I bet Etta Place really did teach English for a while.......

Fate has spoken. The stars have aligned. I am taking a less-traveled road that will one day seem to have made all the difference, after all. A boarding school with a campus in Saratoga Springs and a campus in Spanish Fork has asked me to be their English teacher, beginning June 16th (the Europe trip once again being placed on hold). The students are at-risk girls, much like who I'm working with here in Arizona, and the school specializes in equine therapy....horse whispering or something akin. I'm going to be a real English teacher. Today is a gloriously sunny day. I'm to begin choosing texts immediately...I can teach whatever I want, whomever authors/poets I want, and during the summer, Friday is fieldtrip day and I can take them wherever I want. They've asked me to check out what plays are being performed in Cedar City this summer--I get to teach Shakespeare and then take my girls down to see the play in August.....this thrills me. I'm too blessed. I'm incredibly excited.

And I may be moving to Provo, God forbid it. My Provo readers need to give me an honest appraisal of the Utah county situation and if I shouldn't head on towards Springville or Lehi or even commute from further north to avoid the legions of BYU freshmen that will force me into an early grave (considering I am an ancient old maid already to most of them)....I know there's at least two of you out there....come on Provonians, tell it to me straight.

I'm sad to leave Arizona. I'm quite certain that I'll end up living in the Utah deserts during evenings and weekends. I'd really like to learn to fly fish. Are there places to fly fish near Spanish Fork? I hear the rock climbing is all right, too. I like to think that I'll be living out my next few years like a young Katharine Ross......26-year-old English teacher hanging out with Western outlaws and keeping them in line while I help them bust into South American banks, and then, hopefully, I'll find a Dustin Hoffman to burst into the temple doors someday yelling, "Emily! Emily!" and waving a large wooden cross so I don't end up marrying some strange Provo man I don't really love. It will be very dramatic I hope, and I will be very beautiful. Fingers crossed! Anyway, just wanted to lay down the word--I'm moving back to Utah. *cue very formidable and conclusive metal door slamming shut*

Thoughts on mistletoe.....

After six months of reminding myself to research mistletoe from seeing it suck away at the lives of junipers and cottonwoods in the desert, I finally did a little low-key research on this parasitic symbol of love and courtship. Thought it might make an interesting blog. We'll see.

So it ends up that mistletoe most likely derives from the German Mist meaning dung and Tang meaning branch, reason being that birds eat the seeds, crap them out onto branches where they sneak their way into the tree's core a la Sigourney Weaver's nemesis in Alien. After five weeks or so of digging their way in chigger-style, the mistletoe copycats the tree's branch scheme as well as it can and sprouts itself from the tree, oddly brighter and yellower in color and dropping white, semen-filled berries for further domination. According to my friend Dodge as he told it apathetically to my band of girls one sunny afternoon in November, the mistletoe, like the romance it represents, will find a host and feed on it until both the tree and the mistletoe weaken and die together, leaving only the broken shell of the original tree and wilted rotting mistletoe all around the ground beneath it. Oh what baggage, oh what destruction. Oh, the sentimentality of it all!


In the areas of the desert I have walked, mistletoe leaves a bloody trail of leafless branches stretching bare and naked toward the sky while several clumps of mistletoe leech away at their last breaths, mocking the host trees by bearing their own leaves and fruits that deny the tree its own posterity. My girls used to gather the mistletoe to hang in our camps during the Christmas season, but we somberly quit as we followed the path of arboreal carnage the mistletoe parasites left in their wake. Hanging mistletoe felt like celebrating the Charles Manson of trees, like honoring the vampiric extent this plant takes for survival. And it surely made us at least half as cynical about love and romance as our friend Dodge was.

We most likely owe the Vikings for the kissing traditions. Balder was the Viking god of the summer sun (this legend makes for an appropriate Arizonan April trail tale). Anyway, Balder dreamed he was going to die. His mother flipped out because she knew that if Balder died, everything on the earth would die with him. Her name was Frigga and she was the goddess of love and beauty. Since she's Viking, let's assume she would kick Aphrodite's ass if they cage fought each other.


Well, Frigga did what only a mother would think to do, and she went to all the plants and animals on the planet and asked that they would be kind to her son because he was a good boy. The consequences of Mom's words were typical--it was as bad for Balder as it was for any young boy who walks towards to the junior high's front doors only to have his mom call out, "I love you, Pumpkinpants!" in front of all the jocks that hang out in the foyer until twenty minutes into first period--Balder had more rocks thrown at him in teasing than any of the other young gods and goddesses. Frigga was pretty powerful, though, so nothing worse than broken eyeglass rims ever happened to him.

That is, until this other boy god, Loki, found out that mistletoe had no sway against Frigga's power because mistletoe was not plant or animal as it has no roots of its own, no identity without a branch to leech from. Loki was as low as you could go......I'm not sure who would win a cage fighting match between Loki and Shakespeare's Iago. That's how bad. Loki not only made a poisoned dart from the mistletoe but he also tricked Balder's blind brother Hoder to shoot it into Balder for him. Balder died. Loki was a real bastard.

Here's where those tried and true Christianity parallels and Jung's collective unconscious comes into play. Three days after Balder jumped the Great Boa as they say somewhere, Frigga's tears washed the mistletoe's red coloring off from all its berries and washed them white as snow (or white as semen most Druids would say) and this miraculously raised Balder from the dead. Frigga was so thrilled and grateful for mistletoe afterward that whenever she saw it she got so damned excited she'd kiss anybody and everybody standing underneath it. Which is kind of a nice story and I like that kind of kissing more than the awkward, aw geez, we're both standing under the mistletoe...are we supposed to make out? type of kissing mistletoe pushes these days.


So, a happy ending. Also, it ends up mistletoe isn't so bad after all, botanically speaking. Mistletoe among juniper trees, for example, actually encourages more juniper berries to sprout before the tree chokes up under the mistletoe's grip. More birds and animals come for more juniper berries and the result concludes with more animals and juniper trees in that area than before the mistletoe arrived. What a paradox, huh? Also, mistletoe from some trees are so plush and bunchy that birds get giddy over them and make their nests there in the high branches. So, that seems positive.

Conclusion: love is a leech that can suck you dry and the romance might well die right along with your soul. But cry it out and you will live again. Sure. That's the way this big round ball keeps on keeping on. There are times and there are seasons and there's always another spring and another. We can only hope that if we are so lucky for romance and mistletoe to stick its parasitic tentacle against the soft meshy skins of our metaphysical aortas, that at least we can have the strength to live with these growths long enough that we both survive to fill our neck of the woods with plenty of birds' nests and juniper berries and happy little animal families a good long while. Then, if we all die together, it's romantic and meaningful, just like Old Dan and Little Ann, those timeless beloved coondogs that couldn't live without their love, and a red fern grows between them. The only book I ever saw my father cry in. So that's something. Mistletoe. Finally researched it.

Easter on the Verde

This is the time to be stuck in the Sonoran Desert.......I cannot even adequately describe to you how beautiful and warm and breezy and chock full of life the desert was last week. Not even remotely adequately. I spent hours on my back atop grassy hills covered in purple honey-filled papago lilies (pic. 1 at bottom), totally edible, totally delicious, grazing....my mouth full of the sugary blue dick flowers, staring up at the stacked cumulus clouds spotting a starkly bright blue sky.....nothing but red rock, long slim sycamore branches with green buds slowly unfurling themselves....I tanned myself, lying beside the Dirty Verde River (yes, we pronounce Verde to rhyme with Dirty where I be), letting my fingers dangle in the water that was cool and lazy. It is a sheer crime that I get paid to do this.

My band of girls was exceptional. There were seven of them--some were practically Paris Hilton status and even attended the same parties as said celebrity, and others were there on rich and dying grandparents' money and came from more humble backgrounds. I love those girls. We laughed hard last week and it felt good. We had to cross the Dirty Verde--twice--and the second time nearly took us under, trying to swim through currents dragging our fat packs behind us before they completely filled with water, soaking our sleeping bags, food packs, thermals for the evening chill. But we survived that, ate some de-thorned Christmas berries (pic. 2 at bottom) and spent the starlit nights dancing barefoot in sand around bonfires built from driftwood, howling at the full moon and celebrating Easter by rising early to watch the moon set and the sun rise at the same moment. Like being caught between the meeting of two old friends, my hippie friend Troy once said. That morning we each took a rock we had carried in our pockets on our hikes that represented a heavy thing of the heart that weighed us down and we dropped them in the water and left them behind. I didn't want to let go of mine and held it longer than most. I hate letting go--I hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it. I don't even think I officially did let go completely.........but I let go of enough. I let it slip from my fingers and watched it disappear beneath the deep green waters of that river that the day before I had cursed so frantically when I thought the current would take me under until I realized I was nearly to the opposite shore.

I ended the week hanging out with my friend Price and watching gila monsters creep about the top of the cactused hill as the sun was setting Wednesday evening. A gila monster hissed at me--it was like staring into the face of a dinosaur, and I marveled at how it contorted and flattened its thick spotted body to crawl beneath the spokes of a fat prickly pear cactus when I saw what he was hunting--a tiny three-inch bite-size bunny rabbit. Almost too ironic of an ending for an Easter week on the trail. The little guy was scared, but also pretty chill and he didn't put up much of a fight when I reached into the thistled bush he was hiding in and picked the bunny up. The poor gila monster hissed one last time at me and sulked down the road in search of new prey while I cooed and purred over this smallest bunny ever that sat just as comfortable and content as could be in the palm of my hand.

Now, since I was a kid I liked to think I had some kind of special relationship with animals...I blame the boy in The Secret Garden who could talk to crows and foxes. I can't say that this bunny and I had any kind of special or spiritual connection and that's why he let me hang out with him like I did......but I can't deny that the experience affected me pretty profoundly. He was such a little fluffy guy...he eventually felt good enough to stretch his neck around and hop around a little bit in my hands. I lay on the ground with some sprouted lentils and piece of carrot on my chest, just in case he felt like eating. The bunny hopped up my arm and nestled himself between my chest and my shoulder and rested his chin there. Price, tell everyone how small this little guy was.

I had all these quick fantasies about taking the bunny home with me and raising it like one of my own, like those Disney movies about boys raising baby lions or wolves or bears or the like. This little rabbit and I found each other and we would be a real striking pair, the two of us. Any fears about the future and education and vocation and marital relations and all of that would be numbed and softened because my bunny and I had each other. But alas, I let someone else hold my bunny while I took a walk with a friend and when I returned the bunny had left, they had let him go.

It's for the better. That's obvious, I'm no dummy. The bunny would have died in a week. He probably would have refused to eat. The gila monster probably has him by now. Or maybe my scent that he carries makes all the other bunnies fear him now and he is as much a renegade of his species as I sometimes describe myself to be. The car ride home alone would have stressed him out, and who wants to live in a cage.

But am I so ridiculous to harbor a secret desire to run into my bunny again during my desert adventures? Would it be so silly to wonder if some rabbit some day that I find staring at me with ears perked across the cow tank isn't my little bunny that I saved from the death-vise grip of a gila monster? The smallest bunny I ever did see. It's a crime I get paid for what I do. And might I also add--the desert may be empty and open and blank to some, but this desert is so thick with emotion and memories and fears and gratitude and secret morning meetings and late night fire circles and bleeding hearts and belly laughs that I am becoming almost pained to return again and again to the same gravelly creeks and lonely peaks and lost caves. I miss my friends who have moved on or who are moving on. I am sad that I will soon be that one to leave the desert behind as well. I guess we can't all be Edward Abbey forever. I wonder what Ed Abbey would have thought of that bunny. I'm quite sure he would have been more inclined to raise the gila monster, and he likely would have began by feeding the bunny to it.


To anyone interested, here's a bunch of the rich life I was privy to witness on the trail this week. The pictures aren't mine, as we aren't allowed cameras, but these fine folks of the Internet took better pictures than I could have anyway.

What am I doing in Casablanca, man?

Somebody was talking to me about catharses and what they're good for. I said they were good for clearing the stage of people at the end of Shakespeare's tragedies. But in retrospect, I think catharses breed people instead of chasing them away. These past 72 hours have illuminated a lot of pain from my friends that I haven't noticed because I've been so muddled up and reigned into my own selfish hands as I've tried to fingergrab any last remnants of something dead because I can't face losses, I can't let go. And all I see is what I'm grabbing for. I don't even notice whether or not or how it even wants to be grabbed...maybe it wouldn't be so difficult if I was only supposed to walk alongside it after all. Like trying to push a horse. A real mule-headed horse.

In any case, my hands are free. I should have gone rock climbing today because I'm fat from eating cake and I go out on the trail tomorrow, but I don't trust my fingers yet. I heard from old friends this week, good friends, some here some there and they were all hurting. Not desperately or disgustingly, but when they spoke I felt it in their voices and saw it in their eyes....I had good conversations these past few days about life and goodness and light and friendship. I learned about fights these friends were fighting that I had been completely oblivious to. I confided all my guts to my mom and she not only held them there so gently and forgivingly, she even brushed them off a bit and showed me some of her guts and how they healed up real nice just like mine would. So forgive me for throwing temper tantrums (which anybody real close to me has been privy to countlessly) and forgive me for trying to sound profound here. I just wanted to declare hope for the children and light in the distance and chocolate sundaes in heaven. I connected with people in the most raw ways and I feel clean and washed out from it. Today is a good day. Today is beautiful in Arizona and I wish all of you in the cold states could feel the summer in my parking lot. It is a good day.

It's better than Goofy Golf.

As I make my laborious yet lethargic way towards something like a Career this fall, I'm reminded of my true calling in life: Paranormal Studies. The smallish library at Sarah Jane Adams Elementary School had a surprisingly, perhaps even alarmingly, ample access to nonfiction books that had researched the weird, the terrifying, the unexplainable. After my fourth grade teacher told me I wasn't allowed to check out any more Roald Dahl books (I was reading Danny, Champion of the World for the third time) I memorized the numbers of the Dewey Decimal System that covered Cryptozoology and rarely had to visit the card catalog again. (Actually, Mrs. Siler made me check out a stupid book called Grandpa and Me first and I was so angry that I wasn't reading The BFG that I was actually partially pleased when Grandpa died at the end.)

Amid the dozens of reports on dolphins and wolves in 7th grade, when Mrs. Draper told us to write a report on any animal we'd like to research further, I whipped out a deeply engaging and well detailed five-page, double-spaced essay on the Loch Ness Monster. It was one of the only times during my awkward era that I felt proud to stand before a class of my peers in my Tweety Bird sweatshirt and knee-length, blue-and-white striped shorts. The kids actually had questions for me after I read my report and I think they were grateful not to have to listen to yet another long list of facts about horses and what they eat and shouldn't eat. Remember that this was still the decade that aired both the ending of Unsolved Mysteries and the beginning of The X-Files. We were the generation that grew up fantasizing about proton packs and 1.21 gigawatts. My 9th grade report on Bigfoot in 1997 was similarly received.

Even then I was cynical deep down, however. I knew Santa Claus wasn't real when I was eight, but it took me until 6th grade to admit it. I wanted Nessie to be real because I wanted to believe that people wouldn't just flat out lie. I wanted to believe in honesty and in the human spirit. If a Scottish minister said he was picnicking and saw a sea monster's long neck surface, rise, then gracefully and gently dip back below into the murky dark water, then he very well could have, damn it. Why make something like that up and take it to your grave? I could write a whole other post on taking things to the grave. I don't stand behind that as any kind of evidence anymore. Say something long enough for enough years and you can hypnotize yourself. Plus, most people go somewhat crazy just before the grave, anyway.


That's the real pull behind cryptozoology, I think. Part of it is adventure and the thrill of discovery, of course, but if anybody ever did finally snag a sasquatch, that would make hundreds of people honest, sane, and credible witnesses instead of crazies and liars. I remember being so angry when books would post pictures of the legendary creatures and then write about how they were hoaxes after all, and here are the men who staged them. I'm pretty sure, though, that had I been around at the time, I would have helped them out. The only thing that interested me more than the truth as a kid was being involved in secrets. Except I've never been good at taking things to next week, let alone to my grave.

"Did you ever have to finally decide......"

Bleah.

Sometimes when I am mourning a loss, particularly a great one that I basically caused myself, I undergo this period of sick, stupid, horrible nostalgia. Not even just for the person/place/thing I no longer get to keep. I go WAAAAAAAY back, hoping to find myself again in old metal lunchboxes and stuffed Grover dolls. It's an illness, I think, and I hope I don't end up like that old crone in Dicken's Great Expectations with forty-year-old wedding cake cobwebbed up like gray lace sitting in her parlor and a perpetually pissed-off, hopeless character sketch. Sheesh.

But I don't think that'll happen. I don't feel too pissed off or hopeless right now. I'm super, super sad. And I hate all things Groundhog Day. What a stupid holiday. Oh man....to even think that I would have to relive this year's Groundhog Day over and over and over and over again sends bile to the back of my throat. At least I can be grateful I didn't wake up to Sonny and Cher this morning...It's definitely February 3rd, hallelujah.

What I was going to say, though, is that it's getting to be spring around here in Mesa. And how can anybody really be all that glum when your parking lot smells like new plants and there's the constant whistle of birds in the background? So I watched a bunch of dumb YouTube videos of classic Sesame Street. I doubt any of you will actually go in and watch them, but look, that's all I'm offering this off-week. I think. All I'm offering today, anyway. In the buzzing, dramatic, swollen recesses of my bloody little heart, these clips resonated a little bit of good cheer back into me and I feel completely confident about advertising them here, on my blog, to you, my good friends.

The first is a creepy one about getting honey from bees. I remember it had the same effect on me as a kid as nature shows about spiders did. Uneasy background music and it sounds like it's being narrated by one of the Children of the Corn. I love it. The second is a strong, meaty classic--Madeline Kahn and Grover hang out together. This is probably the strongest attachment I have to Sesame Street, this clip I mean. This is part of the reason I still carry that damn dirty Grover doll with me wherever I pick up and move to and also the reason I love Kahn so much. Sesame Street was such a sweet show.....why and when did they let Elmo take it over? Everything good in the world these days is losing heart to the sucking maw of commercialism. Damn you, Tickle Me Elmo. Damn you to the fiery depths of hell's seventh circle.

Finally and thirdly, how do you guys expect me to act this foolishly and immaturely and NOT throw on a clip from Pete's Dragon. So here's Petey and Helen Reddy singing sweetly and taking me back, all the way back to my old house in Salt Lake, the one where I had a lovebird named Bird G. who used to play in my hair while I sat in front of this stupid movie with my perpetual little kid snotty nose. I'm so damned glum. And don't get me wrong....I know my life is barrels and bushels and trenches better than most people's--I'm thick with good friends and plush blessings and sunshine. But somehow that still doesn't make this any less crappy. You guys know how I am about letting things go, even if I am lucky enough to keep a good friend out of the whole ordeal. If I were Harrison Ford in the Last Crusade, I'd STILL be lying there with my middle finger just barely grazing the edge of that wooden cup.

If anyone needs me I'll be making myself sick off Jim Croce and trying to find a copy of Better Off Dead. Jen, where are you with Steel Magnolias when I need you? I need a good Weezer to sock in the nose (laugh, laugh, laugh then cry some more...you know the drill).

Oh, ye'll take the high road an' I'll take the low road...

**DISCLAIMER: This post isn't intended to have hidden messages or jabs to the ribs. I'm just trying to be therapeutic here. What do I even have this thing for if I can't use it to get something off my chest. That said, carry on.**

It's interesting to me how quickly changes happen. For the first time since I made the decision, I regret not being in Japan right now. I would give a finger off my left hand (preferably the second to the last) to have nothing to do right now but plan an English lesson, ride my mamachari to buy twelve different kinds of mushrooms for my miso shiru at the local grocery and watch Japanese game shows from my teeny tiny Asian apartment.

Well, even as I type that, I know it's a lie. I wasn't supposed to go to Japan, damn it. I can't even hypothetically wish myself there without my stomach saying, "No! No! Don't you remember?! That's what we're NOT supposed to do!" So where the hell am I supposed to be then, Universe? Where?

But back to change--I guess it isn't change really. Just reality. Really. What I'm trying to say is, I wish I were back in school. As a student, most of my disillusionments were about other people....Wordsworth's disillusionments or Buddhism's disillusionments or my own disillusionments about something somewhat separate from me...like me becoming disillusioned about Greece or Turkey or some other far off person/place/thing. Now that it's just me, myself, and I sans textbooks and professors and students, my disillusionments are mostly about myself. I hate them. I'm sick of being under my own microscope. Someone give me something to research, something to write about besides my own dramatics.

So, in order to stay on the bright side of things, here is a list I am making myself write of ten things I can say I am honestly grateful for:

1. I'm not married.
2. I don't have to stay in Arizona forever.
3. I can be anywhere I want this fall. I just have to pick a place and find a job. People do it everyday. I'm going to be one of those people.
4. I am not who I was in 8th grade. Not even close.
5. I have never been in a plane wreck on the Andes.
6. I am not dead yet and thus still have ample probationary time to get righteous. Maybe. I guess nobody knows when they are going to go. Let me rephrase with: I'm grateful for probationary time. Period.
7. I get to see my family tomorrow. I get to take William to a movie.
8. I am in Sharon Morgan's house right now with Patch the Dog on my lap. This is one of the only places in the world I can feel consistently safe in. I think that this house can breathe, deep deep down. Maybe in the furnace or the water heater. But it definitely sighs from all that's happened and been discussed and been whispered inside its walls. Were I to write a book, this house would be a place of great symbolic pregnancy. I feel like I and this house are blood brothers, in a way. Jen, I know you know what I mean even though you wouldn't describe it quite like I am.
9. A stranger told me I looked like Winnie Cooper. I've still got it.
10. Finally, I'm grateful for this backpack I got for Christmas. I look at that backpack, and I see Escape. I see myself going somewhere...anywhere...and being able to live off only what I can fit in my backpack. I just need to secure a couple thousand more dollars as cushioning and then I'm out of Arizona, packing all my unessentials back into my parents' house and I'm out of here. Joe, Darren, keep talking up Europe at me.

Anyone who feels like coming with me is welcome to; I promise to be as chilled as freezer-burned taquitos (beef, not chicken).

New Year Resolution: Whistle More Cat Stevens

After reading Price's blog, I'm tempted to follow suit and cough up everything that's been going down in the past couple of months. I think it's been long enough since it happened that I could retell the flash flood extravaganza with new fervor and spirit, but I'm gonna save it after all. I wish I could tell you all of my recent experience with a haunted campfire (seriously....no, this one is for real....I just about almost walked in on spirits dancing on Indian burial grounds and was molding mountainous formations out of my trail mashed potatoes and shouldn't even be here to tell the tale except that by the grace of God something kept Ramsey and me from reaching The Fire That Disappeared when we saw it that late, late night....our fire pit was booby-trapped even........okay, fine, I'll tell the tale. Keep in mind this is all a parenthetical diversion from my REAL blogging subject:

So there we were. Ramsey, a hobbit-like TrailWalker with energy emanating from his eyebrows to his fists and down to his quick little feet--no one since Cagefighter Kev has kept me laughing harder and moving faster on the trail. We were dropped off around 10 p.m. at a wash that was intended to turn into a road where we would find our band (we were instructed to take one boy from said band and walk with him to our final destination...two TrailWalkers, one YoungWalker...it's called a Walkabout). Anyway, we were dropped off at a different wash. A different wash that did eventually turn into a different road....a road not listed on any of our maps. This is where the haunting begins.

We walked up a hill and onto a ridge, following the road for a good mile and a half. We finally saw the flickering of a small campfire across the ravine from us. We stood at the top of a large hill with the road continuing onto the left of us, and the campfire straight ahead of us, slightly to the right and quite far from the road we currently walked. Just to the right of our place on the road was a large welcoming fire pit and several burned juniper trees crying out to be plucked limb by limb for firewood. Ramsey suggested we spend the night just the two of us and go to the campfire in the morning (he also told me I better not try to get in his sleeping bag halfway through the night because he'd go right to Price and turn me in. I told him to keep dreaming big).

The fire was quite far from us. The ridge fell away just past our fire pit and went way down into a thickly wooded and catclawed terrain where a creek supposedly trickled through. Then, up on the other side, halfway down from the ridge across the valley from us, the campfire flickered and smoked. When I went to check my traps behind a grove of trees down the road, I could hear voices from across the valley and Ramsey and I considered cutting through the valley and reaching the fire that night, but then decided not to when we both got pricked and cut by Arizona thorns as we test-drove the immediate foliage before us.

So we camped at the booby-trapped fire pit. Somehow, at least ten of the rocks inside the pit were the exploding type. Ramsey got thwacked right in the forehead by a thumb-sized piece of rock, and I laughed hard at his yelping and head-rubbing until I got my own pummeling as several smaller rocks hit my shoulder, my calves, and a three inch piece landed right into my bag of macaroni as I held it open in front of me. The heat from the rock melted the sides of my bag. Good thing it was macs and not my powdered milk or gatorade. I mentioned the idea of booby traps and Ramsey chittered at this and we both quoted Goonies for some few minutes: "Slick shoes? Are you crazy?"

The humor faded as flaming sticks and more rocks flew from the fire and Ramsey and I had to move our sleeping bags further and further from the fire as coals leaped from the juniper and continued to smolder and flicker wherever they landed in a five foot radius from the pit. We technically were too close to the fire, anyway, but I've never before seen anything like this exploding fire pit.

We went to bed somber and bruised, still hungry and cold because we couldn't sit near enough to the fire to take full advantage of it. The next morning I awoke to a bleeding red horizon...sailors take warning...and looked at my watch: quarter to seven. I got out of my bag and stretched. Ramsey lay like a slug about four feet away. I walked over to the edge of the ridge and looked towards the fire from the night before. I scanned the entire hill, squinting my eyes and cleaning my glasses, watching for any kind of smoke or smoldering red, any sign of life or movement on the hill across from us. Junipers grew scattered across the face of the land, but never enough of them to hide a group of people, and most of them were scrubby little things that wouldn't come much higher than a grown man's chest. In other words, you could not run nor hide on that hill. But damn it if there wasn't a single trace of any fire or person anywhere on that land across from me.

I woke up Ramsey and he was just as confused as I was. There was nothing. No trace. Unless whoever it was with the fire got up and did a stellar no-tracing job under the stars and moonlight earlier that morning......unless there was someone that crazy, that fire up and disappeared into thin air. Haunted. Imagine if we had walked into that campsite the night before. What dancing headless horsemen would we have found, and would they have let us walk away? Again and again we took GPS coordinates from our road in the middle of Tonto National Forest and again and again there was no road on our ridge according the maps we carried. We were a full three-quarter mile from the real road that ended up being far less developed of a road than the one we camped on.

Ramsey found a large knife in the scrub bushes just off the road, about ten yards from the exploding fire pit. The handle was aged and weather-worn, the wood gray and cracked, splintering at the bottom, but the blade was fresh and sharp except the top half which was missing, broken cleanly off. On one side of the blade, someone had etched, "Gene," and on the other side was, "Uncle".

Nothing since the story of the ghost wrench in 2003 with Joe Griffin has left me so speechless and curious. Ramsey carried Uncle Gene's knife with us until the end of the week when he passed the curse onto one of the boys in the Boys Band #2. A few other weird things happened last week....spotlights on the top of empty hills, noises in the bushes, etc.....but I do believe there was something in those hills last week. Wherever you are, Uncle Gene, we hold your name in remembrance and reverence. Rest in peace, man. Go towards the light.) <--end of original parenthetical

Okay, this post is already too long. I'll tell the real story of New Year's Eve and the hot house with a bottle of Olbas later. I have things to say about important issues. But ghost stories always come first on this blog. I'll end with a list of critters I have eaten on recent weeks on the trail:

Say's Stink Bug. Here he is in all his tan glory--the fabled cinnamon bug that some of you still don't believe me about. Let him walk around on your tongue until he gets nervous and lifts his back legs to let forth a refreshing spray of Trident cinnamon spray with a chemical aftertaste.


Grub. While our YoungWalker spent an entire day sitting by himself thinking and writing letters, Ramsey and I let out our pent up energy by damming up the creek to make a swimming pool and digging a big hole for our hot house. A foot and a half into the earth and Ramsey started finding grubs. He stuck one on his paw and thrust it at me saying, "Eat it. Tastes like peas." Never a girl to say no to a challenge, I furrowed my eyebrows at him, stuck the maggoty looking thing in my mouth and I'll be damned if grubs don't taste just like peas. Dead serious. Big juicy peas. I'm hooked.


Fire Ant. Cook these devils first. I had one bite the back of my throat on his way down as one last attempt at self-defense and I was a drooling, head/throat/ear-aching mess for a full three-hour hike. I put Olbas on my tongue, in my ear, under my nose, and along my neck to soothe my burning lymph nodes. Bad, bad news and SO not worth the lemony taste.


Crawdad. They're tasty. Ish. Tasty-ish. Fantastic with a garlic butter sauce.


Happy New Year, everyone. I should of come and found you on Red Creek, Price. Still, kind of nice to know we were both on somewhat nearby cliffs in the dawning sun writing letters to each other with frozen fingers. We need to get more Jim Croce for our roadtrip. Take care of that while I'm on the trail.

Insomnia on Christmas Eve

When I was a kid, I used to get the stomach flu every Christmas season because I was so excited it would make me sick. I bit my tongue eight years in a row in the middle of the night...opening Christmas presents still makes my mouth a little sore in remembrance of those days. For the first time in years, I can't sleep on Christmas Eve. Not that I've been particularly trying to. The Gilliland kids used to stay up til 2:30 a.m. playing board games and giggling, but this year Amanda and Will were asleep by one, and only because I made them stay up watching stupid YouTube videos with me (Amanda didn't believe me that Harrison Ford co-starred with Beatrice Arthur in the 1970s' Star Wars Holiday Special and after watching ten straight minutes of horrible Wookiee ad-libbing sans subtitles, we were led to watch the trampolining, exploding head glory of the Turkish Star Wars from 1982). Now it's 2:30 and I've retreated to the hallway to say a few words here until I fall asleep. So if I say anything crazy, it's because I have temporary insomnia which is closely linked to temporary insanity.

There was snow on the trail last week, that's how I knew it must be Christmas soon. I've completely missed the malls decorated in candy canes and Rudolphs, the same old songs on all the crappy soft-rock stations, I haven't even watched any Christmas movies. It's been pretty non-traditional....somehow the occasional front yard saguaro lit up in colored lights hasn't quite made the Phoenix area very wintery (we still have temperatures in the mid-to-high 60s).

So what do I want to say at this time of night to no one in particular? Another year has passed us by, I'm a quarter of the way through this crazy ride if I live to be 100, I wish I were on the trail because home has been strange and bittersweet. It's always good to see the family, but I've been distant. On the trail we have blanket-steppings...two blankets are set up in a quiet, pretty spot. One blanket is covered in dirt, pine cones, ants, etc. and hopefully the blanket is pretty ragged and old. The other, in comparison, looks pretty good. You begin on the tattered blanket and listen to someone talk about new beginnings and the things we choose to carry with us in our lives and our hearts. Then you're asked to drop anything you are currently carrying that keeps you from walking forward. This refers first to things like cigarettes, drugs, other misc. contraband for the trail. But then you're asked to drop those things of the heart that weigh us down--anger, fear, worry, jealousy, grief, etc. I've said some goodbyes this week and they haven't been well-received, but I feel......older. I've never been a big advocate of those Moments people claim to have, when things are never the same again and everything pivoted on this one grand instance. For me it usually consists of several small subtle seconds in time that eventually accumulate and one day I suddenly realize things aren't how they used to be.

Well, I guess it will take a while to see if this new feeling of maturity lasts, but right now I feel very different. Don't get me wrong--I'll still watch Pete's Dragon when I get the urge and I'm still going to get the urge--but it's time I stopped playing around waiting for life to happen to me. This doesn't make any sense and none of you need to make any comments on this little soliloquy of mine, but I guess maybe it'll help me sleep if I shout out to the void of the Internet that I'm stepping up. I'm buying a bookshelf for my room because I'm going to live in Mesa at least until the summer and I shouldn't still be living out of my suitcase. I'm cleaning out my car. I'm getting health insurance. I'm going to use my passport this spring. I'm going to be worthy of people's trust. Even if this means having to say goodbye and let go. Socrates said the smarter people get, the stupider they should feel because the wider the circle of light gets in the darkness, the bigger the perimeter of darkness gets and our questions multiply exponentially. I feel like the better of a person I get, the worse of a person I feel......Maybe I'm looking for validation. Well, don't give it to me. I need to stew this over.

This Christmas I can't sleep not because I can't wait to open up a new computer game or Boba Fett action figure. This Christmas I can't sleep because I can't wait to open the real presents Christmas is supposed to represent--forgiveness, eternal companionship with true friends and family, love and acceptance and true understanding. I'm going to try to live more worthily to feel that and give that in deeper ways. I'm going to try to write future postings where I don't say "I" every seven to ten words. To all my sleeping friends, I hope the sugar plums are just a-dancing away in your heads. Merry Christmas to all of you, wherever you're celebrating this year. I'm so blessed to have such amazing friends...maybe my new mature and organized self will send out Christmas cards next year. We'll see.

Wasting time...........

Kudos to Troy for showing me this website: http://www.sp-studio.de/ I've spent the past hour or so creating a whole society of South Park friends to post on here, making me a bit homesick even. As soon as I'm not so tired I'll post something real, in the meantime, I've cartoonized some of you who most frequently visit this silly blog. So, without further ado, and in no particular order, here is how I visualize the lot of you:

First, myself:


Then we've got Price just off the trail, Darren in his LOTR fantasy gear playing Guitar Hero III, and Joe ready for another evening of English teaching avec drums:




And here's Sharon, also wielding a gun...Sharon, you're also wearing some Native American leather dressings, but the book you're reading blocks all that. Below her is Jen, in all her pretty in pinkness:



Then we've got the Watsons...Jaren thinking he's Harrison Ford again and Charity in a gothic come-back (what are you guys doing Tuesday, by the way? Are you reading this?):



Here's our New York friends....Jimmy Best looking all poetic, then the Pews follow:




Here's friend Konrad who is home from Australia for a few weeks, and friend Jackie who may or may not still be frequenting this page...Jackie, I gave you a boombox because you might need it because I figure you look about like this since it's thesis-writing time...I don't envy you:



Ha ha, okay my future posts won't be as creepy as this one, but I couldn't help myself. I'm a sucker for stuff like this and had nothing better to do the past couple of hours. And now it's off to bed I go. Goodnight Neverland, as they say.