Part Deux

So, I last left you at the end of the first night of canoeing. Now we will move on to the rest of the trip. On day 2, we got up at about 0700, ostensibly, but really between 7 and 8. This was to be a patern for the rest of the trip, actually. We spent the morning creating an enormous breakfast of hash browns with cheese and eggs stirred in, and lots of bacon. We finally had camp struck and got on the water around 1100. Within a little while, we'd gotten off of Alder Lake and onto the Manitowish River. I think I was rowing with Micah Bot-Miller at this time. It wasn't too bad, mostly, and went by a few waterfront houses. Then we found ourselves in a field. Grass rose up on all sides and we couldn't see the river any farther. It turned out that there was a path through the grass, but barely. When we got through the grass, we were into just more grass. A different GOOP group, which had started halfway down the trail coming the opposite way, came by us and said nonchalantly, "It gets worse." We were in a marsh that must extend for about a square mile, maybe two or three. Sometimes there was a way through the grass; sometimes we just had to get out and walk. Eventually it got a little straighter, but this was a cruel joke. We heard a machine noise in the distance. As we drew nearer, it got louder. Finally, we arrived at a confluence. Our river joined with another flowing the opposite way, and both of the rivers flowed into a grate punched into a tall wall at the bottom of a hill. I went up the hill to take a pee. There was a motorized pump, working hard and making the ruckus we were amiliar with, pouring the combined rivers into a manmade flume that ran along the edge of a deserted but well-mowe field. In the distance, over much more field, I saw a tractor or something. There was no explanation. So, we tried to remove our shoes by dragging the canoes through a shoestring stream whose banks were covered in sucking mud, all the while being careful not to step into the pool created by the confluence, because we would then be sucked down into the grate next to the mysterious, nasty deep water, where who knew what dwelled. We started rowing up the other river, the Trout River, which, as the other group had said, was even worse. When we got out to walk the canoe through periodical shallow water, we were walking on a mud bottom, not gravel. And the walks were frequent. Moreover, we were still in the marsh. We rowed for hours. Things failed to improve. Finally, we got to a beaver dam, and the water above it was a good foot deeper and twenty yards wider. We didn't have any trouble rowing, and we were free to make conversation, which we did. However, by now it was also late, so for the first time in Ilan's canoeing career, we stopped short of our intended campsite. The one we found was on the Trout River; another opposite-traveling group was staying there for the night. So Ilan made another amazing dinner, of I believe lentils and such, and we had fun with the other group, but mostly with our own group, getting to know each other. Or telling stories about stuff in our lives. We liked stories. I'll tell a couple when I get to tomorrow night.
-So, we set out earlier the next morning - instead of an enormous breakfast, we had granola cereal. There was still another two hours or so of the Trout River left, if you can believe it. Some of it ran by a golf course. Some more of it was completely unpaddleable, about a half inch deep, but by that time it had at least switched to gravel bottom. Finally, and abruptly, we ended up at the source of the Trout River: Trout Lake. Just looking out across it, we knew it would be difficult. The land on either side of us had protected us from the wind while we were on the river, but now it came galloping across the water at full speed, and we could tell it meant to bring rain with it soon. Even so, we steeled ourselves and pushed out into it, right against the wind. Trout Lake is a huge lake. We had a long day of padding across it. But at least we never had to walk. I think I paddled with Natasha that day. She's really nice. Kind of shy, but warms up in not too long, as I said. We should have talked more while we were on the lake, but we were kind of focused on paddling. At the other end of the lake, we pulled up the canoes and did our first real portage.
-We'd done a different one earlier, but it was just a few yards. This one was entirely different. I didn't carry a canoe, which meant I had to carry two packs instead, and that was probably just as bad. We staggered down a paved trail, then across a street and down it a ways, and finally found Stevenson Creek and put down the canoes. Now, we'd heard horror stories about Stevenson. We'd heard it was the worst leg of the journey and mostly walking. But this year, as Ilan said, it "was really forgiving." It was still the most bizarre creek that I think I'll ever canoe on. For the most part, it was only about two feet wide - but a foot deep, giving ample paddling depth. At one point, bushes growing on the banks joined to form an arch over us. At another point, they did the same, except instead of over us, in front of us, and we had to plow through. It was surreal to see a creek with a width and twists and turns comparable to the creeks I've creekwalked on, hardly more than storm runs, but completely paddleable. Chris was the steerer for this, and I'm amazed at the ease with which he took the hairpin turns and astounding bottlenecks. In the next couple hours, our groups got very spread out, and the leaders, Micah and Alex, had no map or leader, so we didn't know if they'd get lost. Then, it turned out they were behind us, which puzzled us to no end until they explained that they had hidden in a niche and waited to pop out and scare us, but then decided not to, and just paddled silently to confuse us later. We found another marsh. This one was much more mazelike than the others, and we took several wrong turns, but eventually we found the second portage. We carried the boats to Pallette Lake. Ilan carried both an 80# canoe and the ~60# food pack. I'd heard about Pallette and was expecting the best. It was even better. No motors are allowed on it, nor even some fishing. So it's crystal clear. And the banks are completely free of Improvements imposed on them by civilization. We paddled briefly across it to another campsite, meeting en route a group that had left earlier in the morning on the first day, and set up. A few of us swam, but not all at the same time. Alex swam for about half a second before she got frozen out. Natasha, on the other hand, frequently swims in Lake Superior, so she was totally comfortable and had fun and a great exercise. I was somewhere between. While I swam, I was really impressed with how incredibly clear Pallette's water is. Even at an eight-foot bottom, I could see right down to the rocks and sand. I swam without much aim, and then, getting bored and sort of lonesome with no one else out there, I walked back up to camp. Dinner was something or other delicious. Then we sat around talking. We were discussing strange things that happen. Chris told us about a time he and his friends were driving through a suburb at night. Suddenly, an owl came through the sky, swooped down, and landed in the road right in front of the car. Then it turned its head ninety degrees and stared at them. For about five minutes. They were too spooked to move the car. "This has got to mean something," he thought. Finally it flew off and they drove directly back home. Chris also told us another strange animal anecdote. He says the squirrels at Grinnell are famously weird, and said the weirdest thing he knows of is: his girlfriend was walking along, when she saw, around the flagpole, a circle of squirrels. They were evenly spaced, and they were staring up at the flag. She was seriously weirded out. Ilan told us that he and some friends at a camp once spent a long time cutting some cords to a perfect length, then woke up at midnight, paddled across a lake to a girls' campsite, and tied their tents shut. Then he said, "The thing is, that was the plan. What actually happened is, we slept through the alarm." Alex had a story that I missed the first time she told it, where her mother told her and her sister, who thought boys were gross, I guess: "Some day you will learn to love a man's penis." Josh and Ilan, who are both Jewish, shared their respective experiences of traveling through the Israeli desert. I don't know if Natasha and Micah had any, but they probably did, and I just forgot. I probably told some too, but I forget which, and anyway they're probably ones that you've heard already.
-The next morning we shipped off Pallette Lake and went lakehopping. There were three portages that day. I carried a canoe for two of them. The last one was the longest portage of the whole trip. Micah carried a canoe along the dirt road as well as me, but he missed the well camouflaged turnoff, and traveled about another third again as long as the regular portage with Alex. Ilan ran and caught up to him and got him pointed in the right direction. Micah carried the canoe the whole time. He's incredible. I aspire to be as rugged as that. Through various lakes and a stream called Nixon Creek, we ended up back on the Manitowish River. We started by paddling off Boulder Lake onto the Manitowish River on the left; we would be rejoining it from the right. Boulder Lake is a wide spot in the Manitowish River. We made camp on the Manitowish, and it was a great campsite and great campfire and great trail calzones. We were all really happy, not least because tomorrow involved only about an hour and a half of paddling. We considered skinny dipping, apparently, but didn't because only two people had volunteered, and it was decided that that would be kind of weird, rather than skinny dipping fun. Micah, ever helpful, filtered lots of water for us; we think he doesn't trust water filtered by anyone else. I swam a little, but there were weeds on the bottom, so not much. We swapped more stories. I loved every minute of it. That night, I forwent the tent and slept outside in my sleeping bag under the bright stars. It was the best possible way to spend the last night on the trail.
-The next morning, we slept in a little and ended up at Camp Manito-wish again around 1400. We had dinner there, and we were going to go to a supposedly great ice cream place, but the slow-witted guy there had closed down early and wouldn't reopen for our party of thirty. So we just went to bed. And we rolled out, back to Grinnell, the next day. And of course I'll be writing about Grinnell directly.

Absolutely Fantastic

Dad and I actually left on Thursday, and had a long, boring drive across Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa to Grinnell. We moved my stuff into my room, which, for the interested, is in Rawson Hall, which is in North Campus. Aunt Ellen and Aunt Irene, I'm not terribly familiar with how Grinnell was in the 1950s and 60s, but I can say with reasonable certainty that it's pretty darn different now. For one thing, they have several new buildings, including East Campus, a whole new Campus with its own glass-enclosed loggia. And we get Pioneer-1 Cards, which have a proximity activator thing in them, so that when you breeze your wallet by the little sensor on the door, it unlocks for you. But I think Rawson is probably very much as it was in the olden days. My dorm doesn't have much in it to indicate that the Information Age is here, or at least it didn't until I put my computer and such in it. I got the VAIO laptop that Grandma and Grandpa bought me, as well as all the accessories. I am now typing my blog with the laptop, actually.
-In the new Rosenfield Center, we met up with various other students going on the GOOP trip. We also had dinner there, because it's where Dining is located now. Then there was a little conference, and afterwards we GOOPers all left to go to the Dari Barn, a local ice cream shop. It was kind of abrupt, as Dad has pointed out; we just kind of walked off and left the parents standing around. I said bye to Dad while retrieving my mp3 player from his truck. And then he left. Stayed in a motel overnight and drove to Ohio starting in the morning.
-I had a slushie at the Dari Barn. The next day we spent learning the basics of canoeing, first aid, the Leave No Trace doctrine of camping, orienteering, and tents and knots. We also got sorted into five five-person groups for the trip, each group with two upperclassman leaders, making seven. The next morning we loaded bunches of gear into a big bus and rode off to Wisconsin.
-Our destination was Camp Manito-wish, a camp that the director of GORP (the department behind GOOP) once worked at. Each group was named after an explorer from the early days of the region; my group was Brulé, and lucky us, one of our leaders, Ilan, has also worked at Camp Manito-wish. Our other leader was Chris. We packed stuff up in the evening and slept through the night. In the morning, we had breakfast. Now, that day was Paul Bunyan Day, which is a camp thing. So the director, a Dave, dressed up in lumberjack clothes and used his already full beard to be Paul Bunyan and tell a story about how camp was back in th bad old days of logging and lumberjacks. "We didn't have these fancy aluminum canoes. Aluminum wasn't invented yet. They were made out of LEAD. ...Maybe not. They were made out of wood. They didn't weigh too much. Eighty, ninety pounds. But when they got in the water, they soaked it all up. SEVEN HUNDRED POUNDS when wet! Try portaging that!" He told of how the lumberjacks always complained at breakfast, until finally one day the cook said no oe was allowed to talk anymore. So now on Paul Bunyan Day everyone eats breakfast in silence, and the first group to talk has to clean up the mess hall afterwards. The counselors go around making a ruckus by clearing their throats, banging dishes, carrying chairs, carrying people, carrying people on chairs. The rest of the camp this morning was a group of middle-school girls, so we didn't lose. I didn't hear any talking, but I think we were pretty much exempt from the get-go anyhow, since we were just eating the one meal there.
-Anyway, Brulé group set out around noon onto Boulder Lake, and we started our counterclockwise transit of the Trout Lake Circle trip. It was really nice. We were in three separate canoes: the Dave Brailey, the Telleen, and the Brooke Rogers. We fell into a rowing rhythm right off the bat, and pushed right on through to camp on Alder Lake. So we set up our tents and made a fire.
-Here is Brulé:
-Ilan's parents are Israeli. He's a really soft-spoken guy, but only in volume. You have to watch out, because anything he says could be deadpan humor. For example, one day we pulled in on shore to eat lunch. He emptied the pack out with materials for pita sandwiches for the group. "Sweet," he said, sitting in front of it. "There should be some more food in the food bag in the canoe if you guys want something." Without a trace of irony. He is also the cook of the century in camp. We'll get to that later.
-Chris is knowledgeable and a great guy and jovial. He also has cancer, so he really wasn't supposed to do this trip, but he says of the doctors, "I guess I showed them." He didn't let it get in the way during the trip, and we went along as if it weren't there. He was chief map guy and brought along a GPS, so we never got lost. He's also into guns, knives, and survivalism. He brought four knives and ended up giving one to Ilan, one made out of "pure death", painted black so it won't glint in the sun and give away your position to the enemy.
-Alex is from St Louis. She's small but loud, and like everyone there has a generous sense of humor. She prefaces any opinion of any sort with "I feel like...", and she's one of those types who says "like" every few words to keep the sentence in the air. She was one of the group's three vegetarians. Ilan was able to use "We have vegetarians" as an excuse to snag positively unfair amounts of meatless foods from the kitchen for the trip.
-Nastasha is from Duluth. She was sort of quiet until we all got to know each other. She's fun and articulate. She was another of our vegetarians. Also great with fire and firewood.
-Josh is from somewhere or other. He kept our conversations from getting too tame, and he has a voice that sounds like it couldn't possibly be his regular voice - reedy and high and funny.
-Micah Bot-Miller was kind of a surprise, in that I've never known a person named Micah who was the same age as me. He's from St Cloud, MN, and does a lot of canoeing, and owns his own canoe. So, he turned out to have near superhuman strength where canoes are concerned; he can do a one-man lift, and portage almost indefinitely, and paddles like no one's business. He's also probably the most wholesome of everyone, and really nice.
-And then of course me too.
-So, that first night, since we were Brulée, we made crème brûlée. It was pretty much completely preposterous, but that didn't stop us. Ilan spearheaded the effort, because he spent pretty much every day last summer making crèmes brûlées of increasing complexity and preposterity, so he had the procedure down. We mixed together some milk we had kept in a Ragú jar with some eggs and sugar and other ingredients. Then we made a double boiler - a pot full of water, with the crème brûlée dish floating in the water, and then we put that contraption over the fire and cover it and boil the dickens out of it until the crème jells. Then we had to brûler it. We tried several methods - first, a torch lighter that Chris had, which didn't get the sugar hot enough to caramelize it, and then a spoon heated in the fire, which also didn't. Finally we covered the dish with an upside-down pan and built a fire on top of it and took turns keeping a constant air stream on it to get the coals as hot as possible. All told, it took about tree or four hours, which was ridiculous but completely worth it.
-I'm going to finish this in another installment, because it's getting kind of late. In the meantime, I am now on YouTube. The new nickname wasn't of my choosing. By the way, sorry if there are assorted letters missing from this post. New keyboard. Getting adjusted.

Gesunfternoon!

There are now only two days before Dad is taking me into the Hawkeye State, which nobody knows why it's called that. I haven't packed sufficiently yet; my next two days will be spent having some quality time with cardboard boxes. Actually, we're leaving Wednesday, and today's Monday. So I really have just one day left at the house. That startled me, just there, because I didn't realize it before. Tomorrow is the only day I have left for packing. Then it's off to Iowa, and of course subsequently to Wisconsin for that Outdoor Orientation, which I expect is going to be a bunch of fun. Then back to Iowa. This has been the most nomadic summer of my life, easily. Home, Crowduck, new home, Iowa, Wisconsin, Iowa. And I assume I'll be having a fair number of visits home, too, increasing the nomaditude even further. I don't have a class schedule yet, inasmuch as I register for classes after I get to the college and get a chance to talk with my Advisor (Dr Savarese). But it looks like life is about to get a whole lot more interesting. In fact, it already has, but I mean more so. Here, let me explain: Finneytown, as we have seen in previous years of posting, has pretty much nothing going for it. It has the highest property taxes in Cincinnati, because there's no industry there to make the area profitable. As a zone, it's a consumer and not a producer. The best thing as far as natural attractions go is Warder Park, which I've learned over the years to make do with, but which, for all the rhapsodizing I've done over its beauty, is still only beautiful by comparison, and overall not that great a place as far as wilderness is concerned. It's a diseased area, but less so than the area around it, is my feeling about it. Now, life has gotten more interesting because I'm now living in Wyoming, Ohio, which first off is new to me. I spent my first few days biking around and getting acquainted with what the place had to offer. One critical thing in that category is a railroad. I've never lived within casual traveling distance of a railroad before, and I have to say it's pretty keen to be able to bike to the tracks and wait no more than half an hour before seeing a train go by. The other day I watched one at night, which I'd never done before. I didn't know train lights pulsed like that. It was like watching a UFO coming from behind the trees around the bend in the track. Trains are also deliriously loud right up close. Besides trains, Wyoming is also at least ten times nicer than Finneytown as a neighborhood, and it doesn't hurt that we're now living in a much larger house that finally has room for all our crap, Thoreauvianisms aside. It's famed for its trees. Everything is so well kept. Since we live right on the border, I can ride right into Hartwell and watch the instant decrepitation of the road and sidewalk under me as it passes into Hartwell's jurisdiction for maintenance. Everything instantly becomes seedier and crappier. It's actually kind of unnerving if you think about it too closely. So I like to stay in Wyoming, though I must confess that it doesn't have the breadth of restaurant selection that Finneytown has - just some expensive places, and a few places over the border in Hartwell. I have yet to go exploring any woods thoroughly, because I've been so busy right here at home and because it's been so butt-sweatingly hot outside. So I guess I'll save that for my first trip back home.
-Micah's going into 9th grade, for reasons that elude me. The Wyoming School district, which I guess should know a thing or two about these kinds of things since it's been rated as high as 12th in the nation for public schools according to Mom, decided that he should just move into high school. He, Dad, and I were at Gold Star the other day, and I told him he now had to be careful for Carnegie Units. Dad concurred and told him, "If you get bad grades in high school, when you graduate you might as well look for a recruiter. But if you get good grades, we might be inclined to fund some of a college education for you." I guess now we just see if Micah takes the point. He also seriously needs to start making better friends. He has a consistent record of picking up the lowest bottom feeders: Brian, Matt, Josh, Dustin. These are kids who have no future. Kids who no one else will tolerate, but who Micah, thinking he's a misfit and can't do any betterthan them, latches onto. They've depressed me for years.
-So now life is about to get a whole lot more interesting again, as I go off and start what they usually call a New Chapter in My Life Story. One thing's for sure, there'll be more entertainment (the administration, I'm informed, has noted that Grinnell is an isolated town in Iowa, and thus provides all sorts of fun stuff to do), and more opportunity for interesting friendships. Perhaps I can finally find a girlfriend. There will also still be trains, though I understand they only come by about twice a day on the track that runs directly through campus. Rather than speculate, I'll get more information to you once stuff starts happening. All indications point to fun.

Now let's have an abrupt change of gear from this happy-go-luckiness. I don't remember what I was searching for when I found Anthropik.com. But I've since kept going back there time after time. The spearheader here is Jason Godesky, and his critical work is The Thirty Theses, a rough draft that he's put up online for a book he intends to create, so that he can get comments and corrections and generally a vigorous if informal peer editing process before making it a final draft. If he's correct in the points he's making, then the theses are most likely the most important thing you'll ever read. I can't say whether he's ultimately right or wrong yet, because I haven't finished yet, and because I don't have the history background to ask the right questions. However, BJ, the man who got a 5 on the AP History Exam with a half hour's studying and at one time at least told me you were majoring in international relations, I want to know what you think of them. I don't know what kind of time you have, but I exhort you to at least read a little bit about the site and the first few theses. I want to know if Jason Godesky is reasonable here, because, as you'll agree if you read it, this is significant, and very few things are more significant if it's right. I'd be more specific here, but I'd sound like a possibly deluded alarmist, and there'd be a possibility no one would go there, or they wouldn't take him very seriously.

And now for something completely different

And so, Grandma, Grandpa, and I went to Crowduck. So did Dan, Tracy, Dave, Maria, Jazmin, Sierra, and Hayden. But more on Crowduck later. Suffice to say that it was a glorious two weeks, and I did much swimming there, and I really love lakes as opposed to swimming pools for several reasons, not least of which is no chlorine. It was hot in Canada. Yep, Canada does get hot. I'll transcribe my Crowduck journals sometime, but I can't guarantee when, because things are getting turbulent.
-The day before we were due back in Ohio, we were staying at the Antlers Motel in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and Mom called and said we had closed on the new house at 1000 that morning. So, as I predicted, the day before I left for Crowduck was my last night sleeping at the old house. I slept over at Grandma and Grandpa's the night after Eau Claire, and then Mom came and got me the next day and I drove us to the new house; she gave me directions.
-It was pretty bare, and we spent the next few days picking up heavy furniture and putting it in a trailer and bringing it to the new house. This task was not made any more fun by the weather, which in addition to a heat wave is also a humidity wave. The human body's natural response to hot weather is to sweat, which cools down the body when it evaporates because the latent heat of vaporization is drawn from the body's heat. But in the humidity, it's much more difficult for sweat to evaporate, because the air is nearly saturated; thus, the sweat stays around and makes your clothes stick to you, which even further compounds the problem by insulating your heat into your body. This is why it's not the heat, it's the humidity. And I hate hot weather. Our air conditioner needed renovating before we could use it indefinitely, so we mostly left it turned off on the last few days. We also did not have internet, because the phone company was slow to come out and hook it up. They just did that today; hence, this blog. So I've been isolated for the last few weeks, with only occasional access to the internet - at Grandma and Grandpa's, or at the library down the street. The internet has definitely become a dominant force in life, and pretty much all my important Grinnell-related notices come by way of it, so being away for this long has resulted in a backlog of stuff to do, which I'm finally getting around to and which I'll continue to work off over the remainder of the week.
-We're pretty well moved in now, and the stuff left at the other house is all trifling stuff. It wasn't until we started moving that I realized just how much absolute junk we've accumulated in the fifteen years we spent in Finneytown. A few days ago, Micah and I had to clear out the attic. Occasionally, we put some stuff in a bag and then chuck it up into the attic. Over the years, this stuff became a pile at least four feet high in some places, encircling the hatch door; when we had it all tossed out into the kitchen below, it was piled so high that it took some doing to even get the ladder folded back up into the ceiling. It was all covered with a half an inch of dust, and it was all absolutely useless, but we still took almost all of it along. Similar situations have arisen with the shed, the garage, and the Pods (those takeaway storage containers that you see advertised sometimes). They were all full of crap that we haven't used in a decade or more, but which we couldn't bear to part with. For example, Dad's computer books. They're for computers made in the 1980s, but we couldn't get him to let us throw them away. Mom even had them in the can, but he made her fish them back out. Homer Simpson had to clean out the basement once:

MARGE: I want you to throw away these old calendars and TV Guides.
HOMER: Are you mad, woman? You never know when an old calendar might come in handy. Sure, it's not 1985 now, but who knows what tomorrow will bring??

Or alternatively, check out this.
Seriously, we only use about twenty percent, if that, of the stuff we've moved into our new house. And know what? The new house is bigger, so we're going to get even more crap now that we have room for it! Thoreau would have us consider doing something different: "Simplify, simplify." And "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to do without." Mom and Dad should have paid more attention in college English.
-However I must make the point that I love the new house. I had no idea how cramped we were until we moved here. Now we have actual space in the house, and we'll be able to move around without running into piles of old mail (which is another thing we need to learn how to throw out). I only regret that I'll be living in it so briefly before going off to college for a few months. I got my room assignment the other day at the library. I'm in 3213 Rawson Hall, and my mailbox is number 3200. The two numbers are unrelated - I'm in a triple, and my roommates have numbers hundreds off from mine. Well, actually, one does; the other is close to mine. Whatever. My roommates are Jeremy Johnson and Jay Bhadnagar. I don't know anything about them except that Jay is from New Delhi. So don't ask me. Mom keeps asking me all about them, and I still have no new information besides everything I just told you. I'm going to go check my email and see if either of them has written anything to me.