could be reached by walking down the river. We even saw a small snake swimming down the river. Other than the fauna, Nature sucks.
I was on the edge of the parking lot when the drugs began to take hold.
After 3 hours had passed with no effects, we’d decided that the brownie was defective. Instead we decided to go to the beach.
As I stepped out of the parking lot and into Nature, I knew I’d made a mistake. About 20 feet into the woods I was about 100 feet behind the rest of my compatriots, who seemed to have no trouble navigating the semi-existant path. I was seriously considering sitting down on a log and saying I couldn’t do it, but kept walking when I saw the other waiting for me. I talked myself into continuing, at least long enough to catch up.
What I’d planned on saying on my arrival was “I can’t do this, I’m going to sit right here until you get back.” What I actually said was “you don’t need to wait for me, I can see the red of your shirt, and follow that.”
To make matters worse, I was dumb enough to do what I said.
After what felt like 2 days wandering around these fucking woods, I looked up to discover I couldn’t see red ANYWHERE. That’s when I started crying. Because I’m all butch like that. That’s when the gentleman in red came back up to check on me. That’s when I realized we were going to go downhill. There was more crying.
Let me take a moment from the narrative to describe the beach in question. It’s not a beach in any formal sense of the word, especially when the lake is full. You walk through the woods, and suddenly the trees stop, and you’re looking down at a shale-esque outcrop that got turned sideways through some cataclysmic event. The whole thing descends into the water at about a 30 degree angle. There’s one or two trees that have pushed their way up through the rocks, but for the most part all you see is uneven rock edges, no places suitable for laying out a towel and pretending you’re having a good time. Not that I could have pretended to have a good time at that point. I was busy being low-functioning.
I found a spot at the base of one of the trees when the stones didn’t appear as likely to carve a chunk out of my ass, threw my towel down and plopped my ass into the middle of it. And that’s where I stayed, crying because all I wanted to do was get up and go in the water, and I knew I couldn’t have stood up if my life depended on it.
After an hour or two of sheer bliss, Aack was finally able to get me upright so I could at least get my feet in the water. That lasted about 15 minutes. At that point she was kind enough to take me back to the car, with me ranting about The Outcrop and Nature the entire way. We returned to the cabin. Much napping ensued.
(Fun side note: Aack was the only sober person on that particular outing. Other than her talking to me and occasionally checking in with the others, no one said a damn thing the entire time we were at the beach.)
I drive past the Sun Valley mall twice a day on my way to and from class. Every once in a while I notice something a little odd. A few weeks back I saw an RV parked in the lot. I’ve seen that before, it’s not that unusual.
I’ve seen a gaggle of Tunnel Rat ghetto rides (wannabe gangsters from East of the Caldecott tunnel). That was a little odd, but funny.
Earlier this week I saw several limos parked in the lot. Again, unusual, particularly at 8 AM since the mall doesn’t open for another hour or two.
Today took the cake. Like I said, I’ve seen RVs before. But I’ve never seen someone outside his RV cooking breakfast on his camp stove. The guy had an apron on and everything. I swear to god it looked like something that should have been in a 1950′s Sears catalog. The only thing that could have made it better was if he’d set up a tent.
But that would have just been silly.