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.

Top Ten List: Memoirs of a Couch Potato, or How I Must Have Got My Bangs

There's lots about it I could say, but today I just don't feel like talking trail.

Instead, here's a list of the horrible sitcoms I wish I could watch a marathon of while I do laundry today. I don't have channels on the 15" television standing on a crate next to the faux fireplace in my apartment. The only movies my roommates own are musicals about Glenn Miller or old obscure Disney movies with the huskier teen Jodie Foster (but it's Candleshoe...I would totally watch Foster in Freaky Friday if we had it here and now).

So, without further ado, here's the top ten list of bad 80s sitcoms I would watch from now til 2 a.m. if I had access to a marathon of them. These are shows I would stay in my pajamas for, eat tuna casserole right out of the pot for, and grow bleary-eyed while eating ice cream after midnight for. But only on a laundry day.

10. Mr. Belvedere. One of television's greatest plugs for adult literacy, Mr. Belvedere's nightly journal-writes I believe are one of the reasons I decided to major in English in the first place. When he holds his not-really-his family close together from behind the couch, he is holding in a powerful safety net against loneliness and despair and even at eight-years-old I could understand this and even at 25-years-old I like to take the behind-the-couch stance for holiday family pictures. Even still, I wish I had an old-timey lamp to journal-write by at the end of the day, just before the credits roll.




9. Small Wonder.
It's a little red-headed girl who is a robot with the voice of a demon-possessed teenage boy smoker. What is not fabulous about that? And what better episode to start off with but the one when the little non-robot boy gives her a milkshake which makes her short out and spin around in short jerks and spasms, yelling out monotone nonsense.....what happened to that great little girl actress? She was a hoot. She really was a small wonder.




8. Clarissa Explains it All.
I hated this stupid show. But I used to watch hours and hours of it to avoid homework. I kind of want to watch hours and hours of it again just for the nostalgia of it. But I really did hate this stupid show. Melissa Joan Hart bugged me and I hated the way she'd just write her own computer games with such skill and ease. I was always trying to do that as a kid but never had the right stuff for it. But the IDEAS....I had the greatest ideas....I could've made millions, won awards....




7. The Adventures of Pete & Pete.
Before there was Salute Your Shorts and Hey Dude! there was Pete & Pete. I think this series was probably Nickelodeon's first real messed-up crazy original show since You Can't Do That on Television. It really paved the way for all the little TV shows they have now....it was a bit brilliant and more than a bit creepy and strange. The two brothers were both named Pete, and their adventures were nostalgic, generic, and as weird as anything Outer Limits could pull. Where Clarissa annoyed me, Pete & Pete disturbed me. I didn't fully enjoy either show, but I watched them both with a fascination and attention that lends towards lava lamp stupor. A real great theme song, always takes me back to lawn sprinklers when I hear it.




6. Laverne and Shirley.

I would like to be the Laverne to someone's Shirley (any takers?). I am THIS close to putting elaborate cursive E's on all of my shirts. Get rid of Squiggy and his side-kick and you have one fabulous way to kill a lazy afternoon.




5. Welcome Back Kotter.
Oh Vinnie Barbarino, you're such a babe. Who wouldn't want to be a sweathog? I still kind of want to name one of my boys Gabe. That's the kind of tender, warm influence Mista Kottair had on me as a young impressionable teen. Gabriel. I could pull off having a Gabriel.




4. Three's Company.
I've always been a sucker for Three's Company marathons. John Ritter is just so damned hot. John Ritter, wherever in heaven you are, I'm still in love with you. So darned cute. With his big ole' bell bottoms and pearly snap shirts and his adorably and comfortably predictive slapstick comic routines....he took Van Dyke's ottoman trips to whole new levels. I'm going to blog a whole entry on just Ritter one of these days.




3. Perfect Strangers.
I actually used to watch this one the fall of 2001 around 10:30, between classes at BYU-I. I would cook two packets of instant Quaker oatmeal, cozy up with myself on the couch, and watch two back-to-back episodes of Larry and Balky before having to be back up on campus for humanities. I lived with Cousin Erin at the time--ironically we have been referring to each other as Cousin Larry and Cousin Balky since the tender ages of ten and eleven. We'll both admit to have done the dance of joy together at Christmas parties in our day (I am Balky, obviously). And does anyone remember the creepy Halloween episode from the T.G.I.F. days? Scared the pantz offa me.




2. Mork & Mindy.
I grew up having an enormous crush on Robin Williams. I used to daydream about being Mindy (I always thought she had the cutest hair) and how Mork and I would go fly kites and fly around in giant eggs wearing red spandex with rainbow suspenders.....maybe this is too much information. Mork & Mindy was one of those big people TV shows I learned to look forward to watching with my Mom before kids my age should have had an interest in big people TV shows. And does anyone else remember when Mork showed up on episodes of Happy Days? I swear that was real.




1. Punky Brewster.
Back in our days, orphans were all the rage. What with Roald Dahl books, Pippi Longstockings and Escape to Witch Mountain, having no parents and making it all on your own was in. All great things happened to orphans and many of us birthed in the early 80s maybe even remember playing Orphans the way kids before us played House. Or maybe it was just me after all. In any case, Punky was probably the most influential television program for me as a child. I cried every time they played the episode where Cherry visits her parents' grave, and I cried when Punky's adopted father has a heart attack. I was on pins and needles when Punky's friend drank poison and Punky had to read the back of the bottle to know to give her milk (another 80s TV plug for literacy). I was so scared when Punky gets trapped inside the refrigerator while playing hide-and-seek. I felt like I was coming-of-age, too, when Punky put pudding in balloons and stuck them in her shirt to amuse her friends in that tree-house with different colored wooden steps nailed to the tree. Yes, I would watch Punky Brewster all day long and into the night if it were on.

Well, did I miss any?

Oh, You Teenage Angst!

Four 13-year-old girls. That's it. That's all I was up against. I only had to take four 13-year-old girls through 20 miles of bushwhacking through catclaw mimosa and cholla cacti patches, climbing up to ridges and following fingers down into Cherry Creek and then up to Ash Creek. I had done it with a boys' band only four weeks earlier and only found the Friday hike to be somewhat challenging, mostly due to dehydration and repeated run-ins with rattlesnakes under century plants and non-rattler snakes in trees (picture: me, pushing away a branch to walk through a bush, only to realize up close that said branch not only had hypnotizing beady little eyes but was also slithering closer to my face, followed by yelping and hand-waving and flash-dancing backwards into the boys behind me). We decided Arizona might as well just introduce the Black Mamba to the Sonoran Desert to give us a new element of hard-core. The Black Mamba! That was our week's war cry: "Hey all! Shall we take this rock-ridden windy-as-hell switchback pack trail down to Cherry or sit on our butts and let the rock slides carry us wither-they-will?" "LET'S RIDE THIS MOTHER DOWN! FOR THE BLACK MAMBAS!!" And now I need new trail pants.

BUT. Black mambas are nothing compared to the death-breath mutterings and lip-pursed grimacing from 13-year-old girls on the rag. All I kept thinking throughout the week was how much I needed to call my mom to apologize for everything I ever said, thought, did, acted like I was going to do, whispered, groaned, moaned, or otherwise felt from 7th to 10th grade. Mood swings my eye. I could have bedded down with Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, El Niño all three before closing my eyes in front of those four little girls.....those girls, with their cute little grins and dimples one minute and those red-patchy cheeks and fangs with sassy little retorts the next. Or worse--the quiet "I-don't-even-care-anymore-so-leave-me-alone-it-doesn't-matter" clam-in-its-shell cop-out....(how many hyphens is it going to take in this post to get this point across?).

I remember feeling the way they do. The world was just barely unfurling for me and expectation and dreaming was everything. I envy them in a strange way, but mostly I pity them. They think they can have it all, they aren't going to end up like these weird adults in front of them, with all their insecurities and baggage--they are DIFFERENT. They are only 13, yet they can bag a 19-year-old man because they are more mature, more understanding, more grown up than everyone else they go to school with. I vacillated between supreme frustration at the constant bickering--"Emily! Brittany's taking the fire-poking stick to make a cat hole! WHY aren't you DOING anything?! Brittany! Brittany! Bring back the stick! Emily! Make Brittany bring it back! Omigawd, she's already half-way up the hill! EMMMALEEEEEEE! Cory keeps PUSHING me! I was NOT sitting on your food bag but even if I was maybe if you just put your own stuff away once-in-a-while you retard, I hate this stupid band, this place sucks so big.........".....I lost my train of thought with this sentence just recalling the incessant whining. Or when they sat. When they just decided, you know, they can't MAKE me hike. This is MY program. So they sit down, in the dirt, five miles in either direction to the closest source of water, at five in the afternoon. My shoulders sag, my jaw juts out with a peculiar twitching in my left eyelash, and I sit down with the girls to listen to their sad stories until they decide they are done breaking after all. Or I lecture first, wave my finger menacingly in the air, pretend to go on without them, come back, pace a bit, and then fall into the shoulder-sagging, fine-I'll-sit-down-and-listen-to-you stance and move from there.

However, I think mostly I worry. Frustrations aside, these are the little girls I caught Canyon Treefrogs with, admiring how good the sucker hands were at clinging to our hands and arms and laughing when I found out they'll play dead and sit in the palm of your hand if you put them on their backs. We caught and ate crawdads together, mutually grossed-out and excited about ripping off their heads and cracking their skeletons, smearing the green intestinal goo and tearing out the black poop chute for a ridiculously small morsel of real meat that smells like a real Red Lobster restaurant. These are little girls doing things at home I haven't even done. I want to neuter the male predators searching out junior high pre-teens on MySpace, I want to lock up the high school seniors and weird cousins and that-one-uncle that takes advantage of these girls, these girls with their young eyes with new long lashes and new high cheek bones and new noses less little-kiddish than the nose I still sport. These girls don't even have underarm hair yet. So what do we do. What can we do? What can I do except hike all day with these moody, puberty-stricken kids who think they are the Firsts, the Only Ones, the Newests and the Nexts, and when the sun goes down, what can I do except hike them on to water in the moonlight and starlight, pointing out the catclaw bushes that point themselves out at me by gashing long red lines across my arm from where they skulk in the shadows of the manzanita and the juniper? What can I do except take them to water, convince them to bust a coal and blow it into fire, cook a cup of lentils with lots of powdered cheese for the next day's energy? And all this in the hopes that they will want to talk, and that hopefully when they talk they will think, and that hopefully when they think they will become awake to the world, to themselves, to the space outside of making out in front of the lockers or having sex in his car in the middle of the night, to the space outside of tree houses and porn mags in those tree houses. That hopefully they will become awake to a space that's safe, that's real, because there has to be a safe place that's real for everybody, doesn't there have to be?

Even if black mamba snakes do get introduced into the Arizona wildernesses, it'll be a safer haven than what waits for these kids in their public school bathrooms. If only raising a teenager was as easy as reminding them to bury their poop and to drink six canteens of water a day. If only the most rebellion a mother ever saw from her daughter was her sixty minute refusal to hike up a hill. And thus ends my cynical approach to this past week's experiences. I am Clear Moon Full Night, and I have spoken.

Broken Wings and Cow Tank

Sorry it's been a while....I wish I could write several posts to record all my trail diaries here, but I won't make you few faithful friends wade through all the blather of it. In short: my first week back survival camping with at-risk youth was painful and terrible. I almost went back to my parents' basement, snake-ridden regardless. I pulled my groin, I fell into dehydration, I couldn't eat more than chicken broth at night, I felt fatigue for the first real time. I let someone else carry my pack up a mountain. My pride, my energy, my heart and my eyes were dim and flat. They made me leader and trainer, but I felt like I'd been put into the program as a patient, which maybe isn't necessarily a bad outlook on any week.

I returned home that week wondering whether I should be in Arizona at all. That week, Elder Holland spoke at my stake conference, my first Sunday in my new ward. It was the first time in over 15 years that an apostle spoke in a Mesa stake conference they said. It was his typical hellfire and damnation approach, and it left everyone in laughter and tears and hearts that swelled both heavy and light which is a horrible explanation but all I've got for you today.

He spoke of night journeys, of the lack of light and happiness, of sleepless worry and angst....I thought of many of you and wished you could have heard E. Holland shout at us with something like Moroni's anger for us not to dare to think God doesn't love us. Not to dare leave the church during those long nights, not to dare think God is unaware, angry, dismissing, or unfeeling. He said God loves broken things, that it takes broken clouds to get rain, broken earth to get grain, broken grain to get bread. He told us to stay calm if we felt God breaking our heart, to not dare bail when God is only halfway through. He promised us that God keeps the altar close, that after our heart has been broken and placed upon that altar, that He has promised to quickly return us a more powerful, better heart in return for what we trusted Him with. He told us again and again that God loves his broken things the most.

I don't have too much to say, I'll come back later this week and fill in this space with funny stories about the boy band I walked with a rotation ago, or the silly girls I ran around with this last week, but for now I'll just give one brief moment I had at a cow tank in Tonto National Forest last Sunday, while most of the rest of you were watching conference and the snow drift past your windows.

It was warm, I was sunning myself in the muddy banks around the cow tank after filling my canteens and dropping them with two drops Clorox bleach each. We didn't hike that day, but I sawed off a limb with a bent blade to coal-blow a juniper bowl that has already begun to crack. I don't care, I'm finishing it anyway, out of sheer stubbornness. I had just left a sitting with another staff member where we discussed all the world's great questions of soul and spirit.

For those of you unacquainted with cow tanks, they are man-made puddles of thick water meant for cattle and attractive to all other forest beasties, including javelina, cougar, rattlesnake, and the occasional band of at-risk youth. The worst cowtank water I ever had left green flecks on my teeth and tasted like expensive Asian tea, or so I told my band of girls last summer. We shivered as it went down and made sarcastic guesses as to how much money we could make off it to the posh elite crowds their own parents sometimes belong to. Sometimes cowtanks are dry as a bone, I've slept in dry cowtanks before, waterless and cold on the shit-filled hay bed bottoms. The cowtank I was currently at looked somewhat better than this one:



I noticed a butterfly floating along the surface of the middle of the murky water doing the dead man's float, and I wanted it. It was an Arizona Sister Butterfly, Adelpha bredowii eulalia; we'd seen them all week flying through the oaks and sucking moisture from between the rocks around the creekbeds and water pockets. I wanted to put her in my journal and keep her wings to remember the week by. So I stood, dusted myself off and grabbed a long broken limb from out of a nearby dying tree. As I pulled the thin parchment creature across the water to my side of the shore, I was sickeningly shocked to see the butterfly was still alive and stepped back to watch her stand up and begin to sun her tattered, broken wings in the 3:00 sun.

I sat beside her, which made her nervous, but she couldn't go anywhere so she stayed next to me, her wings at a perfect angle to the sun's light and heat. As her wings dried, she began to flutter them and slowly flap them forward and back, forward and back. I was enthralled, entranced.

I called my girls from my camp with two hoots, and they obediently came from between the trees, ragged, smoky, dirty, smelly, with twigs in their hair. I loved their sweet, ornery faces and almost laughed out loud at the sight of their scared faces, wondering if I found unburied poo or some other disgrace that would constitute a family pow-wow and lecture. Instead, I showed them the butterfly I felt I had saved from an untimely drowning and let them call her Mona. I let Mona walk along my hand, the three girls' heads bobbing all around my wrist, watching the butterfly's long tongue extend and feel all around the hair on my knuckles until, satisfied or confused, she rolled her tongue back up in an impressive spiral and let it disappear magically into her tiny face.

We took turns holding Mona and talked about how horrible it would be to spend all morning face down in a cow tank and how miraculous she could fly again by letting the sun dry all the cow dung and dirty water from her fragile wings. We talked about what it meant to have heavy wings and what kind of light in our lives can act as that healing warmth.

Unfortunately for my great metaphor, as soon as Mona had the strength, she flew from one girl's arm right back into the damned cow tank. As we grabbed another long branch to pull her back out, we laughing talked about how sometimes we need several new beginnings and how it isn't necessarily the end if we fly straight back into the cow tank.

I guess I don't have much more to say right now....I have to get ready to go into the office, I need to stop by the bank. My budget's tighter than it's been in years, but my heart feels stronger in contrast. My body has readjusted to the trail and I am no longer the slowest hiker. But I'm likewise becoming more and more aware of the cowtanks I'm dead-man-floating in, though I deny it and justify it most of the time. Well, I'm in no state to say anything real profound here and now, ......I figured I'd better post something though so you faithful friends don't just stop reading me altogether. Thanks for all the recent nudging comments, sorry I've been so absent. You should all come to Arizona. Snow is overrated.

Weekend in Tucson

It was my uttermost pleasure to spend a couple of days with the Watson clan in Tucson this past weekend. Before I head out on the trail tomorrow morning, I wanted to post a few pictures and give a large global shout-out to Jaren and Charity in thanks for a time well had. (And I've got a black pair of glasses as well, so I'll pick up that red pair in a few weeks. And Charity, I'm still destroyed from Dancer in the Dark. Sharon, I finally saw it. Destroyed. Demolished. Punched in the vocal chord. Stabbed with a tipless ice pick. Forced to drink the sacrificial blood of cocker spaniel puppies. After the credits rolled, Charity stayed up a few extra minutes with me in the 3 a.m. darkness and talked me through the aftermath. But this is a different post.)

Here's some pictures of the night hike the Watsons took me on the night before I left. What isn't included are pictures of the three coyotes Jaren almost ran over in his car, and neither is the snake that he really really really really wanted to see and that we actually never saw. He did find a stick that looked pretty snake-like...Charity and I both agree it probably was a snake before Moses took care of it.

Actually, the first picture is of a Sonoran Hot Dog. Hot damn but I haven't had such a beast of a meal in a bun before. Yea, verily verily, for I have said, a bacon-wrapped dog covered in beans and tomatoes and Mexican dip held gently in a soft sweet bun brings me to tears of delicious gratitude. I had two that day, and I'll have two hundred more before I die. God bless the Sonoran hot dog and God bless the Watsons for introducing it into my culinary culture.

These pictures of the night hike aren't the greatest. I didn't major in photography. So before you know-it-alls snub me for my poor taste in camera option or how much or how little flash I used, I actually like the ghostliness of these scenes and figure it's as good as I can do for now.




The Watson Clan children are pretty adorable. The youngest doesn't warm up easy to strangers and it is with sheer pride and gloating that I can boast how she began calling me "Grandma" by the time I left. Although, for future notice Amelia, I'd rather be referred to as your Aunt. No offense to Grandmas all around, including you Mrs. Norris. I'm just saying. I'm still a virgin. No virgin is ever really ready to be called a Grandma. I'm just saying.

These spiders were everywhere, with great beautiful webs that defy all my strongest grasps on mathematics and geometrical equations. I don't know but that spiders are extremely brilliant perfectionists. They're like Asians and Chinese characters...I'm not racist, I'm serious. You can always tell when an American is writing kanji, I don't care how many times you've seen The Karate Kid. There's a gene being spread about over there that reeks of precision and nimble, accurate fingers. I think in the future, we'll be able to harness this power from the DNA of spiders. Squares will be squares, A's will look like A's. We'll all be able to write a "g" so it looks like the "g" those old typewriters used to spit out. The one that looks like a figure 8 with an apple stem. The kind of "g" I am using in my blog to describe "g". I bet a spider could figure that one out real easy, if it wanted to.

Unfortunately, we gawked for too long and our spider friend decided having his web in broad headlamplight in front of these jokers wasn't going to get him any grub, so he began to swiftly tear his crib down. We felt bad, though at the same time, the process was beautiful. His handle on gravity and balance was impressive.





The kids finally started nodding off, and were all but asleep as we made our way back to the car (let me add here to getting the van into the parking lot was a feat on all itself.....I'll just say it involved two of us stepping down on tire-piercing spikes to get it through the exit side of the parking area. Hmm, I suppose that's actually all there was to that story. It seemed much more exciting at the time. Like Paul Newman sawing the heads off parking meters or something).

And ten minutes after this picture was taken.....

And this last picture is just to prove that I really was also there.

Thanks again Jaren and Charity for a time well spent. I'm excited to come down again soon, in the meantime, I found an apartment of girls to jump into and I hope I'm making the right decision. I feel I'll be more social, though the family I'm staying with claims I won't be able to practice the same sacrifices that would prepare me for family living. You all know I'm not in this place to be occupationally single for the rest of my life, right? I yearn for a family living. Don't I? Am I really subconsciously holding onto a wanderlust nomad selfish free spirit existence? Is this why I don't call Paul from Institute back even though he declared Official Crushdom on me a week ago? No, damn it. I didn't call him back because he freaked me out by confessing a great crush before he knew my name. Where are all the normal people and will I fit in when I find them. Question mark. Things to ponder whilst I be on the trail. Better to live with three single girls than someone else's family at my age, isn't it? Isn't it? Me oh my, the indecisions still fly. Somebody buy me a magic 8 ball for crying out loud.