It's morning, but not early morning. I usually wake up around dawn when I'm here, and last night was even more extreme: I woke up around forty-thirty, the light still on, my movie over, the laptop sleeping. I got up and went to the bathroom, and went out back, on the deck, which I have pretty much avoided this visit (for no particular reason--just haven't had the time to read, not with the other things I need to do). It was darker than you can imagine out there--darker than I have ever seen it--with no moon and absolutely no lights on at any cabin anywhere. I looked up, and instead of a vast ocean of stars, I could see one dimly glowing--a single pinprick on a canvas painted black. There was an owl hooting far, far away, and I stood there for a good minute, aware that it was so dark someone could have been standing a foot away and I wouldn't have seen them.
Normally, this would have been absolute lunacy on my part, having just woke up, my mind vulnerable, my imagination on a hair trigger (and yeah, there was the idea in the back of my mind that thee WAS something out there in the dark with me, maybe close, maybe getting closer, but it was a weak, dull idea, like a sore shoulder or tailbone from a fall days ago, and I was able to simply ignore it), but hey, maybe I am growing up a bit, that I can just enjoy the silence, like the song goes, and marvel that anything outside of a cave can be so dark.
As I was approaching the cabin yesterday, there was a herd of sheep in the road. Maybe a hundred of them, and two dogs moving them along. I didn't see any people, like you normally do with sheep, and the animals ranged from standing stupidly right in front of me, driving about two miles an hour at this point, to the ones that ran frantically away from my car, plowing into trees and off the road into the gully besides. I've seen them before, and one time in a group of five or six hundred, which was pretty mind-blowing, but this was nothing. The reason I mention them is that now, as I type this, I can hear them someplace up the road, a very faint baa-ing that sounds almost remarkably, like women or children crying.
Had I heard that last night, hoo doggie, that's pretty pants-pissingly scary, since the wailing of a woman in the night is one of my big fears, probably brought on by seeing DARBY O'GILL AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE multiple times as a lad (I believe it's the only one of those live-action Disney films from the period that I own, though I might have picked up SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON at some point, though it saddens me that I don't even know, since that's a waste of money, isn't it?).
I grabbed my audio recorder and put it in the car on Tuesday, so I could record an episode of my podcast while driving down to see my cousin. But I couldn't think of what story I would present on my show, so I didn't do it--but I did resolve to look through my stories and pick one to do an episode for on the drive (over an hour each way) down to the cabin. And I didn't do it.
Due to that, a lot of my pictures ended up like this one, which is a sort of Where's Waldo? with a deer in it:
Good luck. This one came out better:
At one point, I was looking out the window, and there were four fawns all congregating in the same place. I grabbed my phone to get a picture, and even that sound must've been too much, because by the time I got to the window, phone raised, there was only one visible anymore.
If you look really closely, I think you can see three here:
If you don't like deer, this is probably not a very interesting blog post for you. I'll now try to describe how doing so many sit-ups on the hard wooden floor once again gave my buttocks a nasty scraping.
Oh, and this footage, you must admit, is a little better:
Regardless, I really would've liked to have stayed at the cabin one more day. I mentioned that we're moving my uncle tomorrow, and I drove the car down to where there is--if you're tremendously lucky--there's one bar of cell service that the park service has installed for use in emergencies. I texted both my mom and my uncle to find out when we were getting together tomorrow, because if it was in the afternoon, then I would just spend the night here (I didn't get nearly as much done as I had hoped to, and I was enjoying myself--it was about 83 degrees during the day and 70 at night, and there were no noisy ATVs buzzing around).
So I sent the texts, and sat down and waited. And I waited. And I waited.
I knew it had to be the mini cell tower I was using, because surely one of them would text me back, right? But I got a text from Big telling me how many words he'd written today, two texts from Renee Chambliss telling me that she would go off to Acapulco with me when this pandemic is over, and one from Tom Tancredi . . . so it wasn't the tower. I sent another text to my mother saying, "I need to know right now." And waited.
I sat down on the porch of the shack by the lake (the cellphone service extended about eight or nine feet from the shack in every direction) and started playing a game on my phone, waiting for the reply. But it never came. I swore quite a bit, but it didn't help.
If I were a stronger, less generous person, I'd have just said, "Eff you very much, then. Guess you don't need any slave labor after all," and went back to the cabin for another night, watching Jimmy Stewart movies and injuring my taint with more sit-ups. But no, I am weak, so, so weak, and I went back to the cabin, packed up my things, and drove home, just as the sun was disappearing behind the mountains. I had never driven the canyon road at night before, in the dozen years or so I've come to the cabin, but there weren't any incidents (though I did see deer walking beside the road a time or three, and they scare me now, despite my many photographing attempts).
As I passed through a town in the middle of nowhere with a tiny window of cell service, I got a text from my mom saying "Never heard back from him. Just do what you like." This was at nine pm or so, and I had come too far to turn around and go back (though I sort of wish that I had, just to make some kind of informal protest), so I came home and was grouchy with my nephews, but got to do my evening run, which was nice.
Sit-ups Today: 250
Sit-ups In August: 3859
Bottom line is: I should have stayed at the cabin one more day, because of spite. But I didn't, and now, well, I guess I have to write and exercise in the normal way.
Words Today: 1289
Words In August: 20,875
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