All in Time Due ((Part 3))

So, I know what you’re thinking: this is gonna be about Kelly, the second half of THAT story. Well, I shall abstain from that, for now. Instead, I feel the need to describe another major event in my life. That one time I ran out of water in Georgia, in the Summer. I almost died that day. As such, it’s important to me.

I’ll get back to the Kelly thing later in this series. No need to worry, Joey!

Who the hell is Joey?

The drive into ANY wilderness area can range from paved, to absolute madness, to impossible, especially for my little car. I have decent clearance, but that doesn’t help when the road contains ACTUAL BOULDERS. And, yes, I have been along such roads. Somehow.

In this case, the wilderness in question is somewhere in the state of Georgia. The road conditions were not so bad. If anything, they were good. And, keeping my wheels to this particular road (lest I had fallen), was not so bad. When I finally got to camp, chosen precisely for its remoteness, all was nice. Nothing was out there. Another, larger, less dispersed camp could be seen on the way, some mile or so up/down the road, but that was closed at the time. And this is in spite of these events taking place on a Fourth of July weekend. I’m not sure why the larger camp was closed, but it were.

Many of you have not been to my destination camp, a few have not been to any such camp, and, finally, some of you don’t camp at all. And that’s OK. You do other things, like sewing, or rowing, or some other rhymable thing. We all have our whims, some talents. In this case, my talent is cheap,,, and isolated. This camp had almost nothing to it. A fire ring, no bathroom, no other people. No plots right next to each other where people leave food out and force dear to poop all over your spaces. The room for my hammock was minuscule, but it was there. So, I set up my hammock. And if I’m not mistaken, I had a nap. The drive was long, this wilderness ACTUALLY WILD.

I could tell there were animals here, possibly some bears. But little did I know, this trip would end up tying for MOST BEARS SEEN IN ONE DAY. At Six. That’s six bears. In a day. How cool.

I was to run out of water and almost die on the day to follow, but I didn’t yet know this, and so napped well. The air was warm and arguably balmy. Had some bugs, but not as many as some other, warmer places. Snoring. Snoring. Swaying sleeply in the mountains of Georgia. So many miles from everything else. Everyone too.

And speaking of camping: I am coming from a camp today. One along a rather rough road. One that I am kind of forced to use, as I am still being chased along by some vacuous force of insecurity and idiot whim. Some ACTUAL IDIOTS. But, this story is not about where I’ve been this week. Or the fact that I can’t even really hike anymore; I need to watch the car now, and so cannot hike. I am, in essence, not allowed to hike. It’s like I have evil-as-father again. This time, one that isn’t sitting in rehab from a relatively serious stroke. We never really got to talk again following my leaving home around 18 years old. I haven’t seen my mom since I was 4. As such, I don’t really have any parents. And haven’t had any in more than two decades.

About the last time I saw Kelly, give or take. How interesting.

Still, in not talking to my father again, and therefore not entirely working through my issues with him, his psychotic nature, and the abuses he granted so magnanimously, I have done nothing but meet him again and again. Caroline-father. That one guy in Gordon Gulch who yelled at me over nothing-father. Daniel, in Santa Fe-father. How unfortunate. To meet such bad people all the time. And all because I wasn’t ever able to not do so. Allan too, man-father/actual shittiest person I’ve ever met. What does all of this have to do with the hike I am avoiding to describe?

Well, I’m glad I’ve asked. If I had worked through more of my issues by now, I probably wouldn’t happen upon death so often, make so many poor choices. Like hiking in Georgia, in the Summer, with only 32 ounces of water. I can see, now, how foolish this is, but only after almost dying from it. I guess this is life.

On, I put my pack. On, the day following my nap-arrival. Brought with me some USEFUL THINGS, which ended up being useful for OTHER REASONS. Not stated purposes, but other more interesting/life-saving purposes.

HERE I AM, WRITING AT LIGHT-SPEED IN A COFFEE SHOP

LIKE A (MAD) WRITER

I HOPE I’M NOT BEING TOO WEIRD WHILST TYPING THIS FAST

I had done some light research on the hike, which is to say I looked at a map and had made sense of the terrain just enough to start walking. I’m always START WALKING. I guess this too is life. The life of a runaway, the kind of person expunged largely from ANY concept of family. I would call it sad, if it weren’t also so damn cool. There was a point that I would use to make a loop of my hike, to head back, at about 32 divided by 2 ounces of water. I didn’t bring any music, or anything to convert dirty water into something drinkable.

Do yourself a favor. Carry water. Or, something that can make water happen.

This hike consisted largely of service roads, some actual bush too. Either way, I headed into the bush. The trees were nice, and green. As they often are. The air was thick with Summer and all that she brings to outdoor activities. The ground was both clay and dirt, easy enough for me to traverse in a decent pair of hiking shoes. The kind about which my grandfather once said:

THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT THINGS YOU CAN BUY ARE A GOOD MATTRESS AND A DECENT PAIR OF SHOES.

I guess he valued his back. My father, his son, would go on to break his back, live most of his life as a drug-dealer and rehabilitating person of heightened laziness, so maybe this makes more sense than I have ever until now realized.

After one step, I took another. I saw no bears, at first. I did see some squirrels, a few birds, and a snake. Maybe the snake was a sign? Or maybe the snake was just a snake. I was hiking. You get it. I was moving. I’ll shut up about that part now. I’ll instead describe how bright the sun was, how it made me HOT, caused sweat along that space between my back and the pack itself. This too, you get. I was hiking.

HOLY CRAP;

I’M WRITING SOME TWO PAGES AN HOUR;

Everything was fine. I was having a good time. I was thinking as often as one often does when hiking. For some reason, being outside allows us to think more clearly. Something about being away from the world, and all its lights. Thanks, Mike. You made me think of the lights.

So, sweaty and exercising, I moved along. I had reached the service road portion of the hike, the easier of the portions. Here, I spotted creeks, a few small creatures, and also that part of the mountain that makes us work, even. The incline. We all know the incline. It sucks if it’s bad enough. This one was only kind of that way, if only due to the heat. It was hotter this day than the one before it. I glistened. The pack swamped. The animals probably watched on in terror as I did what they had to do every single day, largely for no reason at all. Little did they know, I was thinking. Something about complicated math. Then something else. Maybe it was a new idea. It’s even possible that I actually relaxed for a minute and thought about nothing at all.

What a dream that would be. To shut my mind off, even if only for a second. I think heavily in my sleep, wake up full of ideas. Theories. And so forth.

Now, anyone from Georgia, or anyone else that hikes, may wish to know what part of the world I’m talking about, here. Well, this is the Cohutta Wilderness. It’s nice there. You can actually spot bears there. If you’ve been there and actually know the region, then you might just take me for the idiot I was that day. 32 ounces of water? What’s wrong with you, man?

So much. Maybe not too much. But so much. That’s what wrong with me.

This wouldn’t be my first hike, the first time I ran out of water while hiking, or even the first time I almost died doing something so normally adventurous. When I finally got to the turn-about point, the line that made the loop, it was not there. Instead, it was covered in trees, innavigable to everything, and me. Especially me. I’m not a snake. Or a sign. So, I chose to do about the dumbest thing I could. I kept going. I knew there wasn’t a loop. I was aware that one couldn’t be formed further out. But, I kept going. My will to see new things amounts to a bit of a problem sometimes. And here it did, just that.

I didn’t choose to turn back toward camp until I was just about out of water. This also happened to be where the incline amounted to an actual bad thing. I could feel my thirst, like a well running dry, on the verge of no longer being a well but instead just some hole in the ground. I was to be a hole in the ground. This is where things really got interesting. I started seeing LARGER ANIMALS! And no, I was NOT hallucinating, though it occurs to me here that I could have been. Still, there’s that other time, more hydrated, that I spotted the same number of bears in a day. Call it a tie. That’s six bears. How many bears have you seen in a day?

And, no, I didn’t say beers.

I could feel the thirst forming problems in my throat. I reserved my water, though I needed it right then. Look, ma, a bear. Then another. Some squirrels. A hot road. Thence a creek, flowing dirty and undrinkable in the unseeable moon light. Was the moon actually out? Who cares.

At some point, I drank the water. I was then about halfway to where I needed to be, which could have been anywhere. I was headed back to camp. The thoughts of everything but water had ceased. My mind played a single song. And it was not a good one. A bad chorus of needs. My mind was a bad chorus of needs. My water bottle was now in the pack, as it was no longer useful to be anywhere else. In writing this now, I can see that dirty is better than dying, that that homeless man at the shelter nearby me now was right; I was living, and that means everything.

Having seen half of all the bears I would see that day, I spurred at a trailhead. I was hoping that someone, anyone, was out there hiking, had water, and, perhaps, maybe even a kind heart to give a man dying of thirst some water.

SOME THINGS

SOME THINGS ARE NECESSARY

SOME THINGS ARE MORE PRECIOUS THAN GOLD

Of course, this is not my thinking only. It’s something I learned in a film.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

From 1949, and starring the ever-smoky Humphrey “Bogie” Bogart. An ACTUAL MOVIE STAR. Still, and regardless of how much more interesting one’s film knowledge makes one’s life, knowing about this film doesn’t help one to survive in the absence of water. We all need water. Films, maybe not so much. A man! An ACTUAL PERSON, at the trailhead. This man was in his truck, had just returned from a 4-wheeler ride through some other trail. At least this is what I surmise based on him not having passed me. Was he the snake? Was that one bear actually a man? Was I actually seeing things?

He didn’t have any spare water. Or, he didn’t feel like giving it up. He did, however, have a Mountain Dew. This, he was willing to give away. I drank the cola as I walked back to camp. He didn’t seem like the kind of person to keep up a chat with someone so foolish. Me, specifically. That day.

That day, I learned how caffeine works in the body when there’s not much water in the same body. I became thirsty the second the cola hit my tongue. Still, I drank the whole thing. The first ingredient is-was water, and so I drank. I drank my way into greater thirst. Into a problem. I started to see more bears. They weren’t that far off the trail that day. They were foraging along, looking for berries and bugs. Maybe I should have and/or should be doing the same. Maybe I should be applying for jobs instead of writing about things that have already happened to me. How, then, would I save anyone else from making the same mistakes as me?

At some point, my thirst took away my legs. They no longer worked the same. I took to crawling on the ground. I needed water and didn’t have it. Any at all. What I had left was a will to live, to get back to my car where the jug of water was. I had a will to live, if only to drink. And, once again, not beer. Beer would have killed me, dude. I crawled like this for some time, shouting things like “I’m going to die out here, man.” The bears foraged along, largely ignoring me. They didn’t have any water of their own and didn’t understand English, I think. Do bears understand English? With the right accent, maybe that’s a yes.

So, with the wrong accent, I shouted my way up the trail. I was dying. For real. I was actually ceasing to work the same. My epiglottis was adhered to the back of my throat so tightly that it was like they were, together, a family hunkered down during an imminent war. By the way, war is always imminent. When you think it’s not, it’s there again. A man from the Ukraine once taught me this. War, even those having a singular participant only, are inevitable. They happen. Money makes them happen. Well, those with money make them happen. The poor of one country don’t just decide to attack the poor of another. Because being poor is hard enough. As: the sphere of experience, small, as I have said elsewhere, that the poor experience, works to prevent much of the ills of those with more cash. Like private jets.

Either way and moving on, I was dying. Of foolishness? yeah, probably so.

At some point, I realized that I had a pack on, that I could possibly use the things in it to stay alive. I didn’t have more water. But, I had other things. I had already taken to doing what made Bear Grylls so famous. I had already caused an infinitely bitter taste in my already dead mouth. I won’t describe any of that, though. It’s too disgusting, far too lame for decent television. And, yes, this was essentially television. I should have been watching television instead. But, I chose to hike, in Georgia, in the Summer, with almost no water. What happened next is enough to make me wonder about the uses of everything about us. What uses have we not considered?

What tools apply to other jobs as yet not used for?

I wasn’t thinking about this or anything else outside of water. My energy bars would have made me more thirsty. I know, because they did. And so I didn’t have any more of them. I left them in the pack and pulled out my baby wipes. No, I did not think about using the bathroom. I didn’t have enough fluids in me to make that happen. Not even at that end of my being. Both ends were dry. That’s how dying works, in case you were wondering.

I checked-scoped over the ingredients of the wipes, and recognized the first. I could argue here that it was the ONE WORD I could understand at that time:

WATER

The wipes contained water! They contained soap too and a few other things, but they definitely contained that which I needed. So, I put the baby wipes into my mouth, grew quenched enough to stand. And so I stood. Why sit when you can stand? I felt tall. I felt alive. My throat still sucked, substantially, but I was alive. I no longer felt the need to scream into the void about dying, and thirst. I was still quite thirsty but I was doing OK. I was about a mile or two from the car, so the whole thing wasn’t really over. But, like I said, I was alive. Things were good. I was thinking again. This time, I realized that I was hungry. But, I wasn’t hungry enough to yell about it. And, in case you’re thinking, why didn’t you just call someone for help? By this time, I had killed my phone calling Lauren about being thirsty. I even called the local relevant officials, who happened NOT to be in the office. It was Fourth of July weekend and so they weren’t around. No one was around. I was alone to die of thirst.

But that couldn’t happen if I had so many baby wipes. They tasted like shit, but contained everything I needed. As such, I sipped the finest baby wipes Earth and my pack had to offer. I was headed back to camp, to call everyone I had ever loved. To drink too much water all at once. Recall, It’s bad to have too much water at once when you’ve been so thirsty for so long.

I didn’t care.

I didn’t care.

INSERT BREAK

It’s here that I was forced by a meeting, and life in general, an EMDR session, to take a break from this piece. Now, I’m in a totally different coffee shop than my usual. THE USUAL didn’t have any parking I could see from my seat, and I am still being stalked, so I had to seek other faces. And speaking of faces, BY THE WAY, Boone has so many pretty women in it. What a place. Goodness.

To wit, I saw a woman the other day that made me stop in my tracks and stare, like a beast in the wild glancing upon a collection of prized berries. And, no, I was not a creep about it. She looked at me too. Still, glued were my eyes. She was FINE, son.

Now, all being fine, let me continue MY BABY WIPE STORY.

I had sucked on the wipes, regained my strength. I was a new man. I, as mentioned, stood taller, perhaps taller than I ever had before. And this was in the complete absence of the pretty women of Boone. I wasn’t even in North Carolina, at that time. Still, I should-could stay focused. The energy was good. My thoughts had become positive. Rejuvenated. I hiked, to the sound of several more bears, along the non-service-road portion of my journey. That’s six total bears. I was not at a zoo, either, so six IS a lot to bear.

I realized very quickly what mattered to me. Living mattered. My closest friends mattered. My education, which was as yet not complete, mattered. A lot. So much mattered, so many. My throat was still too dry for comfort and my muscles and bones ached like those of, I assume, a chemo patient. I’ve never had that, but you get what I mean. It all meant so much to me. Life is beautiful if you take even five-to-six seconds to think about it. You’ll note that your girlfriend is good for you. That this one teacher you had this one time was good for you. They taught you so much. They made you realize and feel. Perhaps I was this teacher for you. I would be naive to assume, given my overall passion, energy, and charisma, that I have not had some greater influence on the minds of those younger than myself. Older too. My aunt once said that she looked up to me. I’ve also had students older than myself say kind things. Here’s to forming a Nu-Metal band with one of them.

But, enough with the self-inflation. I was headed out of those troublesome woods. I was healthier and more alive than I had been in the hours preceding. The bears were foraging and didn’t seem as thirsty as they had been. They seemed to be enjoying their forage, too, some 15 to 20 feet from me. And I am not kidding. They were close. I didn’t care. These were black bears, and black bears don’t just fight people. That is, unless they have a reason to do such a thing. In this case, they didn’t. I wasn’t bothering them, and their berries were just distracting enough (i.e., they weren’t hungry enough to fight me for the food of it).

All I could do is head on. I don’t recall crawling any further after the wipes. I remember left foot, right foot, left foot. And so forth. It was nice, and good. When I finally got back to camp, I drank the water. Almost the whole jug. I didn’t care. I needed my muscles to feel better than they did. Before even sitting down for the day, which I eventually did, I called all of my closest friends. At the time, these were the same as at this time, give or take a few. And this being about a decade ago from now, this is saying a lot. It says a lot about how well I keep my closest, how close they keep me. And how annoying we DON’T find each other. Either way, I was free. The story was largely over. I had almost died. Practically did. But, I didn’t, and that matters.

At some later point, a few years to follow, when I started writing music, I wrote this story up, in the form of a song, by the title of More Precious Than Gold. Some of my former students have heard this song, before Soundcloud turned “AI” and I turned them away. Now, I only have a few songs there, and those are all songs with ACTUAL COPYRIGHTS and ISRC codes. You know, things that kind of prevent said Cloud from being such an ass about my creative efforts. Because there’s nothing noble about stealing the work of artists to give the change to those in suits, and largely lacking the same talent. Now, lest I go on an even more extensive tangent against the theft of creative works, I’ll note that the song was in the rather interesting ALL FOURTHS tuning, which is to say EADGCF. AKA, from STANDARD TUNING, raise the last two strings a semi-tone each.

This converts a standard C triad (often played as X32010) into a C+b9+11, which is a far more interesting chord, and no longer just a triad. The chorus to this song, the very same that works its way through a rather odd collection of even odder chords, went something like:

IT IS HERE THAT I LEARNED

SOME THINGS ARE MORE PRECIOUS THAN GOLD

THOSE FREAKIN’ BABY WIPES

WERE MORE PRECIOUS THAN GOLD

Now, had I actually died, this song would never have been made. I would never had finished my PhD. I still would’ve ran away with Kelly, but I wouldn’t have been here to write about it. I’m fortunate, even with the stalking.

The point?

Get out. Get out there and do things. Don’t die, but don’t be afraid to die either. Bring more water with you than you need, more than I did that day. Learn from your mistakes and the faults of your whim. If you don’t own the kinds of things that can hold enough water, go out and buy such things, like I eventually did. Call your friends when you think of them. Thank You, Evan.

Thank you, Lauren.

Thank you, Austin.

THANK YOU, BEARS.

If only for not eating me, whole.

In proofing this piece, I feel whole. I feel like, in writing about these events, I have learned from them. I am in a better position to move on, maybe not do the same, now. Perhaps you’ll think about doing the same. Not almost dying of thirst, I hope, but writing about the events of your own life.

Get out there and have some fun. Then, get in there and make some sense.

I KNOW YOU CAN DO IT