Cabin-bound, I'm cabin-bound.
Cabin, where only the ghosts will stare;
Cabin, where I cavort in my underwear,
Cabin, where I smell bad but just don't care,
That rutted road is leading me there.
My alarm went off, and it was barely daylight out, but time to get up and go to the cabin with my family. My mom was going, my brother, two sets of uncles/aunts, and my cousin's kids. I didn't go this week, so I had this idea of just spending the night and coming back tomorrow, even though everybody else was just going up for the day (basically a picnic on steroids).
I complain a lot about being alone (even in this very post), but I come from a big family. My mom had eight brothers and two sisters, and several of them still get together fairly regularly. My Aunt Blanca just moved away from Vegas, so I've seen more of her this year than I have in twenty, and she and her husband hadn't seen the cabin before.
My Uncle Jerry, who I've mentioned before (he was raised Mennonite in Pennsylvania), helped build this cabin and has always had a great deal of affection for it. And like my dad, who many of my cousins felt friendlier to than I myself did, my uncle has often been agreeable and fatherly to me. He is a very smart guy, who tends to know a lot about everything, and we got to talking about the pictures I've been taking whenever I come up here, and he said, "I have a pretty nice camera I bought to take photos of scenery and such with, but I never use it. I'll have to let you borrow it sometime."
I said, "That would be great. I'm always trying to take pictures of the moon, and they never come out right."
To which he said, "Well, in that case, I'll just give you the camera."
That actually made me feel something unusual and undefinable. Not sure what it was, except that I think I've often had a void in my gullet (or soul?) that a healthy relationship with my father might have filled. Who knows, exactly? I'd ask my therapist about it, except the last time I saw him, he said, "Outfield? I thought I heard you'd killed yourself." Then he shook his head in disappointment. "Must have been someone else. Damn."**
It's interesting how men and women are different. For some reason, my mom was showing off the front door of the cabin, which has long glass panels in the middle of it, and boasted how she picked it out herself, wishing the front door of her house looked like that. My two aunts cooed over the door like it was an attractive newborn. And my Uncle Ed said, "Yeah, right. That door would be so easy to break into. You'd be crazy to install it in your house."
My Uncle Ed doesn't come up much in my blogs or conversations. I've never written a character based on him, even though most of my relatives have shown up in some form or another. This afternoon, he was telling us about going deep-sea fishing (I'm not sure if that's really what it's called--basically, you charter a boat and it takes you out in the Pacific to catch marlin or tuna or sturgeon or Shoggoths), and he made it sound really fun. Not something I'll ever do (you have to have money and friends to do stuff like that), but it would be quite an adventure.
There's a big electric gate at the entrance to the lake that you have to know a code or have a passcard for (last year it had instructions as to what to do if you encountered a bear, but this year those instructions are gone), but today it was wide open. It turned out, there was a wedding out here this morning, and many people had come up to attend it. In the fourteen years I've been coming here, I've never seen a bunch of people in dress clothes wandering around. It made me wonder, when I sing along with you, what my own wedding might have been like.
Weird past tense usage there.
That's not something I've much thought about. Oh, I've imagined what I'd say in my vows, what song I'd want to dance to, what the reception might consist of--come to think of it, maybe I have much thought about it--but never where the wedding would be, if it were up to me.*** This cabin in the woods is unreasonably remote and isolated, but you could do a heck of a lot worse than get married up here.
Let's see, where was I? Oh yes, blogging as an excuse not to write. Good, good.
I was listening to Marshal Latham's Patreon address (he'll often do this thing that's pretty great, where a female voice with a British accent will pop in and remind him of stuff. She's actually an AI, but I am delighted when it interrupts his podcasts), and in his most recent one, she advised him, "Your better health will lead to more happiness." I wonder, since I've gotten in MUCH better shape this year than the rest of my adult life, if that's true for me too.
And yeah, I guess it has, since I enjoy the hikes, enjoy doing my running (some of the time), and . . . well, I've decided that I've needed less sleep since I started all this, and having an extra hour every day is something anybody would be jealous of, right?
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| They're really very ugly birds up close, just not in this picture |
My cousin Ryan's three daughters came along, and they really wanted to go looking for frogs or salamanders, and I volunteered to take them out. I wanted to go in my mom's car, since it would be so much easier, but they all insisted on taking this ATV vehicle called a Mule that I've only ever driven a time or two. I didn't want to take it, because it's slow and unpleasantly loud, but they insisted, and so, I backed it out of the space it was parked in, and as I shifted it into Forward (it only has F, N, and Reverse), we started to roll back, and for a moment, the Mule began to tip, wanting to fall over on its side.
It only lasted a second, and then it righted itself as I hit the gas and we started moving forward, but I keep thinking about that, and how my cousin's kids were sitting in the back of it and might have been injured if we had tipped over. Later, his oldest daughter told me she never wanted to ride in that thing again.
I took them out behind the lake, and it's sad, this summer has been so hot, most of the lake water has been drained (the farmers in the valley use it for irrigation), and it's at the level it usually doesn't get to until October or so. By the end of the season, I absolutely guarantee the entire lake will be dry, which means every living thing in it will die. Already there were dead fish all around the receding waters, and we saw about a dozen turkey vultures circling and scooping them up.
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| This was all lake just a month ago |
That means all the frogs and salamanders will die too, but today, there were plenty to spare. When we finally found the little pond with life in it, the girls were delighted to see not a handful, not dozens, but hundreds of salamanders (in various stages of development) swimming through the mud and weeds. They were all troupers, taking their shoes and socks off and wading in to catch them. Salamanders, despite being fairly large, are quite fast swimmers and hard to catch. Their weakness is that they breathe air, so you can just wait for them to surface, taking a gulp before hiding down in the muddy water again.
While we were doing so, a twenty-something couple came by, and they too caught some salamanders, but just took pictures of them before letting them go, moving on to someplace where they could be alone. I was mildly jealous.
At some point, one of the girls pointed out a flat worm swimming in the water, and we discovered that there were leeches aplenty in the pool. Every single one of us had leeches on us when we got out of the water (none of us waded in any deeper than our knees anyway), but Katie, my cousin's oldest daughter, got it the worst. She had cut her food the other day while skateboarding, and a leech had discovered her wound, and unlike the others, that were brown and skinny, this mo-fo was huge and bright red and swollen practically to bursting. I pulled it off Katie's foot, and the wound began to bleed like she'd just stepped on a rusty nail.****
After that, I said it was time to quit, and I used the lid from the container we were putting the salamanders in to wash off everybody's legs. Girls, as I alluded to earlier, are different from boys, in that none of them enjoyed being muddy and dirty, whereas my three nephews wouldn't have blinked an eye and muddying up their legs or clothes. But all three were fun to go hunting with and not at all squeamish about the leeches . . . which it would only be natural to freak out over.
In other news, I thought this might be interesting:
Could be wrong, though.
Today I continued where I left off yesterday, but I'm so tired I keep typing "Natalie" instead of Talia and "Mason" instead of Rick. Funny, that.
Once again, I wish I weren't alone in this world, but number two on my list, I wish I were a better writer and was confident that this was a solid story, totally worth the hours of work involved.
I'm now alone in the house, so I guess I should do what I want . . . except what I want is to take a nap. It's already five o'clock, and I at least have 418 words. A lot of times at the cabin I do even better with exercise than I do with writing.
Sit-ups Today: 216
Sit-ups In August: 1471
As is my tradition, I drove out to the lake (in my mom's car this time, but I had still remembered to bring my tripod) to record a song. My brother had given me a job to do which I had left until the last moments of daylight, so by the time I ran out there (I literally ran out there, carrying my tripod like a walking stick, in case I stumbled), I had no time to do a second take or find the perfect place to record. There's a section that was lake last week, where my brother-in-law took the boat to fish, that is now just wet mud this week, littered with dead fish, and I angled the camera to catch the reflection of the dying light in the mud, and did my song. Because of the angle, and the whiteness of the sky, it looks remarkably like the lake is already frozen over behind me, despite me singing in a t-shirt and shorts.
I screwed up partway through the song and just started it over, because I literally had no time for a second take (though I could have gone up higher on a hill, or ran across to the dam, to get more light from the elevated viewpoint), and then flipped the camera around to see if I could record another bit with the pink light on my face. But when I looked at that footage, I looked literally uglier than I have ever, ever been. I looked ghoulish--I mean, Halloween-costume-you-spent-the-entire-month-on-level ugly. It was more than a little unsettling, and though I haven't deleted the footage, it's nearly enough to make me swear off ever taking another picture of myself this whole year.
Words Today: 813
Words In August: 7112
*And I recognize I use that word a little bit (lot?) too much, but I've gotten less and less patient with buyers over the years, and now, I get infuriated by people (assholes) that send messages like, "HELLO??" I swear to you, on what's-her-name's very name, I block buyers when they send that. I don't know that child predators make me as angry as those people do. Maybe they fall halfway between Trump supporters and child predators on my spit list.
**Of course this is a made-up story. My therapist, in actuality, committed suicide himself not long after my first session with him. Odd, that.
***And even that's not accurate. Twenty-five or so years ago, I did think about that a bit more, because I was young and naïve enough to think I would meet somebody, the music would swell, and every door would open up ahead of me. Sometimes I'm ashamed that I thought life would be easy and romantic. But it happened for everybody else--not literally everybody, but fucking close to it--so I can't fault myself for thinking I could be happy one day.
Gosh, that reminds me, I spoke to somebody just the other day who told me--even though I didn't ask him and it was certainly none of my business--that he tried to kill himself last year. He bought a gun and everything, but it didn't work out. Even though this'll make me look like a bucket of congealing diarrhea, hearing this story made me feel great affection for the guy, and a little bit less alone on a desert island, with Wilson the Volleyball impaled on a sharp rock the way he is.
****I understand that leeches have some kind of natural anti-coagulant that they emit so the blood flows more freely, but this was ridiculous--Katie was bleeding so badly she stopped to take pictures of it. Hopefully, those pictures grossed everybody out that she showed them to.
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