Number Three

We hiked off from our campsite, down the trail and across the road, up the zig-zagging mountain trail until we saw a little path leading off the trail.  It eventually led to a tree that we sat on and in to mush on our munchrooms.  From the tree you could look into the tops of the trees a bit further down the hill, where a bird was chillin and looking back at us, and in the distance you could see the top ridge of the adjacent mountain range. I was a bit overwhelmed by the amount of shit in my backpack, including the peanut butter, the tapes, the honey, and my surprise necklace beads.  Needless to say, I had an over-materialistic mindset going into this one.

  I felt the usual surge of adrenaline that kicks off the experience, and we ran back through some brush to the trail.  I said hello to a cactus and Jesse noticed.  I talked to Rich and Deanna a bit about how they were feeling.  Eventually we made it to the lake.  

  When we saw it at first there were some families gathered on the beach, and fishermen on a dock that ended in an octagon.  I wasn't sure how good of a location this was going to be.  The lake was kind of small and we were right next to a parking lot where all these families and fishermen parked to spend their day.  But we walked around to the other side of the lake and found ourselves the only people on the other side.

   We went off our old road down to water's edge, and watched a duck named Henry, who kept hanging out by us even though we were a pack of humans.  I left the group to go pee, and heard an awesome bird calling.  After a bit more time hanging out by water's edge, Jesse suggested getting to a warmer spot out of the wind.

  The group walked back up to the road.  The last one up was Adrian, dressed in full winter gear - hat, coat, gloves, etc.  It was still sunny and no colder than 50 degrees.  We walked until the trail became a bit old and covered in grass and fallen trees.  I noticed the sun hitting all the flies in the air, making everything look super-Miyazaki.  The mushrooms started taking effect sometime around here.  We found some stumps by the side of the trail and I sat down.  Jesse suggested sitting on a log further back.  Once we got there I noticed some cool rocks that seemed like a definite cool spot further back.  Jesse and I went over to them and commenced chilling.  

  

  The group eventually followed.  From afar, Josh looked like a different man, and asked "is this how you see me now?" Deanna discovered being barefoot. I put Broken Deer on and started coloring.  Scott came over and asked us if we'd noticed the rock we were sitting on.  But back to coloring–having the number of crayons we did felt amazing.  I was seeing so many colors.  Jesse, Scott, and Josh were sitting in the spot I was drawing and all had matching dark gray-blue color pallettes. The trees looked beautiful, taking on a strange alien-natural quality.  There were so many layers of trees to draw, with the sun shining out from behind them.  And the shrubs behind the trees were awesome and alien-psychadelic looking too. Another thing I remember about this part was seeing Deanna with her notebook of art and seeing how a cohesive character she was.  The art was really just part of her.

  It was around this moment when I took the necklace-making beads and string out of my backpack and discovered that the honey jar had become unscrewed in my bag.  The bottom of my pack was a pool of honey.  There was honey on everything.  My hands and arms were sticky and covered in honey.

  Not good.

  Not fucking good at all.

  My awareness of the doom grew steadily.  Rolling up my sleeve, a bunch of the honey stuck and pulled on my arm hairs.  I realized I couldn't touch anything.  I felt like an animal must feel when it's overtaken and attacked by a swarm of some smaller, lesser animal.  I began vocalizing to the group: I needed help. This was not a one-man cleanup.  I needed water.  Deanna had a towel, I gave Adrian my water bottle.  Water, towel, we had found a solution miraculously quickly.  I held the towel to receive and Adrian poured some water down on it.  The three of us watched as, like an absurdist cartoon, the small pour of water was released from the bottle, hit the towel in my palm, and scattered out and off the towel in several droplets, leaving behind not a hint of wetness.  I think I screamed "AAAA."  We laughed but still needed a solution.  We grabbed the extra tie-dye shirts out of my bag, got them wet, and started wiping shit off.  But I was freaking out, and Deanna insisted that I needed to go to the lake.  Something like the phrase, "You and the lake needs to happen."  

  I hated leaving Adrian and Deanna a mess to clean up, but I had to start dealing with shit and that meant starting to get clean, so I emptied my backpack and brought it down to the lake.  On my way down I was seeing how this was a microcosm for my life.  I take on too many things, I don't spend enough time thinking through with preparations, and it leads me to messy situations I don't want to be in.  I could imagine my dad stressfully telling me to slow down, take it easy, and think.  I looked down and saw other friends flocking towards the lake to help my situation.  Thank god for my friends, but goddammit I hate ruining the freedom of this trip by making them have to help me.  My mind was racing with negative thoughts, and I was trying to get grounded on a reason for being OK, when I came down the hill to the edge of the lake.  Pine cones were sprawled out in their natural-repetitive-fractal kind of way, and the sound of my footsteps were quieter.  I saw Jesse, in a stage framed by the edges of the trees, standing in the sunny lake, rinsing out my sasquatch shirt.  I took a moment to gather myself and told myself everything was going to be ok, and went to greet Jesse.

  I'll never think of the word "idyllic" again without thinking of the image of Jesse knee-high in the lake, submerging and lifting my sasquatch shirt to get the honey out.  Some real Huckleberry Finn shit.  I took my shoes off, placed them on a conveniently-placed patch of grass, and went into the lake.  In my panicky rush I forgot to roll my pants up so they got a little wet.  Stupid me.  Before I put the backpack in the lake, I thought I should get honey off everything that was inside it.  The first thing I found was the top strip of plastic from a bag of peanuts.  I took it out and started washing it in the lake.  God dammit, am I really gonna start by cleaning my trash?  This is why I don't get things done, I get caught up in dumb pointless shit, the equivalent of washing trash.  But I had to get the honey off, and then I think I put it in my pocket.  Then I stuck the whole backpack in the lake and started scraping the honey out with my hands.  At one point a little plastic glow-stick connector fell out, and I felt like I was in Lord of the Rings, reaching for it before it got swept away in the water.  It didn't though, and I had to pocket that too.  Soon the honey was actually coming out of my bag, and I realized there was an end in sight.  Eventually it was clean and I walked back out to let things dry.  A couple times I noticed more of me was sticky, and I had to go back in the lake to get cleaner.  

  I was really paranoid about the campground host coming by, or anyone really, and looking like a drugged out idiot.  But my belongings, laid out on the grass in a Wes Anderson type style, were the most normal camping things one could imagine: a backpack, a headlamp, an apple, a lighter, shoes, a shirt.  I sat down on the awesome curly grass and tried to calm myself down. Josh and Jesse were there to help, but they had to go back to tell the rest of the group what was going on, and to come chill with us.  I stayed back to give them a reason to come back, in Josh's words.  I was worried I'd go to a dark place but I knew I had to face whatever would come.

  This gave me some alone time to chill.  I couldn't tell if I was fucking up hard, or just making a normal mistake.  I looked at the rock next to me, and the patterns on it seemed to create a laughing face.  Laughing with me or at me?  The way my shirt was laid on the rock started to do the same thing, and I made myself look at something else before I lost it.  And this whole time I had all these self-critical and panicking and overwhelmed feelings swirling through me, with some old optimistic me trying to cover them all with this narrative that everything was gonna be fine, with a newer me seeing it as just an attempt to restore an old habit that's been beaten down by reality.  And in some fleeting moments by the lake, this beehive of thoughts just became noise, and since it was just noise it contained no thoughts, and suddenly I was left as me, existing by this lake, serene.  Like I said, this happened for a few fleeting moments.  In one of the longer ones, I kind of felt like who I am was reduced to its core.  And I saw myself as this lighter, shinier/brighter version of my father.  Thinking on it now, of course that's what I am, a mix of my mom and my dad, and my mom has a pretty enthusiastic/bright personality, so that makes sense.  But in that moment, and for most of this particular trip, my dad was in the forefront of my mind.  And by the lake I saw myself not as a mix but as a modified version-up of my dad.  

  Also, randomly, I felt a similarity to Matt Kenseth.  For those of you not in the know, Matt Kenseth is a soft-spoken NASCAR driver from Wisconsin.  When I watched NASCAR back in the day, I didn't root for him or anything, because he just wasn't that exciting.  But he drove a black and yellow car, which growing up was my favorite color combination, and he won the championship the first year I watched NASCAR.  And even though he only won one race all year, he won the overall championship by just being chill and steady and doing what he needed to do for the big picture race by race.  Maybe this connects to how I do things somehow?  Or how I used to, before I tried to do too much?  I can reflect on this more later, just wanted to note it.  In the moment I think I remember a laugh escaping me, because I was just like, why the fuck is Matt Kenseth of all things in the universe popping into my head right now?  Could just be a childish reflex, maybe tied into thoughts of my dad.

  Thoughts must have swelled up again, followed by another one of these clear moments.  It was just me existing and everything around me was what we call nature.  And I looked up at this tree, and it was incredible.  It represented such a foreign and rich intelligence, one that I knew little about.  In that moment, the cloud of thoughts from before, mainly generated by my own idea of criticisms that people in my life or in the society we live in would have of me, was replaced by a very powerful idea of criticisms that an archaic human would have of me.  If you ever listen to an Indian elder talk about modern-day America, it was kind of like that.  Almost as if the land itself was criticizing me.  And while the previous thought-hive concerned my inability to integrate perfectly into the modern social-financial-technological construct, this thought-hive concerned my ignorance to real fucking life.  Humans used to live with nature, and in doing so understood it in ways I can't even imagine.  And I'm just some idiot from the city who brought all his toys to the forest.  I could feel the disgust that an old Indian would feel towards me, disgust even almost from the trees around me.  And I respected this disgust so much more than the self-critical thoughts about integrating that those thoughts didn't even really bother me for the rest of the day, and haven't really since.  Because this new disgust was much more real, much more justified.  I brought trash to this forest.  I rely entirely on things that pollute and slowly destroy this absolutely sacred fucking thing that we call wilderness, but is in reality a complete miracle of beauty incarnate before our eyes.  And everything else that I worry about, about people thinking I'm weird or different or not professional enough, is all absolute and utter horseshit in comparison.  But I knew that I wasn't lost forever, that even sensing this disgust was a positive, that I had the power to change and to learn.  As I was looking at this tree, with it's bizarre alien wisdom beckoning me to know it, these amazing pink geometric patterns in the sky appeared, maybe triggered from a glint on my glasses.  And I thought about how the only way to gain this knowledge is to immerse myself in nature as much as possible.  Even as I write this, the idea of spending my life doing anything else seems trivial.

  Instead of some kind of mystical knowledge, instead of some cool new things to think about or see out in the world, instead of making a bunch of super-interesting art or feeling a bunch of super-interesting sensations, I'd instead been reduced to my minimum and shown in complete clarity a simple "do this."

  

  Around this time everyone came down and realized how awesome the lake was.  Now that everyone was back, I still felt the urge to be responsible.  But now, instead of being responsible to other people, my urge was fueled by responsibility to the forest itself.  Josh was on a responsibility wavelength in that moment too, so him and I set off to make sure all our trash was cleaned up.  Also on my mind was trying as hard as I could to keep this from being a bad trip.  We went back up to the site and saw everything left behind.  We gathered it up into bags.  I ate a bite of my banana.  We turned to leave and saw an old Bud Light can in the ground.  We kinda tossed around the question of should we bother picking it up, and both kinda agreed that we should.  I distinctly remember Josh, with the classic, irritatedly defeated tone of someone relegated to fix EVERYTHING, yelling out "Might as well!" and from there we walked back towards the parking lot, picking up any trash that was left behind on the trail.  And in doing so I felt myself building up value and meaning almost from scratch, from what I had felt reduced to by the lake.  We were both trying to be responsible, and I related to Josh how even in real life I was trying to be responsible to so many different parties and people, and there was just so much to keep track of that it's almost impossible.  And for all I know it still might be.  I kind of erupted on Josh with a bunch of built up thoughts, mainly about how I want to be the person that's relied upon, but in doing so I feel guilty for relying on anyone else.  I also feel boundaries with people where I can't ask questions, either because I imagine it would be rude, so I don't learn out of politeness, or because I'd feel stupid for asking.  But even though these thoughts were back in my mind, because habits die slow and they've been kickin around in there for a while, I still had this seed inside me that had been planted by that damn tree.

  Once again there was a great moment of relief when Josh could bring his trash to a dumpster.  He washed his hands in the spot that was at first occupied with people, then we went out to the octagon dock to chill.

  Someone had left a water bottle there. We picked it up, and started throwing away more trash.  I knew I had to, because that felt like the only thing I had.  But ultimately it was moving trash from the ground to a receptacle.  Not that it's futile, because the animals and plants shouldn't have to deal with this trash everywhere (I thought "do it for Henry" in this moment), but it goes into the bin and then what?  Like everything else that was happening, this spiraled out into a representation of all kinda of other problems with the world.  We both realized just how much shit there is to do, both on the scale of global-political shit, and on the scale of our own lives.  I told Josh how my dad always tells me to take a break.  But I just have too many things that I either need to or want to do that my breaks don't even feel like breaks.  We both felt overwhelmed by the amount of shit there was to worry about.  This had been cycling through my head for an hour at least.  I tried but I couldn't just let myself forget about it, I  felt like I had to apply my mind to it, like a word problem.  There are obligations to other people, obligations to work, the responsibility of making a living to provide for yourself adequately, legal requirements to be in society, obligations to your own health that have to balance with your budget and your insurance, plus the obligation to not make the world a worse place, to pay attention and not let the world's population slip into an Orwellian or Wall-E type of dystopia that it feels like we're moving towards with little resistance from the people, because they just have too much other damn shit to worry about.  All represented in this metaphor of moving trash from the ground to a bigger receptacle that is also still on the ground, knowing the trash isn't just gonna disappear, just be moved, and keep being created.  I still haven't untied this web, and would love to hear if anyone has.  In these moments on the far side of the lake, I guess everything really did feel futile.

  In the midst of talking about how there was too much shit to worry about to even keep track of what we should be worrying about, we suddenly realized that we SHOULD be worrying about whether our friends were still where we were assuming they were.  I looked to the beach-of-sorts where we'd been hanging out, and saw a Jesse that upon further inspection reveled himself to be a tree.  But we looked across and saw a single person in red.  Josh asked if that was Deanna, and this is when I talked to Deanna across the lake, to make sure everyone was where we thought they were, which they were.  The other assumption, that our path connected to that beach, also proved to be true.  We'd noticed the sun was starting to go down, and that all the families and fishermen had left, so I wanted to get back to camp to get warm and dry.  Scott was all about this.  Jesse and Rich were caught up in some arts, and I had to wait for them to shoot something and show me a video before telling them we were going back.  I was glad they at least got to have a playful time.  And fortunately my backpack, despite its wetness, wasn't too heavy, being emptied of all non wet things.  I wanted to get my wet pack and shirt back to camp though, and put dry warm pants on and get by the fire before I was stuck in 40 degree darkness with cold shit, so I led the way, picking up trash with my left hand while I talked about pinecones with my right.  Deanna and I talked about how obvious it is that math works, because it's just humans' discovery of what was already there, and we talked about the fibonacci sequence and it's presence all over nature.  Deanna and I also talked about how dumb it is that people are scared to try new things.  She said something like "You're not gonna die.  Or you are, but like whatever."  It felt perfectly like the opposite of all I'd ever been taught by authority figures.  We also realized that each of us wanted to be more like the other one, and had a weird moment trying to wrap our heads around that one.  Around this time the sun was setting, and we stopped to look at the pink-purple sky, realizing we were stopping in the exact same spot we'd left the trail the first time, and that the stars/planets were coming out.  Also around this time, we heard running behind us, and Rich came to catch up with us, me assuming that he had left Josh and Jesse a bend or two behind us.  I guessed that they wanted to chill in the dark and stargaze.  Sounded cool, but I had a mission.  I would not learn until much later how far gone they literally were.

  Our group had a chill walk back down the hill.  Adrian brought up his sense of self or lack thereof, and we talked about how values and taste are both these auras everyone has, like when you test a chemical or whatever, I'm not a scientist.  Anyways, I must've come down as we came down the hill, and getting into new, honeyless clothes felt great.  The night was great and joke-filled, and sausages were delicious.  Even though I think it's more moral and healthy to eat vegetables, I felt like I'd learned through my conversations with Josh and Deanna that you can't be concerned with every minute detail and just have to take the pressure off yourself.  I really felt like all my concerns and naggings had been lifted and replaced by the over-arching idea that I just had to get back to nature, and that everything else I could relax about. So as far as takeaways, I feel a great urge to simplify my life, but also to do all I can to direct my life back into the wilderness uncompromisingly.  The seed is strong, but the coming months will reveal the strength of the waterer.

  Also, somehow Jesse and Josh made it back through a mile of zig zaggy trail in the dark night of a new moon with no light, but that's their story.