Adaptive Curmudgeon

Nothing dramatic happened all evening… which was the whole point. 

I’ve found myself setting up camp in places I’ve already been just to avoid drama. I’m practically a local now. “That’s Curmudgeon, he’s a quasi-permanent resident of campsite # Non-zero Integer”. Is that what a “comfort zone” feels like? I can grok the attraction.

The place was nearly deserted. I expected a herd of grouse hunters, but few people were there; probably no grouse hunters at all. That’s fine with me. 

Before leaving I’d taken a few minutes to chop up some old pallets with my radial arm saw. Parts with metal are garbage, the rest is burnable kiln dried wood that I use in my folding stove. It’s a flawless system! 

On a whim, I chopped up some old corral rails too. These rails are very old. Older than me for sure. How many cow asses had rubbed these rails is known only to God. All I can say is they look untreated and I ‘ain’t afraid of cowshit. After many decades of dry rot and weather a few had given out. I’d tossed them aside this spring when re-doing the pig fence. Now was their time to go out in a literal blaze of glory. They did very well. Plenty of heat and they even smelled nice (not like cowshit at all!). 

I’m glad I brought them. After dinner I simply flipped over my little firebox (where I’d been using small bits of pallet wood) and dumped everything in the fire pit. Then I added the much larger corral wood. Easy peasy. 

Camping alone is rare. Virtually nobody does it. Everyone goes camping with family, or hunting buddies, or with Scouts as a kid, or whatever. I didn’t think I could even experience “loneliness” but camping alone does test one’s mettle. There’s solitude and loneliness. You must enjoy the former without falling into the latter. It’s wise to deploy adaptive measures to make your time more fun. Here’s what I did:

First, I was at a State Park where I’m familiar with the layout and humans were out and about. Sometimes this makes a difference. Comfort zone… what a novel concept! I’m going to have to cogitate more on that idea.

Second, I had creature comforts; a cheery little fire, beer, and a comfy lawnchair. 

Third, I stayed the hell away from depressing literature. 

Fourth, I brought a toy to amuse myself. I have a spiffy shortwave radio that I very much like. It’s  high quality and has a million features. I never seem to get time to listen to it. No time is better than when you’re alone at a campsite. It was packed somewhere in my truck. I’d fetch it in due time.

While I was happily roasting bratwurst, Bigfoot showed up and drank several beers. That’s the only explanation. I was nursing just one beer… only one! All of a sudden I noticed several empties. Damn Bigfoot.

When I dug out the shortwave radio I had a bit of a moral dilemma. Radios are a cardinal sin if they harsh someone else’s “forest experience”. I can’t get in the groove with nature if some dipstick a campsite over is playing “Achy Breaky Heart” while tuning their UTV. I would never do that to someone else! 

I planned carefully and tuned the little radio way low. There was an occupied campsite about 60 yards away and I wanted nothing louder than quiet conversation. 

I turned on the radio and all hell broke loose! An avalanche of sound spewed forth. Nooooo! The racket of shortwave beeps and bips and someone talking in Spanish and static was crazy loud. I fiddled with the volume dial but nothing happened. Oh no!

I fiddled with it but, probably because Bigfoot drank all my beer, I couldn’t figure it out. The volume dial just didn’t do its thing! Shortwave receivers are pretty sophisticated and I was baffled. I was mortified that I’d made loud electronic noise. I clicked it off and felt like a jerk for the noisy outburst.

Confused and embarrassed, I switched to my “backup” radio. I have a slick little CC Crane weather-band radio. It has the world’s smallest speaker but I put in headphones anyway. I wound up listening to classical music on FM on a radio about the size of a stack of business cards. 

I hummed along while guarding my last few beers from Bigfoot and burning old corral rails. Such a fine evening!

I’m not particularly informed about classical music but sitting in the dark listening is a good way to start. I’ve decided that conductor Sergei Prokofiev’s (1891-1953) music is based on the same demon space aliens that caused Hieronymus Bosch’s (1450-1516) paintings. I love Bosch’s weird paintings but Prokofiev’s music was a bit much. I think some of his chord changes broke my ear.

Mrs. Curmudgeon, who has forgotten more about “high culture” than I’ll ever know, reminds me that Prokofiev also wrote Peter and the Wolf… which is one of my favorite melodies. WTF? Now I don’t know what to think! I guess that’s the point. There’s more out there than just the stuff in front of your nose. Analyzing Russian Prokofiev and sipping Oktoberfest beer next to an American campfire isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it made me happy. 

All in all it was a good night. More to come…

I found myself installing a new headlight at Unremarkable State Park. Whenever I leave my homestead, an almost laughable cascade of events will inevitably delay my departure. In the week prior I’d had a fencing issue lead to “pigtastrophies”, an appliance failure, a truck maintenance problem, and I sustained an injury. That’s just a sample of the drama.

But I had a new headlight and was dying to test it out. I packed more or less randomly… and fled.

I wanted to install my new motorcycle part from the convenient location of my shop; like a sane person in a rational world. Instead, I literally hurled my tool box onto the passenger seat and ran. I was gone before my house dealt me another dramatic reason why I should stay home.

This dumb idea worked surprisingly well. I learned that I can do a headlight swap with just my “emergency tools”. Nice to know. Especially since I’d forgotten my tool box is the world’s shittiest tool box. It seems to attract water like a sponge. All my “handy to have but not on the bike itself” tools were wet… again! In a massive stroke of irony (and good luck), I’d already purchased a replacement tool box. I’d left it in my truck bed during a flurry of medical activity earlier in the week. In the hubub I’d forgotten about it. It was still in the truck bed when I arrived at camp. I didn’t do a wise transfer of equipment, I just dumped shit from one box to the other and wiped down some stuff with an old t-shirt to keep rust at bay.

The old tool box was “Craftsman”. Don’t give me shit about how grandpappy had a great Craftsman tool box back in the day… their stuff is shit now. I replaced it with an Action Packer.

I guess my official camping “kit” for a motorcycle campout includes two Action Packers. (I regularly throw my camping shit in an Action Packer and leave it in my truck bed for days at a time.) One for my camping kitchen stuff and dry food. The other for “Yamaha support” for when I break stuff.

Incidentally I recommend Action Packers for car (truck) camping. They’re expensive but worth it. The lid never blows off and stuff inside stays dry. Regular totes pale in comparison. So far no forest critter has chewed into one. (They’re obviously not bear proof.)

The new headlight was great. Very beefy and plug and play… money well spent! That said, those things ‘ain’t cheap! I’m wondering if I should get armor to protect it?

As always, I was a day late and a dollar short. I got the headlight installed literally minutes before dark. That’s good because I was afraid I’d drop a screw or something. Try finding a lost screw in a pine needle forest floor!

Lucky for me, I now have “instant camp” down to a science. My wonderful “super tent” was up with the cot installed, the mattress rolled out, the sleeping bag laid on the mattress in just under 15 minutes. I’m definitely pleased with my tent/cot! (Note: if the weather is dry, roll out your sleeping bag far in advance and it’ll have more time to “loft”. Loft is the word pretentious backpackers use to describe the process by which your sleeping bag “fluffs up”. I also love having a big rectangular bag instead of the coffin like mummy bags I formerly used out of necessity.)

Despite the dark (the dang moon didn’t rise until much later!), I had plenty of time to start a pallet wood fire in my firebox and roast a few brats. I also had beer… which makes everything better.

I use a little LED area light for camping and it does the job well, but I started thinking about my antique Coleman lantern. If I’m going to get into a groove (rut?) of State Park camping, maybe a brighter light emanating from a delicate device is appropriate? Electronics are super handy and lantern mantles break. But an antique would fit my attitude, not a small concession.

(Update, I’ve done some checking. It’s a Coleman single mantle from 1971. 50 years young. Now I gotta’ see if I can use it!)

More to come.

I recently mentioned something about headlamps and then went off line. You’re probably wondering where I was. I went out into the hinterland in search of Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane.

I didn’t find an imaginary comic relief 1970’s Southern sheriff. But then again he never existed. As a rational man I know that. The reason I went was mostly to forget for a while the implausible modern world in which we all live. As a rational man, I needed a break. Rationality happened. I call that a win.

Lest you think I’ve gone down the rabbit hole… I haven’t. I’m standing next to the hole. I marvel at the masses at the bottom frantically digging deeper by the hour.

“You guys want me to throw down a rope or something?”

“Your insistence on standing next to this hole is why we must dig.”

By comparison, my memories of a goofy sheriff with a funny dog are quaint. Oddly, he was more “realistic” than our current reality. He had logical reasons for his choices. He interpreted and enforced laws according to the words in which they were written. He was a crooked cheater but still waited for the Duke boys to screw up before acting. He didn’t simply make up accusations out of whole cloth… the boys really were speeding. Speeding really is illegal.

He didn’t armor up and kick in their door at midnight. He didn’t impound the General Lee for committing a crime and force the Dukes to prove they weren’t running heroin with it. He didn’t shoot the Duke boys, set fire to their barn, or drive local mechanic Cooter out of business for fixing their car. He liked his dog, hired an honest underling, did slapstick hijinks, and generally was closer to Mayberry 1950 than Minneapolis 2021.

The butt of every joke, the antagonist of the plotlines, a crooked cheating liar… he was more moral than almost everyone in politics or media right now. For that matter, Boss Hogg didn’t import 500 refugees from New York City and use them to cement forever control of the little county.

Compare that dumb fictional show to our current world. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad and we’re madder than any LSD trip Timothy Leary conjured on his worst day. There’s no particular realm free of madness. Dinner out at a restaurant hinges on a Governor’s imagined or real emergency powers and the emergency du jour (which may also be imagined or real). Sports went woke. Entertainment quit entertaining. Science fiction books have sucked for decades. Surf social media for a photo of a puppy and you’ll wind up “informed” of the government’s mandatory truth. It will be delivered in a theoretically non-government panopticon that has completely merged with one of two parties. Our shared experiences became battlegrounds because our society was not built for this much enforced conformity. Workplaces face it too. First unreality and then force, either implied or explicit. Parrot groupthink or you will be ostracized, and then punished. Get with the program; irretrievably commit to the unreality or be burned at the stake.

Suppose you’re doing honest labor that’s completely non-political, say mixing cement. Such work should be without political drama. It might even be fulfilling; especially if you like cement. In this era, your job might require you get injected, by force if necessary, lest a vaccine fail to inoculate the initial voluntary patient. None of this has anything to do with the pros and cons of concrete versus cement. Plus you’re worried about the HR people… who wouldn’t know cement if you put it in their herbal tea. Interacting like normal people is dangerous and cement has less and less to do with your job at a cement plant. Things just keep doubling down.

How can any of that be a normal world?

(If my cement plant analogy seems odd to you, pick up and examine some other irrationality from the growing pile. For example, try to explain to yourself why greenbacks backed with a debt of $28,429,870,638,746,795.00 still buy groceries. Give it a shot. I’ll wait. If you can’t do it, you can put down the shovel. I’ll throw you a rope if you want.)

Time, once again, to turn the page in my choose your own adventure book:

• For an action story turn to page 42 where Australian cops mace an old lady to protect her from a virus.
• For a paranoid thriller turn to page 1984 and see if Facebook will let you display it.
• For Aldus Huxley, toke up on legal weed and then turn to page 1984.
• For a horror story, turn to page 666 and read about the history of forced injections.

Or, if the bullshit is too much, go camping; which is what I did. Stay tuned.

For those of you who missed the 1970’s (which generally sucked so don’t feel bad), here’s an introduction to Roscoe. He’s an old timey fictionalized corrupt cop:

Here’s a real picture from 2020. Technically these cops aren’t corrupt. This is supposedly what the good guys look like in 2020:

This is an 1987 fictionalized cyborg law enforcement officer from the future. He patrols the dystopian hellhole of New Detroit. This too is supposedly the good guy.

These are cops in England in 2017 (I chose 2017 because it’s long before Covid-madness). These are supposedly good guys.

Frankly Roscoe, corrupt but human, seems a whole lot safer for all of us than any of the other examples.

I intended to do a short ride before breaking camp and heading home. However, I was just too happy sitting on my ass brewing coffee. Everything had been perfect, there was no need to do more.

I listened to people in adjacent campsites packing up. First the ones without kids; slipping out of camp quietly and efficiently. Then the ones with kids; in a flurry of helter skelter commotion. I didn’t mind the hubbub. I’d been silent the whole trip. Speaking hardly a word, hearing little but nature. Solitude is grand, loneliness is not. The sounds of domestic chaos was human interaction without interaction at all. Perfect! Also, it was distantly amusing. I sat in peace, cradling my coffee and watching the squirrels organize raiding parties against my breakfast food. The noise of people half my age struggling to pack rugrats in a Subaru reminded me to appreciate my idyllic morning.

It started getting cloudy so I finally levered my ass out of my chair. I packed up in a flash. My tent and cot were as efficient as usual but the bike got messy. I’d been topping off the gas tank from a little two gallon can every night (plus I had a one gallon Rotopax). I like to keep it always full, but I’d forgotten the previous night. Predictably, the “California compliant” can spilled gas all over the place; which seems to be their purpose. Then I used a new brand of chain lube I’d never tried and what a fiasco! I slimed sticky messy goo all over the place. Whoops!

A squirrel made a run at the chain lube (which looked like Cheese Whiz from hell). I let him learn. When its target turned out to be petroleum rather than sugar it glared angrily at me. Sorry buddy.

I rolled the bike on the trailer, strapped it down, and headed out. It started raining. For once, I’d had good timing!

I was pretty far north so my AM radio picked up Canadian stations. I thought I’d evade the propaganda of American NPR. Wrong! If anything, Canada has it worse! They’ve gone down the rabbit hole and started pulling in dirt after themselves. The radio was like this: Covid, covid, covid, a few words about sports, covid, covid, covid, ninety seconds about weather, covid, covid, covid, the government knows best and Trudeau loves you, covid, covid, covid, and… wait for it… stay tuned… back to covid. As far as I can tell, literally nothing exists in Canada but Trudeau’s novelty socks and dead bodies. No wonder people have lost it!

I turned the radio off.

Rather than wind through swamps and forests, I cut at right angles into a vast region of farmland. This gained me easy rolling on smooth pavement. I also got to gawk at the ongoing harvest. Crops are pretty shitty this year because of the drought. I’m sure I could turn on the radio and find out how it’s a direct result of covid… and possibly global warming… which causes covid because covid covids the covid. However, I’m perfectly happy with my deplorable misinformation that crops grow shitty when they don’t have water. Call it “the Idiocracy theorem”. Harvesters were racing against the rain; doing what they could. Feeding the world and all that. Good for them!

Suddenly, in the middle of a vast, recently harvested field, I spied a bear. Awesome! I’d been wanting a bear photo! The poor bastard was in the middle of a huge empty field; about a quarter mile distant and exposed in broad daylight. He was aware of this and hauling ass for cover.

I whipped Dodge and trailer through an unwieldy U-Turn, floored it back to the nearest cross road, and skidded to a halt. Smokey was going to have to cross the road! I didn’t have time to drive down the road (and didn’t want to hassle an already running bear) so I grabbed my camera and steadied it over the truck’s hood.

He approached the road at a dead run and then trotted across… right in front of my camera! Yahoo!

I played it back. I had a nice full color video of a huge grain field bisected by a muddy road. A raisin sized speck scooted across it. Hardly the work of Marty Stouffer. Oh well.

I returned home happy, smelling like pine, and rested. When the spastics of cloud cuckoo land get you down with their black death fantasies and epic failures of the Jews in the attic test, go play in the dirt. You’ll thank yourself.

The road ended and I was happy to be there. I shut down and looked around. If a fire did come, I’d be spending the night somewhere on this road. But there was an open-ish clearcut not far away. A hundred acres easy. So, I had a backup plan and that’s all I need to be at ease.

I had a nice lunch. Sitting on the dirt under the shade of a tree. Hawks wheeled overhead in great number. I hadn’t seen a grouse. Maybe the hawks savage ‘em? It seemed like anything hawks eat would be doomed out here.

How far was I from… anywhere? I reformulated that as “how far from anyone” and started doing numbers in my head. I still can’t quite believe how it came out. Y’all are reading this far in the future. If my math was wrong, someone tell me.

I was more or less 15 miles straight out. That’s 15 miles since I’d been on Ridge Highway (which wasn’t a highway of course). Ridge Highway had been empty but I’d seen fresh UTV tracks. I assume there was a UTV somewhere along that road and where there’s a UTV there’s a person (or pack of them). That would be the closest person. The road was the closest route to that hypothetical person. If, by some improbable hypothetical, say if I had a magic carpet or hovercraft, I pressed on from my current location in any direction but the road, it would take more than 15 miles to emerge on any side of the emptiness.

What’s the area of a circle? I remember it as pi times r squared. Take a conservative 15 miles to assume there was a person sitting just at the tangent of my imaginary circle where Ridge Highway met the road I’d just traveled… that’d be 15 squared. So 225. Multiply by pi which, since I wasn’t going to muck about with calculators, I rounded to 3.14. I scratched in the dirt. Carry the one…

706. Not too shabby. A sizable chunk for an old guy on a cheap bike.

If there’s 640 acres in a square mile… brush the dirt clear and start multiplying… 450,000 or so.

I figured I was the sole living homo sapiens within a 706 square mile chunk of planet earth. A little under a half million acres with nothing but me.

I don’t know if that was exact, I’d taken a few turns on the road. Maybe I was less that 15 miles out by air?

700 square miles sure seems unbelievable. Especially since I was only here on a whim.

Maybe there’s unseen people in that nothingness? Some crazy moonshiner reliving the whiskey rebellion? A trophy poacher who’s absolutely badass? Some industrious/paranoid lunatic with the world’s most inconvenient pot grow? Improbable, but who knows?

It seems weird to be that far from the nearest human… but math is math. Is 15 miles simply a bigger space than one usually ponders?

I listened hard; no motors in the distance. No airplanes overhead. I hadn’t seen tracks on the road. Nobody had been here at least since the thunderstorm several days ago swept it clean.

It was deathly quiet. Just the whispering of the winds on the endless reeds and a few trembling aspen leaves here and there. I heard a hawk cry. Nothing else. Even the insects were quiet (possibly reduced by the drought).

I closed my eyes and enjoyed it. Our planet has so much peace. You just need to cup your hands and drink of it.

I pinged my SpotX “Safe in the middle of 700 square miles. Location = XYZ.” Then, because I didn’t want to hear the electronic chirp if it received anything, I turned it off.

I waited a good long time, just sitting in the dust; listening to the sound of forever.

Time passed. Eventually the sun began to approach the horizon. Wistfully, I rode back out. I hopped the same tree with the same result. Later, I spooked a turtle and a little snake… but other than that.. it was all hawks and reeds.

I still can’t get over the scales involved. A silly little dirtbike and a dead end empty road got me to a place that would have taken a week, or maybe two, if I’d tried bushwhacking. I got to see that place and still return to camp with time to cook dinner before dark. What a fine day I’d had!

That night, I slept like a baby.