another round of Kumbayah

In light of my astonishing absence from my very own blog, I'll try and capture some of the highlights for you:

We went camping at Silent Lake, an experience I can heartily recommend, although when I try to recount the story you might wonder why. The first night there we made an error in judgement about when to start cooking--which was partly an error in judgement about how bad we both are at getting a fire going. (Fairly, although I discovered that having kindling helps. Ahem.) This wouldn't have been so bad except that neither of us had ever lit our new stove before, and as it was getting dark, we weren't able to really see how much fuel we had let out into the primer cup. So when spook lit it and it shot flames a couple feet into the air, we were alarmed, but not nearly as alarmed as when the wind blew said flames directly towards the fuel canister.
I am happy to report that we did not get blown up, and that dinner was good. When I cook, we get rice and beans. When spook cooks, jerk chicken is considered camping food.
We have a convertible camping light--you know: "It's a lantern! It's a flashlight! It doesn't do anything particularly well!" and we did the dishes in its feeble glow. Then we went to bed, and somehow I ended up pulling the bulb right out of it. Don't ask. I don't even know. Fixing it in the pitch blackness was out of the question, and so we decided to put the unsuccessful parts of the evening behind us and just go to sleep.
In the middle of the night, spook got up to pee. The vault toilets were just across from our campsite. It should have been okay. But did I mention the complete darkness? When he realized he didn't know where he was, he turned around to retrace his steps back to the tent. It was only when he came up on the yurt at the end of the road that he realized he'd picked another direction entirely. So imagine him there, if you will, standing on the road remaining calm mainly by force, thinking "Okay. I could just stay where I am. In a couple of hours it will be light." This is when the wolves started to howl.
This story too has a happy ending, which involves me fumbling for the car keys to turn the dome light on--back in the tent, our nervous systems overloaded with adrenaline, we listened to A Thing Of Indeterminate Size whuffling around us. In the dark. The very, very dark.

I will spare you the details of paddling our asses off to avoid being caught on the lake in a thunderstorm on day two. Also the macho asshole thinking (mine, all mine) which led to the 15 km hike on day three that seemed somehow to be principally uphill. (At kilometre eleven or so, spook turned to me and said "You are valiant, my little monkey. Also stubborn." When I told Pauly the story, he said "Oh, 'col, you always did have the biggest dick of all of us." Geez, gentle reader, do you suppose there might be a lesson in here somewhere?)

It was so fun.

We had planned our trip in order to visit Petroglyphs Provincial Park for their night programming. Seeing the layers of carvings that aren't visible during the day was awesome, and trying to take in the idea that all of these carvings were made over a period of about five hundred years was mindbending. The thing I discovered about myself, however, is that I can't do reverence on anyone else's timetable. I get cranky and smartalecky.
A few years ago, I went to a midnight mass with my friend Francine, who's a Catholic girl born and bred. How was I to know that after what seemed like an eternity of incense and guilt trips (no, I'm not kidding, I wish I was) they would get to the choir singing "What Child is This," and Francine would get the giggles? "Why lies He in such mean estate/Where ox and ass are sleeping?" It was an awful, contagious giggle fit, too, one of the ones where you hiccup and snort and whisper "Ass!" to each other like seven year old boys. Causing the elderly ladies in the pew ahead of you to turn and glare. Which of course only sets off another round of snorting.
This was not like that--instead of the priest intoning "You never call, you never write," there was Annoying White Woman who spent a bunch of time trying to prove how she was a critical thinker by asking questions like "How do you know it has spiritual significance? How do you know it's not just graffiti?" until I thought I would start bleeding out my eyes from the effort of not slapping her. But in other ways it was exactly like that, in that I got tired of looking at the things that everyone else was discussing and spaced out to make smartass comments in my head. The petroglyphs really are awe-inspiring, and the evening program is worth it, but I suggest making a first trip at some unpopular time when you can just stare without some New White Genius spouting off about their own interpretation and your very sweet but frustratingly imprecise parks worker trying to talk about sex and genitals without ever saying "sex" or "penis."

That's the rough sketch of my camping trip, not including the hanging the tent in the bathroom to dry it out, the copious mud, or the soot I managed to get on my face while inexpertly roasting corn.

It was worth it to come back to the city, though, if only because we got a new romance anthology in--Highland Vampire--and because my lovely coworker Cookie bought How to Marry a Millionaire Vampire. Cookie is very comfortable with his masculinity, and besides, he harbors the sinister intention of forcing us all to read it.