Day Three: The Stupids or Stupid is as Stupid Does.
My excuse? I wasn’t thinking clearly.
The lesson? Never be polite when death is on the line.
“You gotta get angry! You gotta get mean!” (Dodgeball, Patches O’Houlihan - Rip Torn)
Day three. Sleep comes in fits and starts. I toss and turn, my head throbbing, knowing that at any minute, this migraine could become a whopper.
Dawn. No wind. No food. Hubby manages to snag two portions of instant oatmeal for himself before Mrs. Bob manages to pack everything away and padlock the food bag.
“I have a migraine,” I announce, emerging from the tent. “I’m staying here today. You all do what you want.”
Mr. Bob, “Oh no…we’re going paddling today.”
Me, “No, I’m not.”
Mr. Bob, “Yes, it will be a beautiful paddle and we can stop for lunch on one of these islands.”
“What? Stop for an almond?” Hubby kicks me. “No. If I go out on the water, my headache will get worse. I’ll stay here. I’ll be fine. If Hubby wants to stay with me, he and I can paddle around this area. Or he can go with you. I don’t care. I’m staying here.”
Thus begins the discussion/argument of the decade. Hubby really isn’t paying attention. He’s too weak and distracted by our predicament. Finally, stupid is as stupid does. I agree to a one hour paddle. One Hour. Mr. Bob gets all excited. “I know the perfect one hour paddle,” he says.
Two hours into the paddle, hubby realizes that he has made a terrible mistake. He wasn’t paying attention when I needed him to pay attention. And he understands, deep in his soul, that Mr. and Mrs. Bob are fucking insane. This is a shock, as he has known these people for a very, very long time. Mr. Bob was his mentor and father-figure during his college years. Hubby and I prepare to turn around and paddle back to camp, but we realize we’ve reached the half-way point so there is no going back. We hear Mr. Bob call out, because you know he and Mrs. Bob and Butter are way the fuck ahead of us - “Let’s go over to that beach!” What he doesn’t say is - that beach clear across that stretch of open water into the wind way the fuck over there.
Hubby, “Ignore him. Keep paddling.”
Determined now, we keep paddling around the tip of Sioux Pine Island, directly into a stiff head wind, leaving them behind. We point Old Iron Sides back to camp. After some unknown period of time, Mr. and Mrs. Bob realize we’ve left them. I see them struggling to paddle in the wind and the waves along the far shore.
“Keep to the main channel,” I say, paddling my ass off. “Head directly into the wind.”
“Right,” says hubby, working that great body of his - a body that is getting way too skinny on this trip.
“You may have thought I wasn’t paying attention when you taught me how to sail, but I heard every single word you said. We have to treat this canoe like a sailboat. We’re going to have to pass our destination and then tack or we won’t make it around that headland.” I point.
Hubby, “I don’t know a single other woman who could do this on no food, no sleep and with a migraine headache. I love you.”
Ah, at last he sees the real me! “I love you too. Thank you for understanding this situation. I know you won’t let me die in this god-forsaken wilderness.”
Hubby, “I swear I won’t let you die here. You have a better angle on the headland. Tell me when to turn.”
“Right.”
We look to port, at Mr. and Mrs. struggling in the surf line. Ha! Ha! They approach the headland and are washed into a blind bay, no outlet except to fight their way through the breaking surf and currents crashing around the headland. We sail right past. I wait until the perfect moment…”Fifty yards…forty yards…thirty yards…ten…turn it!”
We surf the waves down the narrow channel and glide up on the beach right in front of our tents. Fist bump! In your face! In your face! In your face! In your face!
Hubby and I pull the canoe up the beach and secure it. I crawl into the tent with a bottle of water and smash my throbbing head against the sleeping pad, hoping against hope that pressure will dull the pain. I fall asleep for an hour or two and then I wake and stare at the shadows on the tent wall. I don’t waste my time fantasizing about all the many ways I could kill Mr. and Mrs. Bob. They no longer exist to me. I care only that my husband and I survive.
I spend several hours listening to the birds and making mental lists of the food and beverages I would have packed for a trip like this. Man, we would have eaten like kings and queens. We would have fished and gone swimming, paddled around just for fun…because what the hell else is there to do on a canoe trip besides fish and cook and drink chilled wine and ice cold beer? Like I said, weight isn’t an issue - you could bring two coolers, drinks, fresh fruits and veggies, meats…As some of you have mentioned, Mr. and Mrs. Bob should run a starvation boot camp or consult for Survivor or maybe go back in time and become Concentration Camp guards.
As the sun gets low in the sky, I emerge from the tent and walk barefoot down to the water. I sit on a rock to watch the sunset. I know the rest of them are eating their meager rations and I hear hubby say he’s eating my portion and I smile. I also hear him say, “We’re out of here at 6 a.m. before the wind kicks up.”
Mr. Bob, “But there are other places I want to show you. You don’t have to worry, we’ll have you back to the pick up point by 3 p.m.”
Hubby, taking charge now, “No. We are out of here at 6 a.m. and we head straight back. We cannot handle another day of paddling into the wind like we’ve been doing, my wife has a migraine and she hasn’t eaten in three days. You want to paddle off somewhere, be my guest. My wife can get us back.” (Yeah, I can. I spotted my landmarks while we were out paddling around Sioux Pine Island.)
Mr. Bob pouts, but my husband has spoken. Mrs. Bob comes and sits near me. I ignore her. My eyes never leave the western sky. She tells me about the time Mr. Bob took her, her sister and her niece on a week-long back-packing trip in the Bob Marshal Wilderness in Montana. I hear how they almost died many times over - because only Mr. Bob had done any backpacking before. Because the terrain is steep and treacherous. Because he didn’t really know the way. Because they ran out of food…big surprise there. Mr. Bob would have died of hypothermia, but the women saved his life. She sees nothing wrong with the scenario she’s just described. I don’t reply, I merely listen. And the life-lesson of her words is, what? That I should buck up? That I’m a soft city-slicker? Uh…I’m not. Is this a parable? Is she telling me a wisdom story designed to lead me to some deep and profound insight? Some personal revelation that will put me in touch with Carl Jung’s cosmic consciousness? She goes on to say that she was estranged from her daughter for several years because her daughter warned her that Mr. Bob would get her killed. Mrs. Bob took umbrage at her concerns.
I remember that when hubby and Mr. Bob organized a backpacking trip into that same wilderness in 2006, hubby learned that Mr. Bob, who was in charge of food, planned to pack in only enough food for each person - eight people - to eat 1800 calories per person per day. Hubby freaked. He estimated that they would be burning at least 5000 calories a day. He and I took over the food planning and upped the caloric intake to 3800 calories per person per day. Hubby thought this was an aberration, that Mr. Bob was simply too concerned about the weight of the packs and didn’t understand the caloric output a trip like this would require.
Ah, I think, a pattern emerges, and it ain’t pretty, and I ain’t the one who needs to learn the karmic lesson. This man is very very sick and so is his wife. What is it that Einstein said? Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
As Mrs. Bob stops speaking, Mr. Bob climbs down the bank and sits on a rock. He crosses his legs and makes himself comfortable, as if settling in for the evening, and he says, “Let me tell you about myself…”
I rise and walk past him without a word, retreating to the safety of our tent, where I remain until 5 a.m. the following morning.
Tomorrow - Get me out of this stinkin’ fresh air!
