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Kill A Cat, Save An Artist
I fell asleep watching Henry V. Which reminds me of falling asleep at the wheel on the way to Brenham, waking up on the left shoulder of the undivided highway with that sound of gravel crunching under tires and the lack of any other traffic at 3 a.m. being our salvation. My oilfield buddies were asleep. Anybody else want to drive, hey I almost just killed all of us? but they were dead to the world, heh, not even snoring. I kept driving for awhile, hit a kitty with bad judgement while going 70 mph, which woke me up, but soon I became sleepy again so 20 miles out I pulled over, and slept until dawn when the owner of the maroon Monte Carlo awoke and said, where are we?
We were in Texas, but I could have said Montana, another place I fell asleep, but in my own car, and I was in a rest stop in broad daylight. I was in the front seat with my legs stretched out past the open driver's side door when a State Trooper tapped me a few times on the feet with his baton. It seems I had become the worry of other resting motorists, some of whom thought I was dead.
No sir, not dead at all, I said while quickly scanning the mess of my car's interior, searching for any top secret documents I may have left laying about. Luckily, it seems I had safely stored all my top secret documents, the trooper was polite, I soon regained my wits, and continued in an easterly direction, where awaiting me was the chance to save a NY artist from floating away down the Potomac River, and over the Great Falls.
Which reminds me, back in the oilfields (I was on a seismograph crew, a doodlebugger), I tried once to swim across the Colorado River with my boots on. That almost turned out very badly and I won't do that again.
Questionable
I thought I saw bare footprints in the snow up on the White Oak Canyon trail yesterday and I wondered if maybe there is a local barefoot hiking club. And the idea of clubs always makes me think of the phrase--join, be a part. And then I wonder, right, exactly, which one?
I don't guess hiking several miles in wet boots with a cold has thrown me into a cold and flu season headspin, even though I do feel pretty stupid right now, I mean pretty stupid, and have some histamine I don't really need, or don't really want.
The night before I met a local at a bar who organizes full moon hikes in the park and he told me not to enter the trail from Skyline Drive but from the 231 side so that's what I did. It allows you to hike up to the falls and then down to the parking lot instead of the opposite, which is a hard way to end a hike, going up that is.
At the top I was sweating, exhausted, and unsure why I had made the effort. Many times going up I thought of K. heading for the Castle and felt the pointlessness of it while at the same time the compelling need to continue upward. Was it worth the effort to see the large falls, I don't know?
On the way down I slid and skipped and stepped carefully down rock ledges, but did not fall on my ass. I started laughing at one point, I'm not sure why.
Back in Sperryville I got some white bean and black olive soup (black olive, in soup? yeah, it's different, it's good, try it, the server said) at the deli and then back out in the parking lot I saw the proprietor and she said when you leaving, I said a few days, and she said, walking to her car, well, hmm, you sure kept to yourself.
So you wonder, should you start keeping to someone else?