making a bug-out bag in Korea

Do you know what a bug-out bag is?

If you don't, follow that link and read the article. You'll need some context. I'll wait.

In case you're too lazy to do that, though, let me just give you the skinny: the term "bugging out" means evacuating your home due to fire, earthquake, poison gas leak, alien invasion...or war. A bug-out bag is an emergency kit, personally assembled by you, a forward-thinking human being, in case you have to be away from your home for 72 hours.

The only natural disasters that face Seoul on a regular basis are monsoons, fires, and maybe the occasional tsunami. (Japan does a pretty good job of soaking up all the typhoons and earthquakes that come this way, though.)

You have to remember, though, what's sitting just 60 kilometers (37 miles) north of this city.

That's right. North Korea.

On Wednesdays I have no class, which means I get to putter around doing whatever I want. Today even more so: I had no choice but to moon around the apartment all day waiting for the deliveryman to arrive with the Coleman waterproof matches I ordered from Gmarket. I bought myself a Stanwell beechwood pipe and some tobacco a month ago, but I've been dogged by the lack of proper lighting materials. You can't use a Zippo to light a pipe, 'cause the butane makes the tobacco taste funny. Moreover, you have to hold the lighter upside-down, and that singes your fingers. Wooden matches, however, neither taint the flavor of your smoke nor char the rim of your pipe. So I had my heart set on matches. After a fruitless search through every grocery mart, convenience store and bar in my area, I found them on Gmarket and ordered them. They were due to arrive today, and the deliveryman wouldn't just leave them at the door; I had to receive them personally. So I couldn't leave.

To pass the time, I watched the 2012 movie Red Dawn.

And suddenly I thought of a much better use for those Coleman waterproof matches.

The movie made me realize just how unprepared Miss H and I were for a disaster—of any kind. She and I have talked about preparing bug-out bags for months now, ever since we moved into our new place in East Seoul. We did all the usual stay-at-home preparations, like compiling our important documents, files, IDs, bankbooks and passports into one convenient and safe location, buying eight liters of emergency water, acquiring flashlights and lanterns and candles and a fire extinguisher, et cetera. But somehow we never got around to putting together a bug-out bag. Senseless, I know. A 72-hour emergency kit would be invaluable in case we had to leave the apartment (and, say, assemble at Jamsil Stadium for evacuation by the U.S. Army as North Korean troops overrun the DMZ).

So I resolved to fix this inadequacy this very afternoon. After taking delivery of the matches, I stuck six boxes into my Timberland® 20-liter backpack. (The other six boxes will go into my drawer with my pipe.)

And that was the start of it all. I hunted high and low through the apartment and located some other items to stick in:

• 2 cans of tuna
• Nature Valley® granola bars
• 2 flashlights
• a deck of cards
• plastic sporknife (yes, they exist)
• diarrhea medication
• multitool
• first-aid kit
• sunblock
• lens wipes
• 2 liters of water
• complete change of clothes
• Colgate® WISP™ toothbrushes
• lensatic compass
• Ziploc® bags
• vitamin tablets
• cash and coins

Noticing that there were several items on my list that just weren't in the apartment, I hopped the subway across the river to Cheonho and went to E-Mart. There, I acquired the following:

• Ottogi tuna (2 bundles of 3 cans, ₩3960 apiece)
• bowls of prepared rice (pack of 3, ₩3450)
• Diget chocolate biscuits (₩1580)
• Dr. You granola bars (2 boxes of 4, ₩3980 apiece)
• kitchen knife (₩2000)
• small paring knife (₩1000)
• folding knife (₩5100)
• hand saw (₩7900)
• folding trowel (₩7500)
• packet of quick-start charcoal (₩1360)
• camping rope (6mm x 10m, ₩2,900)
• duct tape (10 meters, ₩1350)

The items remaining on my list are:

• glow sticks (for when flashlights fail)
• hand-cranked radio
• ponchos
• tarp
• space blankets
• signal mirror (though I think I'll just use the small shaving mirror in my grooming kit)
• safety whistle
• camp axe

I'll have to get these either at Homeplus (which is a subsidiary of Tesco, and generally better stocked than E-Mart) or a camping supply store.

Some of you might scoff at the completeness of this list. "What do you need a hand axe for?" you'll ask. Good question. Hopefully, we'll never need it. But just in case the North Koreans come storming across that border faster than expected (or they bring some Chinese or Russian friends with them), I want to be ready. The worst-case scenario here is Miss H and I hiking through the wild hills of K-Land trying to get back behind friendly lines, or make our way down to Busan to catch a boat for Japan. If we have to rough it for a few days, at least I'll have the tools, ropes, tarps, and matches I need to make our campsites comfortable. Even if the North Koreans never invade (or the zombies never attack, it don't matter to me) we'll at least have a well-stocked supply kit for untoward exigencies.

One more thing.

You'll notice that I entitled this post "making a bug-out bag in Korea."

The emphasis was intentional. There are some items which I would normally include in my bug-out bag, but can't, because I live in Korea. The first one, obviously, is this:

A gun, stupid.

When disaster strikes, people go crazy. Ain't no denying that. I think K (Tommy Lee Jones's character from the Men in Black franchise) said it best:  "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." So when the crap hits the fan and looters take to the streets, I want to be prepared to defend what's mine: my life, my property and my loved ones. I have to be honest: as an American, I'm a bit uncomfortable living in a country that doesn't allow private gun ownership, especially when there's a militaristic regime lurking on the horizon.

The second item is this:

It's a survival knife, in case you didn't know. An Aitor Jungle King II, to be exact. I haven't really shopped around and chosen the survival knife that best suits me, but this is pretty much what I'm looking for: a straight blade with a saw-edge and a good long grip with a lanyard ring. A splendid knife for cutting branches, skinning game, or personal defense.

Korea has this thing about knives, though. Turns out that any pocketknife with a blade longer than six centimeters (a paltry 2.36 inches) is classified as a "sword" under Korean law, and requires a "sword permit." This means that the 10-inch Bowie knife I have in my footlocker back in California would get me chucked in jail over here. Bollocks. I'm not sure what the laws concerning non-folding or straight-bladed knives are like, but I have a feeling they're similarly restrictive. The three knives I bought today at E-Mart were an attempt to ameliorate this deficiency.

And there you have it! My Korean bug-out bag. Once I acquire those last few vital items (particularly the tarp and ponchos), Miss H and I will be well ahead of any disaster which fickle chance decides to throw at us. With any luck, we'll never need this stuff, but it sure will be nice to have on hand.

And if we want to go camping, we're already packed...

what's on tap for September?

...funny you should ask. It's beer. But I'll get to that in a minute.

It's Friday afternoon here in Korea, and though there's a delicious cool breeze blowing, the weather is still warm and a tad muggy. Big puffy cumulus clouds are piling up on the horizon and the last of the year's cicadas are buzzing. I'll venture out shortly for a bike ride, but until then I'm not budging. I have stuff to get done anyways: the new semester at Sejong University begins on Monday. (This might be the first time I've ever mentioned the name of my university on this here blog; I suppose it's high time.) To that end, I've been running around like a maniac trying to get the semester, and my curricula, all planned out. I did my planning on a day-by-day basis last semester, and though it worked pretty well, I wanted to prepare a little more in advance this time around. I think I relied too heavily on the course textbooks and wound up boring my students to death, so these planning sessions have attempted to ameliorate that problem.

I've also been getting my final kicks in before school starts up again. Yesterday my coworker, Mr. J, and our mutual friend Mr. B met up and went to a baseball game in Jamsil. Always a fun time, that. It was the LG Twins versus the Nexen Heroes. The Twins are a consistently good team, but the top spot has for many years eluded them. But danged if the Heroes, ranked fourth in the league at the moment (I think), didn't pull one out of the hat. They beat the Twins by single run in the ninth inning. Or something. How I recalled this fact after all the beer I had is a mystery.

This weekend Miss H and I are bumming around with Dr. BL, an old high school friend of mine and an army doctor recently posted nearby. We're going to give her the full Seoul tour, with the eats to go along with it. Now if we could just decide where to go and what to eat...

Mister J and Miss JB, our favorite couple from Sejong University, have got a camping holiday in mind sometime in September. It'll be over in Gangwon Province, east of Seoul, the wildest, most mountainous, most watery and beautiful province in Korea, particularly in autumn. We haven't set a date yet but we know it'll be somewhere around Gapyeong and in tents (with, of course, a convenience store nearby so we can get beer and makgeolli).

The other exciting thing about camping in Gangwon do is that it's a fine excuse to take the ITX, the Inter-City Express, the fastest train in K-Land apart from the KTX:

It's Korea's first and only double-decker train, too, and runs every hour from Yongsan Station out into the eastern province, terminating at Chuncheon Station. I get to ride another train. In Korea. Whoopee!

The fun doesn't stop once school begins and the weather cools down, though. One of the reasons that Mr. J and Mr. B and I met up in Jamsil at that baseball game was to discuss a serious proposition: home brewing. We ironed out some details, like the materials we'll need, the timeline to commence, the type of beer to be brewed and the location of the actual process. Having done that, all we need to do is head to Itaewon, find the home-brewing shop (which Mr. J has already scouted) and buy the supplies. Come mid-autumn we should be sampling an extract beer of our own making. (I will most certainly post further updates about this.) Wish us luck.

Miss H and I have been doing a little wedding planning. We think we've found a venue; we just need to call and get some solid details (and a price estimate). It's never too early to start budgeting for this thing. We're not planning on anything grandiose, but we still want to make a fair show of it. I'll have more concrete details for you when they come about. The date hasn't been fixed yet, but it'll definitely be sometime in August 2015, a few solid months after Miss H and I return permanently to America.

The biggest news about Miss H and I, though, is that (along with our friend Miss J from Bucheon) we're going to China in mid-September. No joke! For the Chuseok holiday, September 18-20 (and the Saturday following) we'll be in Beijing. We've already gone through the rigamarole of getting our visas. We saw a travel agent in Bucheon recommended by a friend, and stumped up 215,000 won apiece: 190,000 for the visas themselves and 25,000 for the travel agent's processing fee. Four days later we had our passports back with intricate, delicately-printed Chinese visas inside! We're quite excited. I remember way back when I wrote on this blog that I'd never been to China or Japan, and soon that'll be completely untrue. Can't wait to make it so, and knock another country off my to-do list. I have far more that I want to do in China outside of the capital (riding their bullet trains, for example, to places like Xi'an and Chengdu) but for the nonce the city of Beijing, and the adjacent Great Wall, will do. Don't worry, I'll treat you readers right. I'll do just like I did with Japan and put up plenty of photos and accounts. Stay tuned.

Man, suddenly this old place seems a lot more like a travel blog, doesn't it?

rocks, sand and stars

FOREWORD
What you must understand about Southern California is that, basically, it's a city. The entire region is an unending sea of buildings, commercial and residential neighborhoods which themselves compose independent towns. Some of them are packed so closely together that it's impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. (It IS possible to tell where Redlands ends and Hemet begins, for reasons which Karl Marx could rattle off half-drunk; but that's beside the point.)

It's a macrocosm, really. SoCal is put together much like a town in itself. Each city is a different neighborhood, each neighborhood with its own—ahem—unique character. Over on the east side you've got the low-rent district, full of hicks and wife-beaters and layabouts and canned-beer drinkers, living in vans and campers down by the river; the west side is the plush, breezy, hoidy-toidy coastal resort with miles of beaches, bungalows, and palm trees; the south side is the middle-class, (relatively) peaceful and (somewhat) clean area where the parents and grandparents live; the north side's hilly and scrubby and jam-packed with administrative buildings and the cookie-cutter houses, whence the morning commuters come; and in the smoggy, filthy, eccentric center of town reside the sin and vice and glam and sophistry and commercialism of California's recycled-paper heart.

I live on the east side, which is composed mostly of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts, the Colorado River, the San Andreas Fault, a few dozen small- to medium-size cities and hundreds of dead-end, ramshackle towns: 29 Palms, Barstow, Hinkley, Boron, Amboy, and Needles. Some of those cities are nice places with green golf courses and big stucco mansions and expensive restaurants, like Palm Springs. But for the most part the Mojave is Podunk, devoid of moisture. There's a few national parks, some military bases, a couple of mountain ranges and a big salty lake thrown in for good measure.

Just west-southwest of this desert is the Los Angeles Basin, which is composed mostly of Los Angeles (blargh) and all of its innumerable suburbs and outlying districts. That literally IS one big city. You can walk from Burbank to Irvine to Fontana to Long Beach without touching the ground. Just hop from rooftop to rooftop. You may need a vaulting pole to cross the interstate highways; you may need a ladder to get over the skyscrapers; the palm trees would be handy for moving from one Malibu estate to the next; and Mount Lee might require an extra-large jump (what with those big white letters and all). But you get the picture.

Southern California is a massive metropolis, a single titanic municipal entity, possessing a great many postal codes, enough freaky religions to put Jim Jones off his Kool-Aid, more palm trees than ought to be countenanced by a sane god, and about 20 million people—most of whom spend their time either sitting in traffic or being crabby. Or both.

For someone who hates cities (like me), it's a deplorable situation.

Subjectivity aside, there are a LOT of buildings down here.

AND a lot of lights.

That makes it kind of tough to stargaze.

You can stand anywhere in Southern California at night and it's guaranteed you'll have to deal with some kind of light pollution: either from the beehive of Los Angeles to the southwest, or Laughlin and Las Vegas to the northwest.

Nonetheless, Miss H and I saw a hellacious load of stars on the night of October 11. We were in Joshua Tree National Park, which explains why.

CHAPTER ONE - JOSHUA TREE NATIONAL PARK
Not too many people know about this hidden gem of the desert. Not even the people who live here. It's not like it's some big secret. Joshua Tree lies just south of the small town of the same name (itself east of Yucca Valley and west of 29 Palms) and north of Indio and Palm Springs. It covers over 1,200 square miles (nearly 790,000 acres, or 320,000 hectares, if you prefer that sort of measurement). Contained within that expanse is some of the prettiest desert country you could ever hope to find in Southern California. As-yet unsettled by fat, beer-soaked hicks and their rusty cars, that is. It's got some epic scenery, too. The park is coated with massive piles of Cretaceous granite (quartz monzonite to be exact, rough stuff), eroded into oblong boulders and jumbled in the most wanton manner imaginable. Most of these piles are so unique in appearance and so gigantic in stature that they've garnered themselves unique nicknames, like the Hall of Horrors and the Giant's Marbles.

A female friend of mine once referred to these piles as "God's Legos," which just about says it all, I reckon.

We'd been meaning to take a camping trip for a while, Miss H and I. Then, one week, I unexpectedly wound up with two days off in a row. So naturally I seized the carp and arranged things with my lady forthwith.

My father, fortuitously, is an avid outdoorsman. We have enough camping supplies in our garage to put an Arab caravan out of business: tents, folding chairs, tarps, pots, pans, cups, tin plates, lanterns, matches, lighters, med-kits, water bottles, ropes, stakes, poles, walking sticks, knives, hatches, multitools, candles, sleeping bags, air mattresses, camp pillows, cots, cooking stoves, gas canisters, the works. Each component would drive a psychometrist out of his mind. There's so much pain, exhaustion, exhilaration, sweat, torture, exertion and triumph wrapped up in these inanimate bits of equipment. Each has a story to tell. A mountain climbed, a rocky trail conquered, a valley explored, a tent pitched in a hidden glen, a hot meal cooked and devoured lustily. Aching calves. Bursting lungs. Throbbing hearts. Backs soaked in brine. A cool breeze welcomed with religious fervor. Sunlight on the leaves. Blinding snow. Birdsong in the distance. A half-glimpse of some forest creature. The chuckling of a stream. The savory chill of mud and water on red-hot feet. Compass needles and maps. Trails and trees. Rocks and roots. Sun and stars. Earth and sky and everything in between.

From this trove (and its memories) I selected the gear I figured we'd need for two people and one night in the Mojave Desert in autumn. We had a tent, a couple chairs, some sleeping bags, an air mattress, a battery-powered lantern, the camp stove, some silverware and dishes and cups, a tarp for a ground-cloth, and a medical kit. I loaded my travel vest with whatever else might come in handy: my Bowie knife, my survival card (more about that later), my three-in-one sporknife (exactly what it sounds like), a deck of cards, a flask of brandy, a good novel, and various other accoutrements. And by "accoutrements," you know I'm talking about more booze. I packed my traveling cocktail set with 500 milliliters of vodka and a similar amount of sweet 'n' sour, just in case we felt the need for some libations in the evening.

We loaded all this into my faithful Jeep on the morning of the eleventh, picked up some grocery items in Lucerne Valley, and headed for Joshua Tree.

CHAPTER TWO - INTO THE DESERT
The hour-long drive was just as scenic as I remember. Once you crest the hill just east of Yucca Valley and begin the quick descent down the torturous 247, and the town opens up beneath you, rock piles and cactus spines and red tile roofs, with the stark and blasphemous granite mountains rising up behind...

A quick left on the 62 and a right on Park Drive had us at the gates of Joshua Tree inside 20 minutes. All civilization faded away, except for the two-lane blacktop we drove on. All had suddenly changed to desert at its most elemental: sand, rocks, mountains, and the titular Joshua trees, arms clutching at the empty sky like an agonal prophet.

The immaculate clarity of the place dazzles the eye and the imagination: all is reduced to lines and colors, the green spikes of the Joshua and the agave standing out against the beige-brown of the sand and shrubs and the blue-hot ocean of sky overhead. Heat waves trick the eye, mirages dance on open ground, and the merciless sun limns all with a harsh white glare. It's been said before by better men, but one can truly believe, standing in the midst of this unyielding and eldritch environment, that one is standing on the untamed surface of an alien planet.

...which does not and should not detract from the charm of the place. Not one little bit. Joshua Tree is beautiful. The park is a feast for the eyes, far more enchanting than many bits of more extreme deserts like the Kalahari or the Gobi. There's more in it, for one thing. The Mojave and Colorado Deserts boast a more rich and diverse biosphere than many wetter ecosystems. On any given day you can see coyotes, roadrunners, rattlesnakes, scorpions...and that doesn't even compare to what comes out at night.

We spent a happy afternoon touring the park. Up to Keys View, to look down upon the Coachella Valley from 5,000 feet up; Indio, Palm Springs, and a myriad-phalanx of date palm farms laid out beneath us. To the west was Mount San Jacinto, the loftiest of the Three Saints, a massive blue-green beast of a landform, stretching to 8,319 feet. At its feet, winding away toward L.A., lay the deceptive San Andreas Fault, ready to blow any second. To the southwest, the grayish-blue void of the Salton Sea was clearly visible; and beyond that, just at the edge of perception, sat Signal Mountain on the Mexican border, ninety-three miles away. Even Coachella's ever-present smog (and that of Los Angeles, drifting in from the west) couldn't prevent us from seeing these miracles.

Good thing I brought my binoculars, though.

We got some unusually clear pictures up there. There was some kid in a white shirt and a baseball cap with a $3,000 camera hanging around his neck, sitting on the stone partition and looking bored out of his mind. I walked toward him to ask him to take our picture. Before I'd even opened my mouth, he was standing up and reaching out his hand for my trusty red Canon.

He took good pictures.

It was a bit warm to hike to Barker Dam, but we settled for strolling through the Wonderland of Rocks.

We got to the campground at about 4 o'clock and pitched camp.

CHAPTER THREE - HOW TO OPERATE A CAN OPENER
I had picked Jumbo Rocks for a campsite because I was vaguely familiar with it. I'd picnicked there before. I seemed to recall that it was a locale straight from Tolkien or Verne, an epic sort of place with titanic boulders sprawled everywhere, bushes and trees and stretches of sand elbowing in where they could.

My recollection was right on target.

Miss H and I snatched a registration form from the box and drove around looking for the most photogenic campsite (farthest from anyone else). Fortunately, even on Columbus Day weekend, the park was deserted. Miss H and I found our site with relative ease. We filled out the form, raced back to the entrance to get registered, and then came back and set up camp.

Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is what a functioning campsite looks like.

Night fell swiftly. Miss H and I climbed up on the rock to view the sunset. Then we broke out the camp stove and the chili and began to cook dinner.

Now, let me first explain something to you about can openers. They come in three main varieties. The first is the electric can opener. Craven, rump-fed poltroons employ these in their Malibu condominiums to obtain the Fancy Feast necessary to prevent their fat-bastard Persians from pissing on the carpet.

The second type is the rotary or hand-actuated can opener, in which the operator "clips" the blade and its rotating gear to the can, holds the apparatus steady with one hand and turns a knob with the other. The blade proceeds around the edge of the can's lid, neatly severing it from the can proper.

The third type is the manual or hand-operated can opener, which is basically a metal flange with a wicked hook carved into the bottom edge.

There's a trick to operating this latter type.

You have to go around the edge of the can with the blade instead of going straight for the middle.

Guess which stratagem I attempted first?

One mutilated can-lid later, Miss H hit upon the brilliant idea of going around.

Things worked much better after that, and we were soon spooning hot chili into our gullets by the white light of a battery-powered lantern.

After that it was time for some s'mores. I, in my infinite wisdom, had remembered every single solitary piece of camping equipment that we'd need, but had neglected to (a) buy bread to go with the lunch-meat we'd purchased, and (b) had overlooked what method we'd use to toast our s'mores. Propane flames don't really impart a desirable flavor to the marshmallows, you see. Natural flames are preferable. If a little bit of the smoke gets into the graham crackers, well, so much the better.

We didn't have natural flames (we'd brought a camp stove instead of firewood, for the sake of portability).

So we settled for eating 'em cold.

Yeah, okay, I know. We're blasphemers. Apostates. Communists. But hey, a cold s'more is still a s'more, same as cold pizza is still pizza and a bad cigar is still a cigar.

CHAPTER FOUR - ON THE DOORSTEP OF THE STARS
And then came the night's grand finale: we made ourselves comfortable at the cement picnic table, turned off all the lights, craned our heads back, and looked at the stars.

And looked and looked and looked and looked.

There were millions of 'em.

The night-black sky was speckled with tiny flecks of brilliant diamond-white, like granules of sugar scattered in a coal scuttle, spotlights streaming through bullet holes in a black wall.

It was the most beautiful sight we'd seen in an eternity. We were far removed from the lights of any town (even Los Angeles was a mere greenish line to the southwest). Constellations which had previously been muted and tired and old now lit up the heavens with renewed energy. The Big Dipper lay suspended in the northwest, glittering as I'd never seen it before, like a rock star playing in his hometown. Hundreds upon hundreds of tiny new stars, too dim to be seen from my backyard, were glowing and gleaming out of the firmament. It was an immensely cheering sight. It did my heart good to think that there were still places in the continental U.S. where you could see starry skies like this (in Kansas, apparently, you can see nebulae...nebulae, for Pete's sake!). It was like the star-spangled opening sequence of Star Wars: a sky literally swimming in stars, every single square inch taken up with twinkling lights.

We gazed for as long as we could. There was far too much to take it all in at once. Plus our necks were getting sore. So we turned in about ten-ish and hit the sack.

I can remember getting up once in the middle of the night for a bathroom break. I was debating whether or not to take the flashlight. I did wind up taking it, just to avoid tripping on (or bumping into) any of the massive boulders that composed our campsite. But I turned it off when I got to my (ahem) lavatory. I looked up at the sky and breathed a deep sigh of contentment.

Then I looked around and realized that I could see by starlight. I had never been able to do that before, not in all the places I'd been or lived. I'd read about people doing it in books (books written in the nineteenth century or early twentieth), but had hardly been able to credit it. Now I could see that it was possible. There was no moon. Nothing but the endless blue-black vault above me, spangled with celestial bodies, the largest and best planetarium in the universe. Everything was dim about me, but I could see. See in the dark. How long had it been since a human being, raised in civilization, had stood in the dark of the world and tried to see his way without a contrivance like flashlight or fire?

We woke the next day about 8:00 a.m., when it was already getting too hot to sleep. We packed up, did one last check around to make sure we'd left nothing behind, paid our camping fee, and left the park by the scenic route. We had breakfast at Denny's in 29 Palms, had a leisurely drive home, and spent the rest of the day vegetating. Not much was said. We were still remembering the stars.

me Tarzan, you fell

So, says the storyteller, sitting in a chair by the fireside, a gin and tonic in his hand, did I ever tell you about the time I broke my arm? It was 1998. I was eleven years old, and a reluctant Boy Scout. My troop and I were camped just off the road running past Norris Dam, on the Clinch River in eastern Tennessee. It was just an inch away from car camping, really. The vehicles were parked a few hundred yards from the tents. This would prove to be fortunate. My memories of being a Boy Scout are not fond ones. I wasn't in the best of troops. I was a pretty wimpy kid, and the other guys were far from supportive or brotherly. I'd been on several outings with them already, and none were the kind I'd remember wistfully. But during this trip, I thought things were really going to turn around. The weather was beautiful (unlike Big Hump, which was negative temperatures coupled with 30 mile-an-hour winds; it was snowing sideways). Dad and my brother Harlan were along, meaning yours truly, Mommy's boy, wouldn't be left all alone (unlike Savage Gulf, where I was crying and moping and smelly all week because I'd forgotten to pack soap). Camp Jim was a marvelous place, too. It was a big, wide clearing in the woods, floored with dry brown soil, packed hard. It sloped gently upward to meet the wooded flank of a ridge. The trees surrounding and dotting the clearing seemed impossibly tall to me back then. The sunlight trickled down through the canopy and dappled the forest floor with those dancing bits of sunlight which I found (and still do find) so dazzlingly wonderful. All in all, it was a picturesque spot. But most importantly, it seemed the other guys in the troop were beginning to warm up to me. Near the center of the clearing was a particularly gigantic tree. I'm afraid I can't remember its exact dimensions. And I was so short back then that it must've been a lot smaller than it seemed. In my memory, it was gigantic, the next thing to the California redwoods. It was a towering oak, gray-barked and rough, no branches less than 30 above the ground, the trunk so wide that six of us would've had to link arms to encircle it. An enormous tree in the camp would've been awesome enough for us. But no, this one just happened to have thick brown vines hanging from it. And what's more, one of them was swingable. I was wandering around camp one golden afternoon not long after we'd arrived, a bit bored and a bit tired. (Two owls had chosen the wee hours of the morning to start having a conversation, and one of them happened to be perched in the tree right above our tent. And these owls didn't hoot, either. They screamed. Nobody in the camp got much sleep that night.) I look over and I see the guys swinging on this vine. And I think, cool. Here's the setup: the massive tree is just at the foot of the slope of the ridge. In front of it, the ground slopes gently down for a few yards, then suddenly drops fast—a steep embankment, the wall of a shallow gully running through the camp from north to south. This makes the vine-swing that much more thrilling. The guys, grabbing the vine and pushing off the trunk of the tree, swing out over the gentle slope, and then over the embankment. At the farthest outward point in their swing, they are about 15 feet above the ground or so. I make up my mind to try that swing or die in the attempt. The guys make room in the line for me, something I wasn't expecting. Surprised and gratified, I take my place and wait eagerly for my turn. I watch my predecessors take theirs, trying to pick up tips. Push off from the tree as hard as you can. Grasp the vine and climb up the side of the trunk a little to give yourself some extra height and oomph. Push to the side, making your swing wider, longer, more circular and less ovoid. I'm not the only one watching the proceedings. One of the older boys—I think his name was Lee or something—is also perusing, standing on the gentle slope below the tree. The guys are swinging directly over his head. Lee's extremely tall—must be nearing six feet. He's also quite thin and gangly, like most boys his age. My turn comes. My heart in my mouth, I grab hold of the vine, bend my knees as far as they'll go, and push with all my might. It's wonderful. I go swinging out, clutching the rough bark of the vine for all I'm worth, the sudden breeze blowing back my hair, the sunlight sparkling through the leaves high above, the ground dropping suddenly away until it seems I'm as high as a bird, I can see the whole camp and practically everybody in it, I can even see through the trees and over the hill to the road and the Clinch River beyond—and then suddenly I'm swinging back, and I pivot and kick out my legs to stop myself smashing into the other side of the tree. Breathless, I hand the vine to the next lucky bugger, and get in line again. No way one swing is enough. It seems to take ages, but eventually I'm back at the front of the line again. I grasp the vine (I'm probably grinning like a punch-drunk monkey), climb even higher up the trunk, and push off even harder. I start my outward swing— And suddenly it feels like someone clamped a ball-and-chain around my ankles. I can barely hold on. My grip is slipping, the rough bark of the vine skinning my hands. I glance down. Lee, the older boy, is hanging onto my shoes. He's swinging along with me. I look up. We're over the embankment. My head empties. My only thought now is to hold on. The ride is forgotten, except inasmuch as I really, really want to get off now. I try to hold on. If I lose it now, we're falling a long way. But I can't do it. Lee is just too heavy. Just as we reach the peak of the swing and begin to head back, I lose my grip. Those few split-seconds that I fall 15 feet and land on the slope of the embankment are a terrifying, toxic blur. WHAM. Lee rolls away, unhurt. I land on my hands and knees on the steepest part of the embankment, facing uphill. I know I'm hurt. But I've never broken a bone before, and I don't know the signs. My arm doesn't hurt yet, but there's that numb sort of feeling which precedes pain. It's in both of my arms and both my knees. How I managed to avoid planting my face in the dirt, I'll never know. Maybe it was the slope that saved me, who knows. But it does a number on my right wrist. Even after I've been picked up, dusted off and set to rights, it keeps throbbing. And in a few minutes, it starts to hurt. It starts to hurt like hell. Even sitting perfectly still, it hurts as though it's going to fall off. And if I try to move it, or even touch it, however slightly, fresh waves of raw agony shoot through my whole arm. Dad doesn't believe I've done anything serious to myself. He observes me on the floor of our tent, cradling my arm to my chest, whimpering, tears in my eyes, and says "Oh, come on. You're all right." Later, I felt rather sorry for him. Mom really tore him a new one for not believing I was hurt. In Dad's defense, I didn't fall that far, nor land that hard. It was inconceivable that I should've broken something. Pop probably just thought I was scraped up a little, and was trying to get me to toughen up. I'm glad he tried, at least. Dad and the troop leaders try various things on my arm: wrapping it in bandages; ice packs; warm water; immobilization. Nothing works. Eventually, the call is made. I'll have to be taken to the hospital. Dad calls up Mom and she comes A.S.A.P, driving our huge Ford B-Wagon van. That thing was amazingly capacious. With two seats up front and two benches in back, plus a vast amount of cargo space, it was the Post family's workhorse for nearly ten years. It chauffeured a family of four (and two dogs) on numerous picnics, transported entire soccer teams, supplied car campers with a week's rations, and was the best thing for a relaxing after-lunch nap while driving home from the restaurant. My memory blanks out here. I don't remember the ride from camp to the hospital at all. Such is my curse. I have an awful memory, and it's photographic to boot. This means that conversations, sounds, sights, and sensations are often utterly lost, and all I'm left with are images. I'm fortunate to remember as much of this incident as I have. I don't remember what explanation Lee gave for leaping up and grabbing my feet. I don't remember how the other guys reacted to our fall. I don't remember much of anything apart from what I've told you here, unfortunately. My apologies. The X-rays come back and the tall, dark-haired doctor puts it up for us to see. I have a spidery crack halfway through my radius. Nothing that needs to be set or splinted, fortunately, but enough to technically qualify as a "break." It also qualifies for a cast. Now that I've had some anesthetics put into my system and can actually move my arm without wanting to scream, I'm rather pleased. That's the way I recall feeling, anyway. I got to go home early from the Boy Scout trip and had a broken bone into the bargain. I didn't want to break a bone, mind you, but I felt it was something I needed to do at some point in my life. And have a cast. Then I could hold my eleven-year-old head up and proclaim, "I am a man of the world. I have broken a bone, and worn a cast. In your face, Herman." I don't know who Herman is. He just stands for all those bullies at recess who called me a girl or a wuss or a homo. For some unexplained reason, I picked the color orange for my cast. I don't know why. It didn't have anything to do with football. The colors of the University of Tennessee (with whom Peyton Manning was playing at the time) were orange and white, and all of Knoxville lit up with those colors every game day. But I was too young (or too wussy) to like football yet. I just liked the color orange. So they put it on. It went from my wrist up to my elbow, extending between my thumb and index finger. This made it impossible to hold a fork or a pencil, but I grinned and bore it for six long weeks. And I got all my classmates at middle school to sign it. I felt good and proud and accomplished for the first time in my life. I look back on the whole affair now with mingled amusement and shame. I'm ashamed that I couldn't have been stronger and held on to the vine as long as it took to return to the tree safely, even if I skinned my hands raw. That would've been the brave, selfless, manly thing to have done. Maybe that's what Lee was trying to teach me, I don't know. I'm just glad he didn't get hurt. I'm ashamed that I spent the rest of the afternoon moaning and groaning and writhing in the tent. That wasn't very manly, either. I'm amused at how the whole thing must've looked, though. Tiny Little Me, swinging on a vine. Tall Skinny Guy grabs my shoes. Suddenly TLM is swinging from the vine, and TSG is swinging from me. That must've been a sight. Then suddenly TLM lets go and the whole shebang plunges to earth. TLM spends the rest of the afternoon crying and whining on the floor of the tent. There was a lesson to be learned here, but it's temporarily escaped the author's mind. AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is the first of the fireside chats that I mentioned earlier. Well, not really the first. I've already told a few stories on this blog. There's the one about how I fell into a pond in fall in Ohio when I was a kid; another concerning a certain all-night party in Korea that nearly resulted in a lost watch; and a third—oh yeah, did you know that I once saved a rabbit's life? Ever wonder what living in a Buddhist temple is like? Check 'em out. There's much more to come. P.S. I've decided to postpone that award-ceremony thingy until tomorrow, and combine it with the news report I've been compiling. I've got some rather juicy tidbits for you. We have a new dog, for starters. The garbage truck got stuck in the sand up the road a couple days ago, too. HALLELUJAH, I passed the big scary test on shots yesterday! This morning I had my first flight lesson in a month and a half; I went "under the hood" for the second time. Dad has tapped me to play bartender for the dinner party he's hosting tonight. And did I mention how nice the weather's been down here lately?

hats off to (Roy) Harper

I woke for the first time at 2:30 a.m. I know this because I rolled over sluggishly and flipped open my cell phone to check. There was a sort of half-light in the tent. After a moment I realized it was due to the waning moon on the rise overhead. The next time I woke up was 3:30 a.m. The next was probably 4:30, or thereabouts. And so on, and so on. At 6:30 I reckoned I'd about reached my limit. It wasn't that I was uncomfortable, goodness knows. For the first time in my life, I'd actually done a fair job of blowing up my air mattress. It was firm and well-seated. I wasn't cold; between the sweats and the down sleeping bag, I was pretty toasty, even though the night had gotten down to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. This was merely my morning custom: as the sleep chemicals in my brain slowly exhausted themselves, I woke up, dropped back to sleep, woke up, dropped back to sleep, woke up, dropped back to sleep...ad infinitum, sometimes through a dozen cycles. At 6:30 I finally quit on the business and stayed awake, listening to the cars beginning to roll down Center Road a few hundred yards away, the ravens cackling in the trees overhead, and the elderly folks next door (up insanely early, like most elderly folks I know). John was like a rock. He was sleeping on his right side; but neither sound nor movement could I detect. I couldn't even hear him breathe. I'd shared tents with a few people in my time, cabins with a few more, and rooms with a multitude. None of them slept as silently as John did. He's going to make some woman very happy someday, that guy. He also brags that he never needs a midnight glass of water...unless, he adds with a devilish grin, he's doing something that results in a loss of bodily fluids. Right around 7:30, John woke up. By now, the rising sun was lighting the tent with a tender glow. Both of us laid there a moment longer, debating whether it was better to wait 'til things warmed up outside the sleeping bags and then decamp, or simply grin and bear it. Unsurprisingly, I planted my flag in the latter camp. I'm a cryophile, you know. I prefer cooler temperatures. And when I say that I prefer cooler temperatures, I of course mean that, while all of the North Dakotans and Minnesotans were huddling in their warm dorm rooms at North Dakota State University in Fargo, watching the slow-laden blizzard howl past the windows at -44 degrees, I was out taking a stroll through the hip-deep drifts. My ideal temperature range is somewhere between 50 and 65 degrees. Seventies are usually okay, though, 's long as it's breezy. The 40s and 30s are pretty peachy, too. It was only, like, forty-something outside now that the sun was up and coming. So, John and I manned up (or as John prefers to say, we "cowboyed the f___ up"). John got the fire going while I performed a few emergency ablutions: thanks to the condensation inside the tent, my hair had been bent up into the most fantastic shapes imaginable. I could've given Stygimoloch a run for its money. I washed up in the restroom, plastered my hair down, and went back outside to help John. I cut up some canned potatoes while my friend fried sausage and eggs together in a pan. The remainder of our cedar was burning in the fire pit, and that bright yellow ball in the sky was climbing slowly through the pine trees. I made myself some hot chocolate while John sipped some cold orange juice. Then we sat down to our hearty camp breakfast. It was sinfully delicious. As we'd observed the previous night, everything tastes better when it's cooked outdoors. The potatoes may have been canned, but Jimmy Dean has never flunked a sausage yet. I couldn't have asked for a better pick-me-up while out on the road. Except, perhaps, for a gorgeous female hiker who'd somehow misplaced all of her clothes stumbling out of the bushes nearby. Can't win 'em all... All around us, Mather Campsite was coming to life. A dog was barking somewhere to the south. The elderly folks were already packed and ready to go. People were filtering in from nearby campsites to use the restroom. The zoological caucus was out in force, too. As we were cleaning up, John spotted a family of deer poking their way unconcernedly along Juniper Loop, just across the lane from our campsite, nibbling on various herbage as they went. I didn't get very good pictures of this amazing sight (there were two bucks, a doe, and a little fawn) because the batteries in my camera conveniently chose that moment to peter out. As stealthily as possible, I went rifling through my duffel bag for the replacements we'd purchased in Yuma. I managed to find them in time to get a few shots. Following this wildlife encounter, we finished cleaning up; disassembled and repacked the tent; stuffed the sleeping bags into their sacks; and rolled up the pads (not in that order). We loaded everything back into the car, made sure the fire was out (John had used up the last of the lighter fluid earlier by nonchalantly flinging squirts of it onto the hot coals), and took off. We drove back out to Center Road and headed right. After a short distance we came upon the Yavapai Lookout, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Anticipation built by the second as we got out of the car, readied our cameras and slowly approached the lookout point. I suddenly realized that I'd never been to the Grand Canyon before. I began to fully appreciate that I was standing just a few yards from a rather impressive crack in the ground. I began to get an idea of what I was in for. Nevertheless, the two of us somehow managed to keep our gait sedate as we approached. And then the thing opened up beneath us like the gaping jaws of some planet-spawned Titan. We gazed in silent, elemental wonder. Or at least, I did. John was taking a couple of deep breaths a few feet behind me. Poor chap's acrophobic. I'm not really sure if I could muster the poetry to describe just what a full-body experience viewing the Grand Canyon truly is. I was and still am gobsmacked. I felt as if the fluid in my eyes had been replaced with electrolysis gel, and my guts had been turned to empty air. It was a religious moment. The sheer size of the canyon, the majesty of its contours, the subtle mysteries of its recesses, the utter incredibility of the sight...all combined to form a tangible blow to the solar plexus. Unable to do much of anything else, we stood behind the short rock wall marking the canyon rim, staring out and down. John, at least, retained enough of his rational mind to do so in silence. I kept up a steady stream of inane and fatuous commentary. After a few seconds of looking over the massive, primordial formation of rock, sand and sediment, I turned to face John and said, in a voice of faux portent: "Now that, John, is a grand canyon." After a quick tour of the actual lookout station, where the impressive geologic history of the canyon was delineated... ...we took to wandering along the canyon rim, trying to toe the fine line between actually appreciating the miraculous vista with our eyes and taking a suitably large number of photographs. We also toed the line between capturing some heroic poses at the edge of the precipice and falling hundreds of feet to our deaths. This involved much pushing of camera timer buttons and scampering like drunken mountain goats along narrow ridge lines and uneven rocks before the ten seconds were up. Finally, though far from exhausted with our surroundings, we sensed it was time to hit the road. We meandered back to the parking lot and swiftly exited the park, finding ourselves once more among the rolling, scrubby hills of Arizona. After a mere twenty miles, however, we arrived in Valle for the second time. And that was when I finally got my chance to check out that air museum. I may not have mentioned this, but I am an absolute fiend for vintage aircraft. Any old prop-driven airplane, from the Wright Flyer to the Ford Trimotor to the F7F Tigercat, gets me all excited inside, like a kid in a candy store. I especially love World War II-era fighters and bombers. So of course, when we'd passed the museum the day before and I'd seen this sitting out front... ...I knew I had to take a look inside. It was absolutely marvelous, second only to the Grand Canyon. There was a gift shop full of the most magical assortment of books, baseball caps, T-shirts, posters, models, coffee mugs, bumper stickers and badges imaginable; a hangar floor with a gang of my old favorites inside, some of which I'd never seen in person; and outside, some giant classics shining gloriously in the desert sun. Like this MiG, for example... Or this C-54... Or this Grumman Duck, which I'd never seen without amphibious floats... Or the sexiest beast on the lot, the B-26K Invader, which I'd only ever encountered in books and pictures... Or the crown jewel of the museum, this little honey, this shining triumph of aerospace engineering, General Douglas MacArthur's personal transport during the Korean War, a Lockheed C-121 Constellation (coincidentally the same type of aircraft whose engines can be seen flaring to life at the top of this page)... ...the legendary Bataan! Being inside was like a dream. The interior had been lovingly restored to its original form, as MacArthur had actually used it. An old Canadian sailor, Trevor, who'd fought aboard a destroyer during the Allied invasion of Incheon during the Korean War (in which my grandfather, an infantryman, had also participated), showed us through it. Inside were two lavatories; a closet with real uniforms from the period, flight suits and dress uniforms, hanging up for review; a spacious office-cum-living area where MacArthur sat and reviewed ground deployments of his troops from on high; a surprisingly roomy kitchen replete with coffee pots and an electric range, which was an utterly novel concept at the time; a large navigator's compartment, which even had a sectional chart laid out on the desk; and, of course, a knob- and dial-ridden cockpit, which I drooled over. Trevor explained some fascinating trivia to us about the aircraft, and even took some pictures of us: John and myself, in the navigator's compartment... ...and me, standing right by the general's desk. Note the phone, the radio, and the clock with Roman numerals. (We couldn't find his corncob pipe anywhere, though.) All too soon, we were climbing back out of the Connie and back into the sun. We stepped inside the museum again to do a little shopping. I couldn't resist. Planes of Fame was a world-renowned vintage aircraft restoring (and flying) organization, and they had some souvenirs to die for. I managed to limit myself to a deck of cards printed like WWII-era plane-spotter aircraft recognition cards, a Hawaiian shirt coated with fighters and bombers and palm trees, and a ribald bumper sticker for a pilot friend of mine (which read "PILOTS MAKE SMOOTHER APPROACHES"). I paid up, slipped two dollars inside a clear plastic jar labeled "Aircraft Maintenance Fund" and then, after a last goodbye to the lovely old lady behind the counter, we vacated the premises. John, who had acted pretty blasé as we'd toured the museum (except for that MiG), took a few minutes to drool over a Corvette ZR6 in the parking lot. We made a quick stop at the classic car museum right next door (which had everything from Model Ts to old Honda power scooters from the 1960s), and then took off down the highway, bound for home. To say that the remainder of the trip was uneventful would be a gross understatement, even though it consisted of nothing more than us refueling in Williams and driving home on Interstate 40. Between Valle and Williams, we put on Led Zeppelin III, which I'd purchased in Flagstaff. Picture me, in the driver's seat, aviator shades on, my face straight, my insides bouncing up and down like Christmas morning with new music and airplane goodies, my fingers tapping on the steering wheel, the car flying through the sunlight and breeze and golden-green hills; John, in the passenger seat, the log on his lap, baring his soul on paper, the subliminal voice of Robert Plant on "Hats off to (Roy) Harper" ululating out of the Chrysler's speakers. So we traversed AZ-64, refueled in Williams (where John switched again to the driver's seat), got on I-40, and rolled on. Pensive and preoccupied, neither of us said much as we drove by Kingman... ...crossed the border, passed the celestially beautiful Mojave National Preserve... ...and arrived in Barstow just as the sun set. We exited the 40, reunited with our old friend 247 for the drive to my house, and got home right as the last pink light was fading out of the star-lined evening sky. John and I got my stuff out of his car, carried it inside, shook hands, and parted. And that was the end of that road trip. How I felt afterward might best be described by this picture:

"Tom Petty needs to learn to drive a stick"

I came slowly to myself on the morning of Thursday, November 5. I remembered immediately where I was—Room 245 in the Motel 6 in Yuma, Arizona—but it just didn't seem like a good time to wake up yet. Thirty minutes later I gave up the ghost and creaked out of bed. The motel mattress was firm enough, but sometimes sleeping in strange places stiffens me up. I shuffled to my suitcase, retrieved my kit bag, lurched into the bathroom, and showered, emerging to find John already awake and watching one of the Final Fantasy movies on TV. I'm not sure which one it was. The premise involved asteroids, and aliens, and ray guns, and an insane amount of jumpsuits. By and by we got road-ready. We hoped to hit the Grand Canyon with enough daylight left to set up a tent, and possibly an entire working campsite. At this time of year, that involved getting there well before 5:00 p.m. We needed about seven hours or so to drive to GCNP from Yuma. That meant departing no later than 9:30 a.m., if possible. At 9:48 a.m. we were pulling out of the parking lot, threading our way through copious amounts of road construction, and weaseling back onto Interstate 8. A few miles out of town we stopped for gas. As we were filling up, we're reasonably certain we saw Tom Petty pull into the parking lot, blasting his own music out of the speakers of a bright yellow late-model Ford Mustang. He parked, ran inside, came back out, got back in, pulled jerkily out of the parking lot (working the clutch inexpertly) and drove away. Finished staring, John turned back to me. "Tom Petty needs to learn to drive a stick." The Yuma-Phoenix run wasn't quite as scenic as I'd hoped. Extreme Southern Arizona turned out to be little better than Extreme Southern California. It was flat as a pancake, and whatever hadn't been bleached bone-white by the sun had been turned into mangy farmland with copious amounts of water. After a few hours, we came into the environs of Phoenix. Oh boy, I thought. I've never seen Phoenix, really. All I've seen are a few tantalizing glimpses outside the big plate-glass windows of Sky Harbor. Now I'll finally get a good look at the place! Yeah, right. This is what my "look" at Phoenix consisted of: Interstate highway interchanges can go take a running jump. That's all I've got to say about that. Fortunately for my mood, the scenery improved greatly once we emerged on I-17 north of the city. Not bad, eh? The first thing I noticed were the saguaro cacti. I'd seen them before, but not for about, oh, ten years. They were far more impressive in person than I recalled. So of course I badgered John until he pulled onto an off-ramp and we could have ourselves a photo-op. As we continued on, the scenery rolled by like prickly waves on a greenish ocean. We traversed the Prescott area (where we saw the smoke of an enormous brush fire, which stayed in sight for more than an hour), and moved onward, ever upward, growing nearer to Flagstaff. Flagstaff was actually nothing like I remembered. I'd been there once before, at the tender age of 13, during my family's epic move from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Apple Valley, California in 1999. All I remembered were a lot of rocks and pine trees, and a few bright yellow WATCH FOR ELK roadsigns. There were rocks, yes. There were pine trees, yes. There were plenty of elk-related notices. But the layout of the town of Flagstaff was completely different than I remembered. The place seemed bigger, too. Either my memory was truly atrocious, or the place had undergone some changes in the last ten years. Either way, it was still pretty: the most beautiful stony hills surrounded the town, arching surprisingly high into the ethereal blue, coated with trees and reddish rocks. We made a brief stop in Flagstaff to—you guessed it—drop by the Best Buy. John claims to have some kind of morbid, work-related compulsion. He says he has to go inside any Best Buy he sees, just to compare it to the others he's worked at. I think he might be jerking my chain. He did have some rather excoriating things to say about the level of customer service represented (or rather, not represented) by the Geek Squad at the Flagstaff branch, however. Apart from that, our purpose in Best Buy was clear: John had to buy another kind of cable. I contented myself with poking through the store's R&B music section, which is my morbid Best Buy compulsion. I was, for the nth time, unable to locate the Black Keys album I've been questing for, The Big Come Up. (It stands to reason; that's probably their most popular album to date.) I struck gold in the next aisle over, however: Led Zeppelin III. Laden with yet another mysterious cable and some succulent classic rock, we paid our money and made our egress. At John's suggestion, we gassed up on our way out of Flagstaff. Then we got down to the business of being confused about which route to take. John had been showcasing his lovely Garmin GPS system all day. It worked well, and had a multitude of useful user-friendly features. Unfortunately, like MapQuest, it occasionally had a debilitating tendency to send us on nastily circuitous routes. The only difference was that John's GPS sent us on these nastily circuitous routes in an irritatingly calm, feminine voice. After realizing that we were not on I-40 (which connected up with Arizona State Highway 64, leading to the south rim of our destination), we turned around and returned to that interstate. We turned onto the 64 at about 3:30 in the afternoon. Now it was a straight shot to the Grand Canyon. After all the stops we'd made and electronics stores we'd criticized, I never thought we'd make the national park with any sort of light left. But we did. Following a deliciously scenic drive down the two-lane AZ-64, during which I almost broke my neck craning to look at a Lockheed C-121 Constellation parked outside the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Valle (more about that in the next installment), we pulled up to the park entrance sometime after four. John stumped up the $25 entrance fee, and we made a beeline for the nearest campsite: the Mather Campground near Market Plaza. Fortuitously near Market Plaza, as it happened. We turned down Juniper Loop and began scanning either side of the lane for a suitable campsite-cum-parking spot. We chose one a ways in, a little too near an elderly couple's RV, but suitably close to the Dumpsters and lavatories. It had a flat expanse of ground for a tent, a wooden picnic table, and a fire pit. After clambering out of the car and donning an extra layer against the cool Northern Arizona evening, we promptly busted the tent out of the trunk and set it up. Our practice run on Tuesday night paid off. We managed to erect the thing with little trouble. While pounding the tent stakes in, we encountered a frustratingly wide patch of bedrock at the southwest corner; but with the aid of my military-surplus entrenching tool, I discovered its boundaries and was able to find a decent spot to embed the stake. We threw the pads and sleeping bags unceremoniously into the tent as the dusk gathered and then turned to the more interesting idea of dinner. We had a stove to cook on, but both of us realized that it really wouldn't be camping without a campfire. And we had no wood. And there were signs all around saying NO WOOD GATHERING. Well, shoot. John got back in the car and manfully found his way to Market Plaza to get us some flammable materials. I bustled about the camp, installing batteries in the lantern, setting out the cooking utensils, and generally organizing the campsite. I called John on my cell phone (there was barely enough signal to be heard) and requested that he bring back some more water. He agreed. I also hunted around for the triple-A batteries. I couldn't find the darn things anywhere. We'd picked up a few in Lucerne Valley along with the groceries, intending to use them in the fancy LED headlamp my mother had loaned me, but they'd disappeared in the meantime. Oh well, the heck with it. I had my Doomsday flashlight, anyway (one of the ones you charge by shaking). The darkness quietly completed itself as I worked (and searched fruitlessly). After a time, there was little to do but sit at the picnic table in the small white patch of illumination thrown by the lantern and hum a little tune as I waited for John to return. I didn't look up during this waiting period. It's a shame I didn't. I was missing out on quite a show. In due time, John returned with fire-starters, lighter fluid, bottled water, a six-pack of Stone Brewery's Levitation Ale, and three bundles of split cedar logs. He set the water on the table and the rest alight. The cedar wasn't well seasoned, and was more fond of smoldering and smoking than actually burning; but after moving the logs closer to one another and throwing a few more fire-starters on (and a few liberal squirts of lighter fluid), we soon had a cheery blaze going. Then we got down to brass tacks. John set up our new camp stove, pulled out a saucepan, opened a couple cans of Dennison's Chili, and set them to warm. Soon, we were chowing down on hot chili, crusty French bread and beer, with the quiet night all about us and the fire crackling away, sending fragrant cedar smoke over us as the breeze swung to and fro. "Marvelous" isn't quite the word for that meal. John and I chatted away as if we hadn't recently been separated for three years, joking and chuckling. The smoke curled away, up into the night. Our feast concluded, we cleaned up the dishes with the aid of icy water from an old-fashioned water pump near the lavatories. (Only the next day would we discover that there was a sink for dishes at the rear of the building.) Then we pulled up a cooler by the fire and watched the stars, which we'd just noticed. I don't want to sound trite, but they were glimmering like diamonds. Off in the distance, a couple of campsites over, a solitary flute began to play. The flautist was undoubtedly a novice; his or her repertoire was limited to the major scales, and a few lilting notes in no particular order. But the effect was stunning, especially in that darkness, especially in that strange and majestic place. Less than a mile from the Grand Canyon, under an adamantine sky, warm fire-glow and cedar smoke filling the air, a delicious meal in our stomachs and beer in our hands, John and I listened to that tinkling flute filter through the trees with a visceral reverence. It was the perfect complement to an evening of subtle splendor. "It's Ian Anderson!" I postulated. There remains little to tell. We secured whatever belongings we weren't going to sleep with inside John's car; disposed of our trash in the proper receptacles; and adjourned to the tent with flashlights, cell phones, and warm pajamas (sweats and long-sleeved shirt for me, a polypropylene body glove for John). John attempted to read a few Bible verses by the light of the lantern, but pronounced the illumination too dim. I was more stubborn. I laid awake for another half-hour with a flashlight in one hand and my new copy of Alcott's Little Women in the other. Between paragraphs, my friend Allison administered the daily grammar quiz via text messages. (The word was "gravid," I believe.) After an engaging electronic conversation, she signed off. I stayed conscious just long enough to finish the chapter, then put the book aside, switched off the flashlight, and laid my delightedly weary head to rest. And upon the morrow rested the golden promise of the canyon itself... I'd like to conclude by adding that I considered entitling this piece "Canyon dig it?" but I thought better of it.