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Buzzard Bait
This guy with his teenage son came up to me in the White Oak parking lot yesterday and asked me was he in the Old Rag parking lot and I said no. I was wearing the old style large headphones over a black knit skull cap because the ear buds have been bugging me and I had on wrap around shades. I may have looked a little freaky. And the ponytail and few days worth of grey speckled beard probably added to my "this is the guy we'll ask as last resort" ratio and even without the headgear and shades and throw in a haircut/shave if you want I pretty much don't have some of the more typical hiking gear and so look more like a guy wandered in off the street hiking rather than a guy who really hikes. I like hiking but I'm not all that good at it. I get lost and disoriented (only partly on purpose) and take not asking for directions to such an extreme that someday I may find myself disoriented too far away from help too long after dark and I'll die of exposure and/or get eaten by a bear and by all rights the words on my tombstone will be--"He wouldn't ask directions until it killed him."
The guy and his son were athletic, clean cut, and good looking by the most basic standards--in that they did not have any freakish proportions or unusual growths front and center--, and they appeared to have good teeth. Also, their healthy exemplary attitudes seeped from every healthy fresh scrubbed pore and no doubt advanced them in whatever ventures they attempted. People like them don't suffer after fools so when I went into evasive maneuvers and philosophical hem and hawing in response to their more specific questions, they wrote me off as a nincompoop and without saying by, see ya later, eat shit, or thanks for nothing, they just turned away from me and went to ask for help from the fresh scrubbed young woman who was now getting out of her car across the lot. At least she knew how to dress. I don't have any enmity for the young woman, she was just being herself for godsake and had not even a tiny bit of cognition regarding her role in making me look like a nincompoop. I'm really not the person you should ask for directions. I readily admit this.
But I stewed over it a bit and wanting to limit my exposure to any possible future human contact, I vered left at the first fork and ended up on a trail I thought I knew but turned out was unbeknownst to me until it was named about a mile or two later by a German tourist with a map. He also did not mean to underscore my nincompoopity but he surely did when in response to his question how far is it to White Oak trail I said you mean this isn't it. It hit me all of a sudden that it certainly wasn't the White Oak trail because I hadn't seen a waterslide the last time I hiked and here we were--me, the German, the English dude, and about 20 frat guys doing a polar bear thing by stripping down to skivvies and doing the slide, which is a gradual slippery drop over smooth moss covered rock for about 100 feet. There is a small pool of river water at the bottom. I'm on an "isolated" nature trail and there is over 20 of us congregated. I just kept going up until I hit Skyline Drive (which to get to driving, from where my truck was parked, would have taken about 25 miles and I don't think this could have been more than 4) and then turned around and hiked back to the parking lot, climbing down instead of up. I was hiking for about six hours. I got lost in my mind towards the end and backtracked to the guy looking like Seinfeld's, Newman, who told me I had been going the right direction and so that added another mile and a half to what was easily my longest hike thus far, maybe 6 or 8 miles of moderately steep hiking.
Today was perfect early so Loretta on her way to work (she didn't have anything to wear so she was today going to perform her job naked) showed me another trail, one known to far fewer people, and I hiked again, trespassing a little mostly because of the signs telling me not to. Back on the trail proper and I've always wanted to do yoga so I was doing some on a hill above the trail, with my shirt off, until, the combination of my calm station, and, rib bones prominant enough to imply cadaver, inspired six buzzards to circle in for a very close and somewhat threatening looksee. I stood up and they acted like they couldn't believe I wasn't lunch and even though that could be considered an insult I was pleased to see them fly away from me scared. For awhile, the natural order which implied my superiority over the beasts of the earth seemed somewhat skewed, and I felt small, and insignificant, like one of those MacDonald's cheeseburgers.
There was a forest within the forest, in a deep valley below the trail, and without leaves you could see alot of other birds and especially those bigger, red-headed woodpeckers, there were lots of them, and lots of still standing rotten trees suffering from apparent shotgun blasts which were really just round holes caused by voracious peckering. I'd never seen so many woodpeckers in one area and thought up the name Forest of Woodpeckers but later changed it to Pecker Woods.
I returned a rented movie to an area rental place last Sunday and one of the owners, whom I haven't seen for a year, and was then just where I had seen her last, out on the sidewalk raking leaves in a windstorm, called me by first and last name, which startled me because I think we had met only once. She said she was hoping to run into me today because she wanted my opinion on something. A movie I had rented last year had been checked out next after me by a person who came 25 miles to get it and when that person got it home it was cracked, from the center hole towards the outer edge, about an inches worth. She made me come inside with her so I could see for myself. I didn't really have anywhere to be but I was beginning not to like the direction this was going. First off, to show me the thing she basically proved the culprit of this crime not to be any one individual but instead the overly tenacious gripping ring of the DVD holder's plastic case. In fact her own machinations which resulted finally in getting the disc out of its cover were so severe in nature, so thoroughly was she bending the DVD, that when it did finally come free, and she turned it over to the side without the title, showing more clearly the crack, I was tempted to cry out--hey, did you just bust that? But I said instead, oh yes I see, and just offered to pay for it. This overly simple solution was met with disdain and a not overly convincing assurance that she wasn't trying to get me to pay for it, she just wanted my opinion on how to deal with such a thing. I offered several, most of which required more work, and one which simply wrote such matters off. She did not seem satisfied with any of my rather stellar suggestions and continued to remind me that it was just my opinion she was after. As I had given her the full range of my opinioneering, I was at a loss to discern just what it was she really wanted. So I offered to pay for it again, or make a donation, or accidentally drop a twenty on the floor the next time I came in. When enough time had passed I decided, rather all of a sudden, that I did have other places to be, and said ok, see you later. She said with no little vehemence that she was sure I would. I saw her again just last night at the community theatre but pretended I was someone I am not--that new guy who really doesn't know anybody.