Mosquitoes, Turlock, Duncan MacLeod and more

I sort of like the current events prologue to the continuing saga of my backpacking trip, so we’ll keep that going for a while.

My wife turns 29 again this coming week and I’m beginning to become suspicious. I may or may not have unwittingly become a huge fan of the campy TV series Highlander back when I was in law school. It was a spin-off of the Movies which were, contrary to Ricky Bobby’s assertion, not the best movies of all time. Both the show and the movies were premised on the idea that there are immortals living among us that don’t age past adulthood and can’t be killed unless you cut off their heads. It sounds like a pretty good gig until you consider some of the downsides which include:

1. every time one immortal kills another he gains that other immortal’s “power” making him that much harder to kill the next time. As it turns out this provides more than enough incentive for all the immortals to want to kill each other. Plus, they all believe that in the end there can be only one, which means not only do you have to watch your back all the time, you might end up having to fight your friends which just isn’t that fun.

2. You have to carry a sword with you at all times, even to the pool or the opera or whatever and worse, you have to know what to do with it if you are suddenly attacked by another sword wielding stranger

3. Everyone else around you gets old and dies and you don’t.

4. You apparently have to wear a full length leather coat and a pony-tail.

But back to my wife and her birthday. I believe the Highlander premise may in fact be true and believe my wife may be an immortal. Consider the evidence:

a. The show was on TV and TV doesn’t lie.

b. My wife has not aged since she was 17. Seriously, if it weren’t for the enormous (though beautiful) hair, her senior picture from high school could be a current picture. I have lots of pictures of her around my office and home from the last 15 years and I’m telling you the only thing that changes is the hairstyle. It is uncanny. Fortunately for my wife (and me of course) she was stunningly beautiful at 17 and so she was lucky enough not to get stuck forever at an awkward stage, which frankly, I don’t believe she ever had.

c. My wife has a samurai sword displayed in our living room. Technically, it’s mine, but she doesn’t allow me to display my sports posters and memorabilia in the living room. But, if it’s the sword it’s just fine. Coincidence? I think not.

d. Neither John Wooden nor Fidel Castro are dead and each are approximately 256 years old. This is well documented fact.

e. My wife owns a full length leather coat and often wears a pony tail

f. Sometimes she gives me this look that seems to say, “if you were someone else and talked to me that way I would cut your head off with my samurai sword.”

So, there you have it. Undisputable proof that my wife is immortal. As far as I know, she may be 500 years old. The only thing that gives me pause, is that she actually gets slightly prettier every year and I don’t remember anything about that on the show.

Moving on…

Tonight I’m going to the Vancouver Wine and Jazz festival to hear the great James Cotton and his magical blues harmonica. Should be great. I think this is a great festival because as you know, the Blues can be very sad and yet there’s also wine which seems to make people happy. Personally, I don’t like wine and would get more than sad if I had to drink a lot of it, but that’s ok, because the blues makes me happy. Isn’t life great?

In a month I have depositions in Turlock, Ca. I have never heard of Turlock, though it sounds like the name of a vampire in a cheesy movie that I would know going in was going to be bad and yet I would watch it because I like vampire movies and then I would leave going, “I knew that was going to be awful, why did I go?” Can anyone out there tell me anything about Turlock? Anything?

3 days until my fantasy football draft. Where does it rank on the Dork scale that I have already targeted my 4th WR who I hope to get in the 10th round? I would use the Dork scale I own to tell you the answer, but it actually starts crying when I type in the question. Since you asked, though, here’s some free advice. Larry Johnson is not going to be a fantasy stud this year. Everyone’s saying pick him first, but I do not trust that KC offense. The teams around them got better and they got more shallow. Not a recipe for success.

My friend Jennifer just set me a link to job postings for people looking for professional bloggers. Seriously, apparently this is a job for some people. I am now officially in pursuit of a professional blogging gig. The thought that someone would pay me to sit around venting my opinions to the unsuspecting public gets me more fired up than any lawyer should be stuck in the office on a beautiful Portland day in August. Jennifer, you may have just put an end to an otherwise promising legal career.

Ok, now back to the backpacking trip: Day 1 continued:

After arriving at camp, we went through the same routine that always follows getting into camp after a tough hike. It goes something like this:

Step 1: Remove pack and drop it on the ground. You don’t “set” your pack down no matter how hard you try, you drop it, because as soon as it comes off your shoulders it adds about 30 pounds when it hits your arms and you just can’t hold it. I don’t know why this is, but it’s true.

Step 2: Comment to everyone about how light you feel and how sweaty your back is. Comments like, “man my back is so sweaty it feels like I’m the winning coach and the team just dumped Gatorade on me, except it isn’t sticky…or sweet….it’s just kind of gross” are common.

Step 3: Sit on the nearest down log or rock and soak in all the different places you hurt until the place that hurts the worst is your fanny because you didn’t have enough energy to find a flat rock to sit on.

Step 4: Get up to set up the tent. Spend at least 10 minutes arguing over who had the poles in their pack. Spend at least 4 minutes panicked that you forgot the poles. Find the poles in your pack. Set up the tent on a piece of ground that while flat by day is at a 45 degree angle at night with your head down hill no matter which way you face.

Step 5: go down to the water source to filter water. Why filter water in a pristine meadow miles away from civilization? Horses and guys who pee in streams that run through pristine meadows, that’s why. Thank goodness for the improvements in water filters over the years. The first ones we took with us could filter approximately an ounce of water in an hour and would require so much energy that you could not possibly keep yourself hydrated with filtered water. The new ones are much much nicer.

Step 6: attempt to wash up in stream. Realize that stream is so cold that it would be frozen if not moving and decide that it is better to be dirty and stinky than cryogenically frozen in a pristine meadow

Step 7: go back to camp and begin making dinner. Ahhh, glorious dinner. You could pick up a big scoop of sand and mix in some salt and pepper and it would taste better than anything you’ve ever eaten after a long hike when you’re in the woods. And if you want to test that theory, eat a cliff bar after that long hike. Fortunately, like the improvements in water filters, freeze dried backpacking dinners have also improved over the years. One word of warning about the freeze dried food…ok, several words. Don’t add too much water. The spaghetti with meatballs will not be good as a soup. More importantly, don’t ever, ever try one of these meals at home. When you’re out in the woods and you eat these meals they taste good enough to make Wolfgang Puck jealous on his finest day. But that is only because the hike, your heavy pack, the bug bites and your ridiculously sweaty back have all make you temporarily insane. In reality, that food is toxic rubbish. I mean, it is really bad. If you eat that at home when everything else is normal, your body will turn on you like a woman who asks you if these jeans make her look “hippy” and gets anything but a “no way” in response.

Step 8: enjoy your pristine meadow. The views, the quiet, the stars, the wild life, the flowers, it is all amazing. You earned it, just sit back and enjoy.

We followed this routine to the letter with one added wrinkle. At our campsite the first night we were greeted by approximately 1 jillion mosquitoes. I mean I didn’t count, so that’s a rough estimate, but it might actually be on the low side. Thankfully, neither Tanya nor I ever get much attention from mosquitoes. They just don’t like us. It can’t be because I stink (the most commonly offered explanation from my “friends”), because they leave Tanya alone as well and she has never stunk a second in her life. I actually think they bite me some, (or stick me or whatever it is they do), but even when they do, I don’t get those itchy bumps that everyone else seems to get. No doubt this has contributed to my desire to continue camping. Enoch, however, is not so fortunate. Those little blood-suckers went after him like comedians on a Tom Cruise joke. By the time we were eating dinner he had already begun looking like violet from the first Wanka movie (and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, shame on you, go see that movie now). Taking a break from my usual hyperbole, let me say this. When I was eating dinner the mosquitoes were so thick I had to weave my spoon around like the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field just to avoid any cling-ons (my apologies for the mixed sci-fi reference).

Thankfully, after the next morning brought the return of the mosquitoes one last time, that was pretty much the last we had to deal with them. A slight breeze came up after that and kept them fairly cleared out for the rest of the trip.

And that actually concludes Day 1. The next post will begin “Day 2: The death march.”