One of the stupidest things we do is go camping in the Oregon Cascades in the spring. You would think that winter camping would be worse, but it’s not. We commonly go snow camping which can be a lot of fun if the RV has a large supply of scotch and cigars. It is even better with electrical and TV cable hook-up with which to run the microwave, propane furnace, while watching a ball game and not worry about running the batteries too low. Every once in a while we even go outside and enjoy the snow flakes, although we had to learn an expensive lesson about putting the awning up for too long under those conditions as awnings do not tend to do well at holding back a couple tons of accumulated snow. Places like Willamette Pass Ski area used to have electrical hook ups for $10 a night and although they did not offer cable, they had a nicely stocked bar with a stunning view of the slopes at night where down hillers on skis and snow boarders do their best at auditioning for America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Judy and I think we are expert cross-country skiers. There is really nothing to it. Just pay your trail fee, slide over to the groomed trail, place the skis, one each into the twin ruts, give a little shove with your poles and whoosh, you are soon moving at the take-your-breath-away speed of 5 mph. As long as you can keep the skis in the ruts you can just keep going and going with little effort. If the downhill gets too steep, just close your eyes and squat down cause you ain’t stopping or slowing down till the bottom of the hill. We had completely mastered this and wanted to move on to alpine downhill skiing. So, one evening instead of going to the bar we rented skis and somehow managed to pole our way over to the bunny slope. Took us two tries to get on the ski lift but only one to get off. I don’t think we earned any style points with our fall on your butt and slide dismount techniques. The next thing we tried to do was go downhill, which was a mistake on my part. Judy made it all the way down, but I ended up skiing right off the slope and into the trees, twice. My second close encounter with a fir tree was accompanied by a large thump as my head met a low hanging limb. This was rapidly followed by a blinding flash of light and a vision of Sonny Bono saying,
“That’s twice! And you have a PhD!? Do you want to break your freaken’ neck like I did? Stay away from the light you stupid asshole!”
I quickly took off my skis and walked out of the woods, slipped, and fell on my ass. As I was landing, I managed to drop the skis which mockingly skied down the slope all on their own to where Judy was waiting for me. The hike down the slope was somewhat embarrassing; I had failed, while my darling wife had no trouble. Although this was most likely due to her lower center of gravity, I was not going to hear the end of this one for many years. But what was really bothering me was that I was going to have to explain wet spot in my BVD’s again. Then it dawned on me that as she had made it down, she was likely to want to do it again and would want me to accompany her, most likely on the same skis that had just tried to kill me. That is when my bladder really let go. I crunched slowly down the slope desperately trying to come up with some kind of excuse on why she should go it alone. Although I had hit a tree, she had not seen it. There was no blood or lump, and it was already too late to fake a limp. I tried walking slower to give myself a little more time, but I was drawing a complete blank. I could tell her the truth, that my 30 seconds of managing to stay on the skis had scared the bejesus out of me and that my vision of Sonny Bono could only be interpreted as a foreshadowing of doom. No way was I revealing that truth. I was going to hear about this misadventure for the rest of my life as it was, the rest of the story would only lead to further humiliation as it was told and retold by my children and their children, and countless generations that would follow after them. It would probably be emblazoned on my tombstone.
“Here lies Bruce Boese, devoted husband and father who tried to downhill ski once in his life, had a vision of Sonny Bono and pissed his pants”.
That is not how I would want to be viewed by posterity. And there she was, smiling, waiting with infinite patience, standing so proudly on her skis, holding her ski poles in one hand, and my cursed skies in her other. The bitch! I was out of time. I started to stammer when she cut me off with,
“I’m done! These damn boots are cutting into my legs and I have to get them off right now”.
I was saved by a pair of large calves and too tight boots. It was not a smile on her face but a grimace of pain. There is a God in heaven, and he loves me!
“You sure? I could go back and get you a bigger pair of boots,” I said hiding a smirk.
But she was sure, and I managed to live another day. In her pain she never noticed the wet blotch slowing spreading from my neither regions. We went back to the RV had a couple of drinks where she made me reluctantly vow to never try downhill skiing again.
I don’t know why I told you that story. This is not about snow camping but about why it’s stupid to go camping in Oregon in the spring.
Actually, it is pretty easy to guess why it is a stupid idea to go camping in Oregon in the spring. Oregon is an American Indian term which roughly translated is “When it starts to rain, go south or you will drown”. If Noah had been an Oregonian, God telling him it was going to rain for 40 days and 40 nights would have been met with a “so what else is new”. And “why do I need to build an Ark when I own a kick ass drift boat”.
Out-of-stater’s, who move here when it is nice in the summer, seldom make it through the rainy season which is roughly from Sept through July. If they stay, it is because they have burned though all their money that they made selling off their condo in southern California by trying to maintain their Oregon dream house which leaks like the Titanic. Actually, it leaks worse than the Titanic cause the Titanic only had to worry about water leaking in from the bottom. If eventually they do manage to sell their house, the buyer is some other So Cal. sucker and they sell it for just enough to pay it off and buy a used travel trailer. After which they are off to the southwest desert states or Florida, or some other place that has more than two seasons (damp and deluge). This rational behavior is in stark contrast to the native Oregonians who stay ‘cause they have no idea that in most other parts of the planet, mud dries. Some of us, especially Judy, claim to love the rain. But in truth, while a few of us we may greet the deluge season with happy thoughts, by mid-April we are all wet, weary, and depressed. This is especially true for LoriAnne and me, for it has been a long time since we were camping and with the arrival of the first sucker hole of the new year there is nothing that is going to stop us. BTW, a sucker hole is a distant break in the clouds, often accompanied by an irresistible urge to fly fish.
One of our spots for this early campout was Humbug, a small forest service campground not too far from Detroit Lake, which is a rather large reservoir on the Santiam River. There is a nice state campground on the lake but they have rules about quiet times, keeping your dogs on leashes, and a limit to the number of people and RV’s, tents, and cars you can stuff into one campsite. Humbug also has these same rules, but it does not officially open till May, and as they don’t lock the gate, screw the rules. As the Breiten Bush river that runs through camp is not open to fishing at that time of the year, we have the whole campground to ourselves, but we usually just take one or two of the central large sites while taking a few of the smaller ones for extra rigs. A few of us still have not gotten RV’s so the tents go up with large blue tarps hung over them from tree trunks by spider webs of bungees and ropes, just in case the weather turns. Bobby calls this encampment Tarp City Utah. I don’t know why and know better than to ask. Just like the line in one of those bad sci-fi movies, there are some things that man is not meant to know. The dogs are turned loose, with the exception of Jaxson, as Bobbie and Jeff’s young Rottweiler had the brains of a gnat and if given the opportunity he would eat rocks.
Next step is to get the campfire going. Although Oregon is awash in firewood, most of the stuff is either wet or so green that even napalm just scorches it a bit. Alan has partially solved this problem by using a propane powered flame thrower, however, even that has a problem with the really wet stuff. The only solutions are to buy firewood from one of those roadside “camp wood” entrepreneurs or bring it from home. As it is Easter weekend and only fools, my friends and family camp this time of the year, there are no camp wood vendors open. They are all down in Baja at their winter vacation homes enjoying the obscene profits they make from idiots who are willing to pay $5 for a half dozen 18-inch pieces of partially cured alder.
Lucky for us, some of us have access to the bring-it-from-home wood bank. Mark seems to have an endless supply of cured oak while I have the debris from my latest construction project which is prime firewood with a few rusty nails attached. This in my humble opinion only adds to the campfire adventure. Mark’s wood is all cut to the exact same length and comes prepackaged in a series of plastic milk crates which are packed in a manner to maximize fuel volume in the minimum of crate space. I throw the scrap wood into the pickup bed haphazardly and dump it pell-mell on the ground like a game of pickup sticks played with the broken and discarded weaponry of the army of darkness. It was only a matter of time till this juxtaposition of prissy neatness and demented chaos came to no good. Mark, while unloading his prefect and pristinely prepared oak, managed to step on the end of my pile, catapulting a four foot section of a splintered 1 X 4 with an exposed nail which in its previous life had been part of a picket fence. Although Mark, when sober, is noted for his cat like reflexes, it happened so fast the even a Ninja would not have reacted in time. Smack, right between the eyes, dead center on his forehead, with the nail making a small but profusely bleeding hole. Lucky for Mark that the nail only slightly protruded from the board. This was because when I originally built the picket fence, I used left over nails from one of my many and assorted other “honey do” projects. Also lucky for him that it had only one of these “too short” nails rather than the five or six it normally takes for me to attach one board to another. After we had cleaned the wound and stopped laughing Bobby put one of those little round band aids on the puncture which made him look like a blond Hindu.
The next morning, we decided that as Easter was approaching and we had all those Easter egg dyes and little stickers we might as well pretty up the dot a bit. After a few beers most figured why should Mark be the only one who was “stylin”, so they began to decorate their foreheads with similar artistic spots minus the underlying hole. I might have joined them in the cult, but I was still sober. I am not one of the beer-for-breakfast crowd as I was saving my limited supply of Scotch for the campfire that evening. This meant that at that exact instant in the space-time continuum I was the designated driver.
I can’t remember who decided that we should drive up the mountain to find some snow. It was definitely not me. It was also definitely not Jennifer, as the sun had mysteriously appeared. Being a reverse lycanthrope, she immediately ripped off half her clothes, and planted herself on the nearest chaise lounge to tan even though it was only 55 degrees.
Don’t you need some heat to tan? Although you can cook meat in the microwave, it sure looks and tastes better if you use the hot coals of a barbecue. As a scientist I know that UV from the sun travels through space and upon striking bare skin causes a chemical change which makes it tan and eventually to look like that of a rhinoceros with terminal psoriasis. I thought about reminding Jen of the eventual outcome of her trying to look like Malibu Barbie, but I happen to like Malibu Barbie, so I kept my mouth shut and my eyes wide open.
So although I was perfectly content to stay in camp with Jen, I was soon driving my pickup up the mountain with Judy in the passenger seat and the rest of the sots in the pickup bed like so many pieces of camp wood, all with that stupid dot in middle of their foreheads. About two miles up we had to pull over to the side of the one lane gravel road to let a pickup by as it was coming down off the mountain. I rolled my window down to ask
“How far up till we hit snow?”
He replied that it was not too much farther, then he noticed my cargo and added “OK I have to ask, what’s with the dots?”
To which everybody began replying at once. Somewhere in this cacophony was the truth about the board and the nail and everybody feeling sorry for Mark and adorning themselves with sympathy dots.
He was not buying that one, “Yeah right. Now tell me the real story.”
Bobby replied with something about sacrificing a virgin. This seemed to satisfy him, even though it was obviously not the truth. First, there are no virgins left in Oregon and even if there were, they obviously would not be riding in the bed of my pickup with a dot on their forehead. And second, everybody knows that you sacrifice live chickens or ducks if you are an Oregon State University alumni.
There were other high lights of that first Easter campout at Humbug, like the adults only Easter egg hunt, my third degree burn from trying to put wood in the fire pit using only my feet, and Jen getting aloe lotion rubbed into her now naked lobster hued back. All in all, it was a wonderful campout, with lots of good food and friends. And as the weather was passable, we gullibly assumed that it was always to be thus. Little did we know the horror that awaited us the next year.
To be continued
