Dang, another day and another zero words. I talked to Big today, and he seemed to find it easier as the months go on to write his thousand words every day. I don't even have that as a goal (simply writing each and every day), and I can barely find the energy to do it.
So, today was Father's Day, and I had intended to put out my Rish Outcast episode for the story "Father's Day In August," which I wrote in 2005. But I didn't. I had it all edited, except for putting in the music, so I could still have had it done today, had I wanted to, but just like writing yesterday (and today, to be honest), I decided to simply let it go.
Thanks, Elsa.
Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-Ups In June: 2734
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a woman about hiking (this was the same really cool lady who just got married, having her special day with pictures and flowers and relatives and bridesmaids, COVID-19 be damned), and she mentioned that she's a huge hiking enthusiast, and asked me if I had gone to various places around the area. I hadn't been to many of them, and she suggested I check out a place where a river comes down a mountain, going into a circular hole in the rock, and becoming a waterfall in the cavern below the hole. She said it was, essentially, a donut waterfall. I couldn't stop thinking about it, combining two of my favorite things like that, and joked to Big that the only place more tempting would be called Pepsi Breasts Donut Falls.
I never went there, though, because I knew it was relatively far away (and my sense of direction is notoriously horrible, which guarantees I get lost anytime I go anywhere). But after going hiking two days in a row last week, I decided to head off in the middle of the day and see if I couldn't find this donut waterfall. I gave the address to my phone, and told it to guide the way.
Well, it didn't. Believe me, the f-word got a lot of exercise as my phone would tell me my destination was eight minutes away, and a minute later would say the same thing. Eventually, I discovered that the phone kept losing its GPS signal, and when it would get it back, it would tell me I had missed my turn and now the destination would involve a U-turn.*
Finally, I got to my destination, got out of my car, and looked around. I was about an hour from home, in a town I hadn't been in since 1987 (it might have been '86, I dunno, but my mom had brought me and my friends to The Haunted Old Mill, and there it sat, abandoned and covered with graffitti and crumbling cinderblocks). I wandered around trying to find the hiking trail, and wondering how there would be a waterfall in the middle of a neighborhood. I turned on my phone's GPS again, and asked it how far I was from my destination. Now it said twenty-six minutes, despite me having gone where it told me.
Eventually, I realized that there were two streets with the same name in two bordering towns, and one was Big and one was Little. I had gone Little. So I got back in the car--now two full hours into my drive--and let it guide me into the canyon, which it had sent me to a half-hour before, then told me to do a U-turn as I started to go up.** The phone said, before it started to lose the GPS signal (again) that it would be nine miles up the canyon, so I reset my odometer so that I'd know when I neared my destination, even if/when the phone stopped giving me directions.
Up, up, up I went, and it was some really beautiful country with breathtaking vistas (and tons of people out and about, hiking, biking, and taking pictures), but I was too angry at my phone to appreciate any of it. Sure enough, the phone stopped GPSing, and I only pulled off the road when my car said I'd gone nearly ten miles. I was way up in the mountains where I had never been before, but there were so many tourists, you'd think the Coronavirus was all a myth like my uncle's radio shows insist. I parked in a lot there where every space was filled, and a truck was pulling out. But when I looked at my phone, it said my destination was still four miles away. If I walked from there to the waterfall, that's eight miles, and it would surely be dark (even though it was the longest day of the year).
I don't think I mentioned that there were dozens of hikers running around the lot, but because I'm male, I didn't think to ask them if I was in the right place. So I started my car again, and took it down a small, one-lane trail deeper into the canyon. No other cars were around, so I finally rolled my window down and asked a couple people walking my way if I was going the right way. They said I was, and I asked if we weren't supposed to drive cars in. He said, "Yeah, you can drive in." So I did.
The road was narrow and overflowing with hikers, but eventually, I found other cars parked along the side of it, and encountered vehicles coming down the dirt road toward me, where we could barely squeeze past each other, and had to crush two or three pedestrians to not scrape paint. I saw a sign pointing the way to the donut falls, and parked my car behind some others in a spot where the road widened (at the narrowest points, there were always No Parking signs, because that would've blocked the road completely).
I got out, grabbed my water (I'd prepared this week, even filling it to the brim with ice), and started up the road, listening to Campfire Radio Theater's latest episode on my phone. Eventually, I found an entire parking lot--complete with empty spots--right at the base of the hiking trail. Whoops, but it gave me that much more exercise for the day (anything to keep from writing).
I cannot overstress how many people there were on this little trail. If I had to guess, I'd say, over a hundred. Some of them were young, fit adults, but several were fat, a few were old, and oh so many of them had children with them. Speaking of children, there were all these squirrels (and one chipmunk) along the trail, and kids were always holding out potato chips or fruit or nuts to them, and the rodents would eat out of their hands. I took a picture of one that just stared at me tamely, but you can't see the squirrel, so it must have been a hallucination.
Like most waterfalls, this one became a river at the bottom of the gorge, and the hiking trail went up alongside it, but occasionally crossed the water entirely, and you had to carefully hop from rock to rock to get across. The water was ice cold, even on a ninety degree day like today, and when I lost my footing and splashed into the water, it was chilling. But there were so many people either going up or coming down, that we had to take turns going across the rocks, and worse, one place where a fallen log had been placed over the water and only one person at a time could go across it.
Then it was a rocky incline. If you see this picture (which I admit isn't the greatest resolution), you can see just how many people are trying to get up the rocky embankment, where there was hardly room for one or two:
It's not a perfect picture, but it does show the river, the angle of the rocks going up, and the scattering of hikers making their way up and down the ridge.
I've gone on multiple hikes this spring/summer season. The one all the way up on the mountain above the city was the biggest workout, the one to the lover's lane where I will never go with a pretty girl or a drunk man was the longest, the one where it was snowing that I could never find again was the most mysterious, but I'm going to peg this one as the most dangerous. There was a sign, and I wish I had thought to get a picture of it, posted right below the falls that said "Danger, No Climbing Beyond This Point," and I normally would have turned around there and slunk back home like an Outfield on a Friday night . . . but there was a line of hikers climbing the rocks beyond it, maybe twenty or more. One of them was a heavyset lady and I distinctly remember looking at her and thinking, "Wait a minute, is she wearing shoes? No, she's not. That plump lady is going up the hillside barefoot. There's no way I'm turning back now."
So up I went. And it was a struggle, to be honest. The rock face was pretty sheer, and I thought of that awful YouTube remix of Bill Shatner saying, "Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain, why is he climbing a mountain?" as I pulled myself up by my own arms. And I wondered if I would have been able to manage a year ago, when I wasn't running every day and doing push- and sit- and throw-ups all the time. I followed the barefoot lady all the way to the top of the hill, where a group of twenty-somethings were on their way down. I heard one of them ask her, "Is the waterfall this way?" and she said, "Yep, almost there, boys."
Wait a minute. "I'm sorry, what did you say?" I asked the barefoot fat lady. "Almost there," she said. "But . . . they're going down the mountain," I said. "What about the waterfall?"
She looked at me to see if I was joking or not, and saw that I wasn't. "You passed it about halfway back there." "No, the donut waterfall. I saw pictures of it online. It was a cave with water pouring into it. It was . . ." She interrupted me. "You must've walked right past it."
To my surprise, the group behind me exclaimed, "What? When did we walk past it?" They had been right on my heels as I made it up the rocky embankment, a young guy and a half-naked girl. I had been following barefoot lady and they had been following me. The barefoot woman told us she was just exploring, and on she went. Suddenly, I and this young couple were brothers ("Don't you see . . . ?"), and I felt like I had been tricked somehow into pulling myself up there by my (remaining) wits and determination.
So, the three of us turned around and started back downward. And it was hard, a lot harder than going up had been. The places where I had climbed up using my arms didn't work going down, and I had to either jump from perch to perch, or simply slide down on my backside (the unfortunate half-naked girl behind me probably fared worse, poor thing). Once the rocks got closer to the water, though, they became slippery, and yep, my feet just flew out from under me once and I fell on my butt (as I did last week, and a couple weeks before that when I found the phone). Weird thing is, I just got up and kept on making my way down. I'm not old yet.
But get off my lawn anyway.
So, right beyond the "No climbing" sign, there it was, surrounded by people, and going into a cave that's so tiny, Big and I wouldn't be able to fit our remaining Dunesteef listeners into it. There it is, going into a hole in the ground. Guess you can see how we missed it:
I imagine I missed the falls because I was watching where I was going. I did record what it looked like, but the footage of the water entering the hole (sexy) was so blurry that I deleted it. Now I wish that I hadn't, because I'd have liked to do a little audio commentary over the top of the two clips, like Big and I did the other day with his bat video.
The dude with the half-naked girl got in line (yes, there was a line) to go into the cave and take a picture, and came out dripping wet and complaining about how freezing it was. His girl said, "Hell no," to the disappointment of all of us standing around, and I figured I'd get in the line too. The cave was not only very very shallow, but you had to wade into calf-deep water to get to it. Because the water was so cold, I turned on my camera and only did one take, going inside and looking up at the "donut," being sprayed with icy water the whole time.
In the end, I was glad I had gone inside, but not entirely glad I had gone on the trip, you know?
I made my way down, no longer trying to balance on rocks or keep from stepping into the river--I just stomped right through, since I was soaked anyway. I came down, sloshing water and rubbing absently at my backside, and passed the thirty-something dad and his little boy, maybe a hundred feet farther down the mountain, still going through the exact routine of "You can do it, just jump down, I'll catch you!" "No, I'm scared!" I imagine that they're still there right now, just a few more feet down, even though I'm typing this a full day later.
Once I got to dry land and the regular trail away from the river, I sped up (still having to weave through and around various other hikers, always with children, making their way up or down), and once I reached the road, I just ran to my car, figuring I'd get a little exercise that way (not that climbing up a fairly sheer rock face and using my arms to pull up the rest of my body wasn't exercise, but running downhill is the fun kind).
I checked my phone and was shocked to discover there was cellphone service all the way up there, so I called Big and complained to him that I went hiking alone (again, naturally), but if I had had a girlfriend and took her to the donut falls, she would have broken up with me because of it. He was upset that we didn't go hiking together in the eleven years that we lived in the same state, but my love for hiking is a mid-life/pandemic development.
Luckily, the drive home was easy and I didn't have to depend on the GPS to get me there, but I had to pay for my outing by now having to catch up on my daily words.
So, somehow I utterly failed yesterday when it came to writing (I did some work on the screenplay--which is due tomorrow--but I didn't count that as words . . . maybe I should, though they will be very few), but as I said, I had a lot going on then. Same thing today, as I worked on the script this morning (I was kind of horrified to discover, when I reached The End, only about a five hundred word difference between the second draft and the third), and while I think it's in even better shape now than it was on last Tuesday's table read, it's still too long, even if I only listened to the one producer who (crazily) said to cut two pages.
Hmm. So, what I'm going to do is count the difference between the two drafts as of right now as yesterday's writing, and any difference after that as today's. It's not perfect, but it gives me a chance to salvage the 208 words I had written down for yesterday.
Whoops, guess it was far less difference than I gave myself credit for (you see, I added a new bit in, making one of the characters who wasn't significant in the last draft significant in this one, and somehow, that only made the story longer. So, when I cut here and there, it didn't do much to bring the script down in length). I may have to go through with a bit more brutality, just crossing stuff out as I go, without trying to rephrase or combine sentences like I did before.
Well, I stayed up, going through the whole script again, and managed to cut another two and a half pages from it. By then, it was after three, so I emailed the script (saved it first--good idea, no?) to the three producers, and went to sleep.
Words Today: 1092
Words In June: 21,518
*Honestly, I'd say this happened between five and eight times throughout the drive.
**I have to echo what Al told Sam on "Quantum Leap," that while he wasn't sure there was a God or not, he was absolutely certain there was a Devil.
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