What a weekend
My buddies Patty and Lisa went out camping with me this past weekend for some long-awaited girl bonding time (though none of us are really that great at the girlieness) and got much more than we bargained for out of our choice of campgrounds.
Lilliwaup (pronounced "Lilly-whop" though I prefer "Lilly-woop" or "Lilly-wayup" because it makes Patty turn colors in annoyance) is a tiny little campground about 15 miles away from the small town of Hoodsport, which is a half hour away from the also small town of Olympia, which is an hour from my lovely city of Seattle. It's beautiful, largely unspoiled and right near Lake Cushman - our favorite chilly mountain swimming hole. We camped there last month also, and were expecting more of the same relaxation amongst the trees, but THIS time our neighbors were anywhere from 8-20 underage alcoholics (Patty liked to call them "Shelton's finest") who started out as merely annoying but soon erupted into a late-teen tornado that had us fearing for our health.
Patty stayed on her own Friday night, claiming the site for my lazy ass (I had two birthday parties to attend on Friday, though one doesn't really count because he was actually trying to pick a new birthday to change his astrological sign into one that fit his impression of his personality better. But still, party.) which would be joining her Saturday morning. She said that they started drinking early and spent all night making wild animal calls back and forth and wandering the campground, throwing their empty beer cans all over the place. A couple of them baptized the pit toilets (the only nice place to pee, dangit) with the contents of their stomachs, and they apparently also threw large amounts of lighter fluid on their fire and went around trashing unoccupied campsites. Except that one of them was occupied, as they found out on Saturday night. We went out to the lake when Lisa and I arrived, and when we came back to have dinner we found the young punks already in an argument with some older hicks who were yelling full-voice that someone better pay for the stuff they'd broken. It kept escalating until suddenly things got quiet, which I knew from high school experience was a bad sign. Suddenly about ten punks returned to their campsite and spoke in hushed voices, and a car drove off up the logging road back to town. We found out later that they'd beaten up one of the hicks pretty badly, and they were suprised he'd been able to drive.
This might be a good time to also mention that when we'd gone to the lake, we'd also stopped by the town and called the police about our neighbors. Patty and I were worried that 16-year-olds and hard liquor would either equal alcohol poisoning (judging by the projectile vomit, they weren't that good at knowing their limits) (I know, I'm one to talk - but I'm old and any alcohol poisoning I get is my own damn fault and not a result of simple inexperience) or someone getting seriously hurt. We spent all night looking for the cops but none came until late the next morning, and then it was only a fire engine with kids in it not much older than our miscreant neighbors.
Once they'd kicked the asses of the only fellow campers who would challenge them (the campground was full of families and other older groups of campers, who from what we saw either hid in their sites or left early), the punks turned on themselves. A fight broke out and suddenly girls were screaming. A guy (I'll call him Mr. Megaphone since I don't know his name and his voice carried for miles) had head-butted a girl and then was punched by her boyfriend, and he had responded by breaking the boyfriend's nose and doing who-knows-what other damage to the guy. The boyfriend and girlfriend ran off and hid, and I guess later drove off to get medical help for his nose and her head, and Mr. Megaphone started what would be a night-long reign of terror, attacking everyone who came near him and screaming at the top of his sizable lungs for the guy to "COME OUT HERE, YOU FAT FUCK, I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU!". That was his refrain. Mr. Megaphone didn't stop until 5 a.m., and then resumed at around 8 when he'd woken up and asked his friends what the fight was about the night before and someone told him and he got angry again. He wandered the loop of the campground, yelling for the guy and yelling at anyone who was out of their tents "HAVE YOU SEEN A FAT FUCK AND HIS FAT GIRLFRIEND? IS THAT THEM THERE? ARE YOU SURE? ARE YOU HIDING A FAT FUCK, 'CAUSE I'M GOING TO KILL HIM!" He tried to throw their tent in the fire. He tried to beat up anyone who told him to calm down. As far as I could tell, all he got from the fight was a split lip. And I suppose a full-body rush of megaphonic testosterone that lasted for the next 12 hours. Boys.
Patty, Lisa and I sat around the campfire for as long as we could stand it. Patty throught about going over there to try and help, particularly when we saw a mother and her young daughter high-tailing out of the area and people racing in all directions. I convinced her to wait until people started yelling for medical help, because that's usually the signal of the end of the fight and coming in at the middle is never a good idea. Plus I was worried that she'd tell them that we'd called the cops and they'd turn on us. They had already been making comments about us, and we'd won no friends by talking about them at a normal volume when they could probably hear most of what we had to say (mostly "damn stupid kids". We're old and crochety.) Tempers were high all around - I went to the only non-puke covered pit toilets all the way across the campground and ran into two of the girl punks, and we almost got in a fight because I told them that they should use the door locks when they were peeing.
We retired to our tents and spent hours talking back and forth through their thin walls. Lisa wanted to drive back into town and call the cops again. Patty wanted to give them a few more minutes. I pointed out that if we drove off now, we'd all better go and take all our valuables because they'd surely figure out what we were doing (we'd have to go right by their camp) and trash our stuff. We didn't drive, eventually they calmed down a little and we got a couple hours of restless sleep.
We went swimming again on Sunday to try and wash away the experience but still didn't feel safe. We'd look up every time a car went by, and picked a swimming hole that was so far off the beaten path that we had to scale a cliff to get down to it, and pull ourselves out using tree limbs.
Next time I'm thinking that we'll camp at a slightly larger campground, one that's a little closer to the regular ranger patrols and a little less tempting for the camping criminal element. I know it's a slippery slope from unregulated campgrounds to regulated campgrounds to manicured not-really-campgrounds to flippin' RV parking lots but I'm willing to risk it to never be afraid of a drunken 16-year-old again.
Southern nightmares
When I graduated college the first time my parents and brother came to see me in Texas. It was a first-time trip for all of them, and they stayed after the ceremony was over to sightsee and to get ready for my brother and father to drive back to Washington with me while my mother flew home (she’s not the road-trip type). We were staying in the same hotel room on the last night before the drive home, with my father and brother in one king-size bed and my mother and I in the other. It was the first time in memory that I’d shared a bed with her, and the evening was not exactly a restful one for many reasons. I had wrecked my car the week before and had been running around getting it fixed before the migration plus getting ready for the graduation ceremony, which in Texas is a big occasion (every opportunity to dress up there is exploited mercilessly).
I didn’t sleep much, and when I did doze off I had a series of horrible dreams. I dreamt that my sister was run over by a semi truck, my aunt had met with an accident, and finally that my mom had passed away in her sleep while I was right next to her. That one shook me, and I woke up with a start to see my mom very still across the bed from me. She wasn’t moving a muscle (strange, I know, to be sleeping and not moving but I wasn’t exactly thinking straight) and I couldn’t see the rise and fall of her breathing no matter how hard I looked. And I was looking pretty hard.
I scooted a little closer to her, leaning in to see if I could see her nose move or eye twitch or any indication that she wasn’t dead like my dream had predicted. I worked myself into a frenzy (a very quiet frenzy, just in case she actually was sleeping) and started to panic a little. My brain was whirling with options, from jumping and shaking her awake to saying her name (I just know it would have been a shout if I’d tried that one, given my state), to tapping (shoving) her shoulder. Finally I settled on a trick that I’d read about in books, where you put a mirror or glass under their nose to see if it fogged up. The only problem was that I didn’t have a mirror, or know where to find one. I decided to use my hand, and to try and feel the breath under her nose.
You have to picture this: A fully grown daughter who really should know better sneaking up on her own mother with her hand flat below her mom’s nose, holding her own breath to better gauge the possible air flow of the potentially deceased mother. Of course my mom woke up. “What’s wrong?” How do you answer that? “Nothing… I just had a bad dream and had to make sure you were still alive so I stuck my hand under your nose.” I think I did end up saying something like that, and apologizing a million times because I knew she’d have a hard time getting back to sleep. She knows me, though, and if anyone can understand a little childish midnight death-related paranoia, a mother can.
Why I am Seinfeld sometimes
Reasons I have broken up with/stopped seeing men (these are not the deal breaking, primary ultra break-up reasons, but they are important all the same and certainly contribute to the overall desire to run far, far away):
1. I suspected that he stole my toothpaste. He visited my house when I had a new tube of my favorite kind, and when he left it was nowhere to be found. No minty breath on the dogs, either (believe me, I would notice).
2. He kept saying “Let me look at you” and then staring at me from different angles, beaming. I felt like a prize bass hanging on the wall. Creepy.
3. He told his mother about me after our first date and told me that he told his mother on our second date. He informed me that she had given her approval.
4. His previously white bathroom was bright orange with mold. I asked how bad it was when he moved in and he told me that he was the first tenant after a remodel so it had been brand new. I was scared to sit on the toilet seat.
5. He had a blow-up mattress for a sofa, but didn’t let me sit on it. I had to sit on the floor with my back up against it like he preferred.
6. He took longer to fix his hair than I did. Granted, this was in the early ‘90’s and his rocker-mullet was pretty ornate but for the love of all that is holy, if it takes longer than a half hour then shave the bastard off.
7. Poetry.
8. He sang me Bobby Brown’s “Don’t Be Cruel” at a karaoke bar (complete with rapping) and then got mad at me for giggling.
9. He kept petting my face and cooing at me like I was a baby. Granted, he was pretty sloshed but face-petting is not an amateur move and he wasn’t all that coordinated at the time. I wasn’t a fan of being randomly semi-slapped and told what a preeetty guuuuhhhrl I was.
10. I couldn’t pronouce properly or remember his name, and he didn’t take kindly to being called “John” (his real name was more like Baku-somethinglongandcomplicated).
11. He really only kept me around because I knew how to hang shelves.
12. He only had one piece of furniture, a loveseat, because he felt that anything he bought had to be just perfect and even after three years of searching he hadn’t found anything else that fit his house. So there was just a loveseat, all by itself. weeping.
Underwater wonderland
The Edmonds Underwater Park is like a scuba Disneyland, minus the mascots (unless someone can find a way to make Ling Cod cute) and theme music (if you don't count the hiss of your own exhalation and inhalation in your ear and the occasional ferry horn blast). It was begun long ago and far away by what seem to be a bunch of hippies (it was the '60's) with scuba equipment, a bunch of crap, and a dream. They took the crap and started making a series of underwater sculptures, including giant piles of rocks called the Cathedrals, concrete tubing piled to look like Stonehenge called Tubehenge (what can I say, they were high), a giant spiral of something called the Spiral (the "of something" is implied), and random little things here and there like a discarded torpedo and a cash register that has achieved legendary status based on its resistance to being found. Also, about 5 shipwrecks. It is now acres wide and has been established as a marine sanctuary, which means that divers come from all over to swim its rope "streets" to the attractions and the protected Ling Cod and Capascan fish have grown to monstrous proportions.
I chose the UWP as the first dive site for my lil' scuba club because it has very little current, easy navigation (hello, they have ROPE STREETS), and I really really wanted to see Tubehenge. We had a great group, with three of them being extremely experienced divers and three being completely new to the sport. How new? Just-finished-certification new, and in addition finished-certification-a-while-ago-and-certain-to-forget-important-things new. For example: we hopped into our gear, hopped into the water, started confidently swimming out to the buoy marking the edge of the streets, and my fins fell off. I guess I'd accidentally put the heel straps too low. Then once I got going again my weight belt suddenly slipped down over my hips and I quickly caught it in the crook of my knees. My BCD vest kept me afloat, but now I was stuck 10 yards out in the water beyond the point where I could stand up, and couldn't kick my legs to get myself back without dropping the weight belt. My dive buddy PJ came to my rescue and got the belt off me, and we both swam back to where we could stand up and I worked to get the belt on as tightly as I could (PJ was pulling with all of his might and the thing still slipped again at the end of the dive. Stupid nonexistent hips. Stupid man-designed-for-man weight belts. grrr.). Then PJ lost his fins (he's another newbie). Then the third novice was scared to go under. Then my vest started leaking. The poor experienced divers were waiting for us to get our stuff in order for over half an hour! When four of us finally made it out to the buoy, we decided to go under and let the other couple go on their own.
Here's where it got fun...
I put my regulator in my mouth and grabbed my vest deflater and pushed the release button, confident that I would slip under the water as easily as my compatriots were doing and slide all the way to the sea floor with my deflater raised over my head, like a strange underwater elevator that you had to raise your arm to activate. That's how it had worked every other time I had dove. This time I raised my deflater, pushed the button, sunk exactly six inches under the surface of the water, and stayed there. I kicked down, I swept my other arm upward to get the process going, and still bobbed just under the surface like a leaky pool toy. The other three were far below me now, but one of the experienced people came back up when she saw I was having trouble. She told me I was underweighted when I got my rental equipment and that I should just swim back in, since even if I got underwater I'd be fighting to stay there. The other two came up and had a lively debate about if I would stay under better if I was down deeper, and just how deep the dive site was and if it would make a difference, and if anyone had any extra weights (I scored an extra 2 lbs. off PJ but he couldn't spare any more). All the time they were arguing I was fighting to get my head deeper under water, shooting up our of the water to see if I could get some extra depth, adapting my kick to try and get that extra foot or so of depth that could get me under... it wasn't pretty. Lots of flailing. What I should have remembered at the rental shop is that I am a very buoyant person (shut up) and that even in class I had to have extra weights to keep me underwater. It's not fat, you evil people, it's something else about a person's body composition that makes them float or sink like a rock. I don't remember what it is, though. Bone density? Muscle percentage? Lung capacity? Anyways. I float. I have friends that are larger than me that sink. I'm not fat. I hate you all.
Here's a list of the war that was going on between myself and my gear:
Things that were sinking = Weight belt with 28 lbs. of weight, tank (very heavy), assorted gear
Things that were floating = Wetsuit (they are slightly buoyant), me (parts - I refuse to believe that my liver floats anymore).
I would be proud to win (with the meager help of my wetsuit), except that in this battle I wanted to lose, and lose badly! After agreeing to swim back if I couldn't get under in the next five minutes, they submerged and left me at the surface, scheming. Finally I rocketed up in the air with the help of my very fancy swim fins and plunged under, jackknifing mid-descent and swimming with all my might for the sea floor. This is not a traditionally acceptable way to descend. You're supposed to take the leisurely elevator ride down, stopping every so often to clear out ear and nose pressure buildups, not rocket straight down headfirst and only stop when your face is about to hit kelp. I grabbed the buoy base and cleared my ears violently (they hadn't liked my choice of descents very well) and pulled all the emergency deflating devices on my vest just to double-check that it was empty. It was easier to stay down at 25 feet under sea level, but just barely. I found that I had to swim diagonally, with my fins far above my head pushing me down, and if I stopped too long to look at something I'd go drifting up to the surface again. I stayed under for quite a while in that manner, hovering with my feet kicking madly over my head and feeling for all the world like one of those freak-of-nature sea creatures that you see on the Discovery Channel and feel very sorry for, even though you don't really know why. It was a great dive, we saw ship propellers (though no ship - the visibility was bad and we couldn't find the main wreck) and milk crates covered with sea life, we saw the Cathedrals (I almost ran headfirst into one due to my misaligned viewing angle and tendency to look at the sea floor), we saw some sort of wreck that was so covered in kelp and anenomes that it was near impossible to piece together if it was a boat or car or just a jumble of unrelated things. We saw a Ling Cod that was over 5 feet long, and swam next to some other little rock fish that seemed very curious about our dangling gear. Then my air started getting lower and the tank began to join the "Things that were floating" side. Not a good idea. I had to kick with all my might to stay down, and then even with my hardest effort I started to rise and waved goodbye to my friends at the bottom as I slowly floated up to the surface to begin the long swim back to shore.
An aside: NOBODY looks cool in scuba gear! James Bond only did because he wasn't wearing all the dorky parts. You have a hood and mask pushing your face every which way, a bulky vest and tubes heading everywhere, and a wetsuit that doesn't do anyone any favors. When I waded up to the beach with it's playing children and sunning moms and couples strolling along in their finery, I felt like the creature from the black lagoon emerging from the water. All shiny and black and tube-y and with a slightly pink tiny bit of face from the cold of the water, plus staggering under the weight of the gear and walking gingerly on exhausted legs. A crippled, slow, weaving creature from the black lagoon. With bad hair. But that was under the hood so at least only I knew of that part.
After lunch and a break, I managed to convince two of the guys to go down again with me in a more adequately weighted state so we headed out into the water again, me staggering with the added 10 lbs. strapped around my waist (I have bruises today - I think I may have overdone it the second time). I sank like a large, properly-heavy grateful rock and we set out to see whatever we could, checking out a couple more of the features (I have no idea what they were pre-submergence, they were so overgrown), petting the wildlife, and finding the strangest looking little sea creature I've ever seen clinging to a leaf of seaweed. It was probably only 2 inches long and roughly caterpillar-shaped, but it was covered with strange protuberances and bright white with purplish stripes zig-zagging across its body. I tried to get my fellow divers to touch it but I think we were all scared it would either grab us with its tentacles or explode like some alien octopus/caterpillar bomb.
Another aside: Arguably the best part of scuba is being completely weightless in the water. Working the weight/air balance out so that you can stay perfectly still and suspended in the ocean, watching the world go by. Also, flips are really easy. I couldn't do the splits because of wetsuit inflexibility (2 layers = walking around like the wrapped-up kid in The Christmas Story) but was rolling and twisting around like a sea otter on crack.
PJ has a boat, so expect many more Scuba Adventure Dive stories in the future, hopefully with less dropping of things and more seeing of alien life and backflips.
