A big h/t to the work of Bill Watterson and my favorite always - Calvin and Hobbes
I was sitting in a hotel room one night, and it hit me hard, " I wish I was home". It'd been a good day. I talked with several of my friends as I waited for a flight. All were well and we had fun making plans for summer shooting and outdoors activities. So why so blue? I had beautiful travel weather, even if part of it was four hours in a car. But in my room in the quiet, I started getting a little homesick. I've been on the road a lot the last six months. I missed my friends. I missed Barkley. Then I looked out the window to a beautiful sunset, to a lovely room with a huge comfy bed, a big bathtub. I'd had a nice supper with a colleague and there's NO work to do until daylight. I realized then, I had nothing to feel glum about. Life was good.
My folks sent me to camp one summer. I lived near the Mountains. In my backyard were trees, there was a big body of water only a few miles away. Why was I being packed up and shipped out to
camp for Pete's sake? For two weeks. Camp with GIRLS, even worse. I always had a close girlfriend, but as a kid, I wanted to hang out with the boys. They had cooler toys and less of that "Princess" thing going.
But off I was going. Aside from being stuck in an open ended cabin with a bunch of prepubescent girls who thought their Barbie was a toy, not some hostage to be used in negotiations with G.I. Joe, I wanted to be elsewhere. Home, with friends I had already, not new ones. The camp's location was beautiful. There were fun things to do. There was a small river that fed a lake, with some current even. And the canoes. I'd never canoed before. They were there for us to play with during swim period. We learned all the basics - jouncing, where you try and propel the damn thing without a paddle by standing up near the stern and flexing and unflexing your knobby 10 year old knees. The canoe rocks, slapping the water. It is then, supposed to move forward. Mostly it just knocked my ass into the water as I lost balance. After that you got to crawl back into the canoe. From the water. Water as deep as you were tall. Not an easy task.
After jouncing earned all the appeal of a dental visit you got to learn to deliberately tip over your canoe. That's not hard, lean too hard one way, a little pull on the opposite gunwale and over you go, into the water. Then, wet, cold and frustrated, you looked at your adversary, quiet now, but you know with the knowledge that only a 10 year has, that underneath the surface of that canoe was something huge and alive that had just woken from a slumbering nap and taken it's shot at you. It was slumbering now, but it would be after you again. Or you could slay it now. Time to roll that damn canoe.
The first time trying to roll it was the scariest, there briefly underwater, among the small tendrils of what only botanists would recognize, looking for that air pocket or a way out as the canoe was upside down and I was under it. And there it was, that small cathedral of space underneath the overturned canoe, inches above the grass green dance of a small body of water, the sounds of the other girls muffled for the moment. They told me to try again. I wanted to, wanted to learn enough to try some more serious trips down some swifter moving water if they let me. Real canoeing, with water that churned and foamed as if it had sweat, lathering like one of the horses. But I begged off, wanting to go sit by myself for a while, wondering when that bus would be coming back. I wasn't the only kid that cried that first night, but I felt the same way about tears as I do fear, you keep it to yourself, and move on.
I think the counselors knew I was having a hard time adjusting to "group" fun, missing my family, not being a real "social" kid among other girls. So they let me wander a bit ahead of the group while on our nature hikes, within shouting distance and restricted to the trail, but enough ahead I had the illusion I was by myself. I don't do well in groups, even this day working best by myself or a small handpicked team that I've trained. Those moments were the only reasons I didn't pack my bag and hitchhike into town to walk in on my parents with the "whose idea was THAT?". I wandered, cataloging bits of plants and flowers with the quiet efficiency of an inventory clerk, the leaves being little flags of life along an otherwise desolate trail. Small bits of the wild I hoped I could take home with me to add to my little scientific collection there in my sunny yellow bedroom. Home. Soon, I hoped. I paused sitting on a rock by a stream watching the waters, yet still I stayed to myself, not wanting to join in, thinking only of when I'd get to leave.
Nights were back in the cabin while the other girls talked into the wee hours about school and boys and trivial things. I wished only that they'd quiet, so I could lay on my back, there in the bunk closest to the front and look up into the sky. I didn't care about whether that boy in the third row noticed me, or how soon my boobs would grow. Face it. I was 1o, and I was homesick. There I was in some of the most beautiful woods in the State, with no pesky brothers, no chores, nothing but water and trees and play and I was wishing I was somewhere else, with someone else.
Too often we spend so much time thinking we know what we want, desire becoming a shadow around everything. When what we need is right under our nose.
Years later, I worked with a young man who said he couldn't wait to marry a sexy model type his friends would be jealous of. He passed over cute, fun, smart girls and rushed into marriage with his dream, one with the IQ of a bunny and the good nature of the one on Monty Python. I saw him years later, divorced. I asked him about it and he said that one day when he was out and another man whistled at his wife, he realized he had his dream, indeed he'd possessed it for years, and it didn't make him happy. He said it was the saddest day of his life.
It's easy to plan your life around, next week or next year, on what you think you need. The perfect house, the perfect job. You're so busy looking at "what if" or "when", when happiness may well be right there around you, right under your nose, this day,
now. I think that night, when I lay there and thought about the canoe, what I'd accomplished and how much fun I had, I began to understand.
The next day at camp, we went back to the water. With the first try I rolled the canoe and came up and around laughing, with only a small amount of water up my nose I noticed the smiles around me, the sun on the water, how very blue that sky was, the spectral tracings in the water of the other canoes. All around was water, the sound of its life cresting and swelling, rhythmic music to the whispers and laughter and joys of simply being a kid at camp.
I felt badly I hadn't written my parents back, still sulking that I'd been sent here. That afternoon I got out a sheet of paper and penned some words. As I started to write, I thought of the way the trees smelled right outside my sleeping bag, how fun it was to fill up that snotty girl's sleeping bag with pine cones, how midsummer light reflects off the water as you captain your vessel down what to you is a roaring rapid, even if to others it's a small creek. I thought of how hungry I was in the morning after a day of nothing but play, and how good pancakes taste. I thought of the geese that I couldn't hear in my room at home, flying overhead here, their honking quiet and high and wild, bursting out of the dawn's first blush. I looked around the woods, full of promise and grace and just enough danger to whet the imagination of a youngster. There, all around me, was joy; the gravity of life, the outdoors, with no parents to shush me, no brothers to tease me, just real mountains of stone and wood and rushing water, of need. Mountains containing the stories of a lifetime, told around a campfire.
But what I wrote was.
Camp is OK. Thanks for sending me. Love -meOutside of the cabin, the wind dries the sweat on my face. I pull on my hiking boots and launch a boot clumping run for the lodge to meet up for afternoon crafts. The wind of the mountains whistles through and around me, tickling the back of my throat, which erupts into laughter as I race towards my new friends. I laugh into the wind, with no thought of the future, only that which is now, these days of delight.
A couple weeks ago business took me across a neighboring state. I watch things as I drive, it's part of my nature to note detail. There coming up at my 8 o'clock position was a black 4 x 4 driven by a young lady. The custom license plate. GNYS GRL, with a little sticker on the back window - I love my Marine. I smiled, a Marine's wife or sweetheart.
