Outdoor Bunny - June 5, 2006

I was on top of a mountain, covered in thorns, looking at the tiny box of grey the roof of my little house in Glendale was from that height when my parents landed at LAX. My dad was first to call.

"We're here. We're taxiing in, and we'll have to get our luggage and the rental car, but you can expect us in about...why are you panting?"
"Oh, heave, nothing."
"Where are you?"
"Um...heave, I'm on a mountain."
"Will you be able to get down the mountain in the next hour or so?"
"We'll see, won't we."

Once again, like so many other times they've come to visit me before, like the camelbak full of fresh water I'd left in the car, I've forgotten that they are coming. I fall no less than four times running back down. It is dry and the recent heat wave has sucked the water from the soil. The dirt could be banana peels. Same kind of experience. I take a particularly long slide down the steepest part of the trail, and find myself entwined with a pricker bush. On the other side of the pricker bush, I hear low and deep panting, the kind my dogs make at the dog park. No...the kind the German Shepherds make at the dog park. I pretend I don't hear it and move on.

When I reach the bottom, I climb the chain link fence that is supposed to keep self destructive idiots like me off the mountain and run to my car. I do not have a brown and red spotted paint job, but it sure looks that way.

Later that night, my parents and I go to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. My mother asks me how I got so many cuts all over my legs. I tell her that they are from sliding down the mountain behind my house. My father asks me if saw any coyotes or mountain lions, and I assume he is playing an elaborate joke on me based upon my rocky past with outdoor fun.

--

I used to have a kayak. I bought it when I lived in Texas, and that was how I would spend my entire Saturday, from dawn to dusk, paddling a river. I would see deer and cattle, but no people, and that was how I liked it. My roommate at the time was a nymphomaniac. There was a different sex partner at my coffee machine every other morning, a total stranger, usually married. Aside from the snakes, rivers were much better than people.

When I moved to Baltimore, I lived on the inner harbor. I only kayaked once, and this was how it went. I took my boat down to the Fell's Point boat launch, and though the water was the color of diarrhea, and had a similar consistency, I went in anyway. Bits of trash peppered the water, Styrofoam cups, used condoms, a battered crab trap and infinite fishing line with no start of end. I would pull the line out of the water with my paddles. It was annoying. Further out in the harbor was still trashy, but populated by millions of jellyfish. The jellies were the size of a bowling ball, and pearl white, and they were sucking garbage between their tentacles into their mouths and eating it. If they ate a particularly colorful piece of garbage, they would take on that hue. They were fascinated by my boat and this made it hard to paddle without knocking them around. Over time, frustration trumped fascination. It became almost a game to spank a jelly fish with my paddles.

It was off the shore of the aquarium that I stopped to drink some water. I laid my paddles across my lap. Beneath my right side was a submerged Dorito bag. It was floating like an astronaut. There was a flurry of movement in the bag, and out of it popped a sizeable jelly. Out of the jelly's mouth popped what looked like a human finger. It was a russian doll of weirdness: Dorito bag opens to, jellyfish opens to, human finger. Magritte couldn't have thought that one up. That was the last time I kayaked in the inner harbor. I washed my boat with bleach and then scrubbed myself like a rape victim.

When I moved to Tampa, I was jonesing for the boat again. I lived on a tributary of Tampa bay, a mere mile paddle to the brackish, but clean water that separates St. Petersburg from the civilized world. Despite the waviness of the water, and the rather large and dark lumps that deftly swam twenty feet or so beneath my boat (not sharks, of course, because sharks don't like fresh water), the kayaking was good. I would go every weekend, trapse down the river that ran through my complex with my boat, toss it in the water and take off.

When spring turns to summer in Florida, something unfortunate happens in the earth. There is an invasion of evil creatures, so to speak. I discovered this after a day of paddling. I'd hoisted my kayak out of the river and stopped to take a drink of water. While gulping, a burning like the fires of hell erupted on my right ankle. I noticed it was black. I reached down to rub the blackness off, and that is when the black transferred to my hands and wrought fire there too. The black seemed to be millions of tiny ants, much smaller than their northern brethren, and I knew this because I had spent many an adolescent afternoon "inspecting" ants through the lens of my father's magnifying glass. I jumped into the river, and that seemed to do the trick. The surface became covered with squiggling bodies, and my hands were clean.

These little fuckers are called "fire ants" and they are in need of an extinction. I woke the next morning to a club foot and mitts for hands, which throbbed and were covered in hundreds of little pimples. I threw up several times and had difficulty walking for days. It was during this time that a man was eaten by a bullshark while taking a swim in the brackish water of the bay. I haven't kayaked since.

So it is with tongue in cheek that I tell my father, after he asks if I ran into many mountain lions, "Whatever, dad."
Dad: "Well, did you?"
Me: "Of course not. There are no mountain lions up there."
Dad: "Of course there are."
Me: "Are you serious?"
Dad: "Yes."

He was. Perhaps the panting was just a coyote? I really ought not to participate in outdoor fun. I'm too stupid.

Posted by The Bunny at 10:49 AM

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