Part II: The Buzzards of Baja Await You

Our squadron deployed last year to a place that was far enough away from the shooting that we could visit the most decadent cities on Earth, cities with so much money, they were still trying to figure out how to spend it. However, we were still close enough to the shooting to accumulate obscene amounts of tax-free combat zone pay. After two weeks in the desert, we faced the same dilemma that our host nation faced, namely “what should I do with all this money?”

Unlike our host nation, we didn’t have enough for Bentleys or Lamborghinis, but we did have the money for plasma TVs, and iPods.

It also became clear that a great deal of that money was going to boost the economies of various countries in the form of tourism dollars and I was determined to do my part to help. I finally decided on a paddling trip to Baja. I’d been kayaking for almost a year and bought my first kayak that previous spring. My first time paddling was in the Johnstone Strait in British Columbia, so I wasn’t embarking on this completely unskilled. I was just embarking on it at previously unheard of levels for someone whose lion’s share of paddling experience took place on Lake Hefner.

Undeterred by my utter lack of sea kayaking experience and encouraged by the promise that all skill levels were welcome, I signed on for a six day paddling trip on the Sea of Cortez.

I called my parents to tell them my post-deployment vacation plans. I halfway expected by news to be met with lip-biting concern. Whenever I’d previously expressed my desire to visit Mexico, my dad would send me the standard announcement from the State Department warning people to flee for their lives from the state of Oaxaca and avoid any town near the border. I assured them that Loreto was very safe, very small, and very far away from the drug cartels. I registered my trip with the US Embassy. The only caveat was that my dad made me promise I wouldn’t drive. I made a mental note to cancel the rental car I’d already reserved. It was only after I got to Mexico, that I realized he may have been on to something.

The trip started out from the town of Loreto. I went to the Loreto website and looked at the photo gallery. One picture stood out. It was a picture of some large birds overlooking the water and the caption beneath stated, “Vultures await breakfast amidst a golden sunrise at Juncalito beach.”

Maybe buzzards don’t have the same connotation of impending death in Mexico that they do in the US, but I’m not sure how a picture of carrion birds waiting for capsized, dehydrated, and hopeless paddlers and anglers serves as a great tourism pitch.

When we first started out, the weather was beautiful. We were told by our guides, “it never rains in Baja.”

Of course wind was another matter entirely. On day two, I began to think Baja’s turkey vultures might be eating like kings by the end of the day.

Tune in for Part III: Bye Bye Cantaloupe, Hello Cold Shock

Collared Lizard

I was on a hike in the Wichita Mountains when we came upon a collared lizard. If he'd had the cognizance to know better, he would have felt like Paris Hilton. We were snapping pictures like crazy.

Part I: In the Beginning...

My parents were never “camping” people and we never took “outdoorsy” vacations. They were Howard Johnsons/Holiday Inn people and since we were also a military family with a history buff as the for a dad, most of our vacations involved driving 1500 miles to visit relatives, interspersed with pit stops at Civil War battlefields. It’s not that my mom and dad didn’t want to get out in the sun and fresh air, but the bottom line was that at the end of the day, they wanted a toilet that flushed and to be in close proximity to a Bob Evans. One day during the summer, we went on a family outing to one of the state parks and packed a lunch to take with us. Immediately, we were beset by bees. I still have a picture somewhere of my dad trying to swat the bees away with a loaf of bread. Bugs and filth were fine for a day, but they didn’t see any point in turning it into an overnight adventure.

There is one notable exception to this. It was the summer of 1987 and my dad was away on a TDY. My mom got a seedling of a thought that germinated into a full-blown bad idea. Platte River State Park was about thirty minutes away from where we lived and in addition to the very nice, well-appointed cabins, they also had for rent—get ready for this—teepees. A novel way for suburban families of the Eighties to experience what life was like for Native Americans if Native Americans had built their teepees on carpeted platforms and made them from canvas instead of buffalo skins and had sleeping bags, hibachis, and flush toilets across the way. You can probably guess where this story is headed. My mom decided to rent a teepee for two nights and take my brother James and I camping. This necessitated the proper attire. She wore a denim skirt. It made for outstanding comfort and ease of movement when she had to push our stuff to the campsite with a wooden cart. The first night, the weather was hot and windless.

None of us slept a wink, which put us in the proper frame of mind for quality family time the next day. When we woke up, the first thing my brother and I did was pick a fight. What it was about, I have no idea, but it couldn’t terribly substantial since I was thirteen years old at the time. Whatever it was, it was enough to make my mom burst into tears. Nothing puts a damper on a good fight like making your mom cry. What could we do? James and I stared at each other, at a complete loss for words. Mom spent about 15 minutes boo-hooing and wondering aloud what she’d done to raise two such selfish, ungrateful urchins. She finally regained her composure and we headed up to the arts and crafts center where we spent roughly forty dollars making God’s eyes and painting ceramic unicorns (a stellar example of fauna indigenous to the Great Plains region).

While we were at the arts and crafts center, it started to pour down rain. Now, before we left the campsite, the sky was overcast, so my mother made it a point to ensure the top of the teepee was closed up tight. What didn’t occur to us was the roughly two inches of space between the base of the teepee and the ground. When we arrived back at the campsite, the top of the inside of the teepee was nice and dry, but the wind had blown the rain under the base of the teepee. All our belongings were soaked. We gathered our things and left immediately, marking an end to the Parsons family camping extravaganza. It’s the stuff memories are made of.

I went camping again some ten years later with a bunch of friends. The night we got there, we experienced golf ball-sized hail. A childhood friend managed to one-up me though. Her family owned a camper and she related an anecdote of how they had to run from a tornado while they were at Adventure Land, a low-grade theme park in Des Moines with overpriced food and a giant lion as a mascot. She told me how she and her two brothers were out enjoying the fun park and in her words, “having a good old time”. At the end of the day, they went back to the camper. Then the storm clouds rolled in and the tornado sirens started wailing in that special panic-inducing way that causes people living in unstable structures to flee to the nearest ditch with only the clothes on their backs and if they have any presence of mind, a video camera to record the whole thing. My friend said that they fled from the camper shrieking and running through the rain and hail, while her older brother screamed, “Run your asses off!”

They ended the day by drying their sleeping bags under the hand dryers in the bathrooms of Adventure Land.

I did eventually have a relatively successful tent camping experience in Sparks, Nebraska. I went canoing down the Niobrara River with a gaggle of friends where we spent two nights in a tent. Everything went reasonably well. It didn’t rain a drop. The only regrettable thing was the smell in the tent after two nights. When we left, we looked like extras from the set of Braveheart.

While my parents didn't engage in camp out pursuits themselves, they didn't see any reason to deprive me. They were thrilled to have me go off for a week at time, even if it was just to make me scarce for a ten hour period at day camp. I attended summer camp every year between kindergarten and the seventh grade. My first experience was at the Camp Pokamoke in Crescent, Iowa. The only thing I remember about it was that they had a pool and that I experienced the chagrin of having a sensible mom who packed lunches with peanut butter sandwiches, apples, and a thermos of Kool-Aid while other kids had Fritos and pop.

The next year, I started going to Girl Scout camp and by about the third grade I was going to sleep away camp in Fremont, Nebraska, which I’m sure delighted my parents to no end. It was an outstanding camp with cabins, horseback riding, and a pool. Every year, each church in the synod sponsored a week long camp in which they gathered a bunch of grade school kids and about thirty horny pre-teens and brought them out to live in the woods for a week with a bunch of other grade school kids and horny pre-teens. It was a fun-filled week of swimming, horseback riding, night hikes, learning the fine art of wood burning on viciously splintery plywood, mean-girl drama, and week long relationships that everyone just knew would last forever and ever and ever. Camp was only a week, but I would have stayed all summer if my parents had let me. I had gotten accustomed to daddy-long legs, snakes, dirt, and stinging nettles

In light of these personal experiences and since it had been almost eight whole years since I slept outside for three nights without showering, I decided the next logical step was to try this all over again. Only I didn’t go at this half-assed with a trailer, teepee or cabin at a state park. I went at it whole-assed by signing up for an eight day paddling trip down to Baja, Mexico. This was a full-blown, knock down, drag out, crap-in-the-wilderness adventure. It also included yoga.

Stay tuned for Part II: The Buzzards of Baja Await You

Just Say No to Lead-Filled Computer Monitors

I've been doing some housecleaning and I went to take a computer monitor to the Goodwill. The sucker was mondo heavy and I think I lost a few years off my life just carrying it out to the car. So imagine my feeling of utter dismay when I showed up at the Goodwill's back door and was told by the Goodwill, "I'm sorry, we don't take computers." When I asked her why, she said, "Goodwill has gone green and computers have too much lead"
What? I mean, WHAT THE FREAKIN' CRAP?! I'm not asking them to dump it in a landfill or grind it up and stir it into paint. And it's just a monitor, it's not like they have to upgrade it.
So now I have this ginormous CRT in the backseat of my car until I can find a place that will take it or someone who wants a free monitor.

Loogee Man

There's this guy in my water aerobics class. In Water Aerobics Land he would be an arch-villain and his name would be Loogee Man.

He never misses a class. Ever. And during every class this is what we hear...

Ungh, Ungh, UNGH AARGH! Whark, whark, whark...P-TOO! plop (sound of goober hitting water).

He starts off with lots of grunting and straining, which sounds like he's either suffering from severe constipation or he's passing an elephant. He works up to the loogee hawking, and finally makes his deposit in the pool. If he does it once, he does it 75,000 times. Woe to the unfortunate person who happens to drift Loogee Man's direction during deep-water aerobics. They spend roughly ten minutes vainly trying to swim away while holding water weights.

I've learned a very valuable lesson from all this--don't ever fall into a swimming pool with your mouth open.

Bye-Bye McDonald's Fried Pie

You know really fills me with a sense of loss and sadness? McDonald’s no longer sells fried pies. They still have pies, but they’re baked. I was thinking of this the other day when I got one of their lukewarm apple pies.

The old fried pies of the 80s were crispy, greasy, criminally unhealthy and if you weren’t careful when you took the first bite, you could end up with second-degree burns as cherry filling streamed from your lips to the bottom of your neck. However, upon completion of the pie, you were filled with a deep sense of satiety. It made me smile. It made me forget my problems. Those were some good, damn fried pies.

So now the pies are baked and I’m sure it all has to do with marketing a healthier product and not wanting to get sued by people who claim they got fat because McDonald’s didn’t warn them that eating five fried pies everyday and not exercising would make them blow up like a whale. Or maybe McDonald’s didn’t want to get sued when some crybaby exploded hot filling down their shirt. The pies now have holes in them as well, quite possibly to counteract that filling spewing problem. Then again, maybe they just wanted to stay ahead of the Trans Fat Government Nannies who would eventually make them get rid of the fried pies anyway.

Convenient stores remain a Mecca for unhealthy food. When I lived in San Angelo, Town and Country still sold fried pies.

I just think it’s sad that the fried pies have disappeared from the health-conscious mainstream and are now relegated to the fringes of society and gas stations out in the sticks. Oh well, off to Buffalo Wild Wings. At least something good still remains untouched by the fat cops.

President or Savior?

So, we're in the throes of electing the future leader of the free world. The thing that amazes me most about elections is that people think that if a candidate doesn't fall in lockstep with every single issue that they hold near and dear, they must certainly be the anti-Christ.

During the Nebraska primaries many years ago two individuals were vying to be the party's gubanatorial candidate for the November elections. One guy was party base's wet dream. The other guy was more moderate. When things started going south for Mr. Perfect Candidate, his campaign sent out a scurrilous mailer with all kinds of silly accusations on it. One accusation that I recall was, "Mr. Moderate Candidate wants your children to have access porn in public libraries!" It was patently B.S. and it didn't help Mr. Perfect Candidate's campaign. In fact, his political career pretty much tanked after that. I ended up voting for Mr. Moderate Candidate. So did most Nebraskans--he ended up winning the general election too.

We're just trying to elect the best person to lead the country, not the Savior of America. No candidate is going to fit in whatever box, the special interest groups have made for them. We all have things we wouldn't want the public to know, we all have stupid friends, and we all have clay feet. Why should politicians be any different?

Is Anybody Out There? Part II

Any Sunday school-going American kid could probably sing Jesus Loves Me--it's one of the standard little kid Sunday school ditties. We know the words by heart and as we get older we learn more. I eventually learned The Lord's Prayer, the Twenty-Third Psalm, and the Apostles Creed which I had to learn for Confirmation.

Here's the thing--SETI sits at a telescope and searches the sky for signs of intelligent life, other people toy with Ouija boards, and still other people search for solace in the religion of their choice, so the real question in everybody's mind isn't "Is anybody out there", but the root of the search (at least in my mind) is "If there is somebody out there, do they care about me?"

I never felt like I could sing Jesus Loves Me, because I could never be sure that Jesus loves me. He may love us collectively, but there's got to be what, something like 6 billion people on the face of the Earth and I keep thinking that to God we must look like ants on a sugar cube. I'd like to feel like more than an insignificant speck whirling around in the universe.

Wanted for Murder

Meerkats are generally altruistic little creatures, but they've been known to kill the offspring of senior members in their societies in order to advance the position of their own offspring. Kind of like mothers of cheerleaders.

I'm sure the one meerkat isn't dead, just resting--or is he...

Is Anybody Out There? Part I

Many years ago, around Christmas time, I bugged my parents for a shortwave radio receiver. Under the tree Christmas morning, I found a world band radio waiting for me. I thought being able to get radio stations from the other side of the globe was just Way Cool. (Yes, I know I had bizarre ideas about what was cool--that's how nerds are). I'd turn the analog dial ever so carefully, my ears straining to pick up broadcasts from Finland or Australia or Japan for anything in another language. Usually when I got something, it was Tex-Mex music or some Latin American religious broadcast and if I got really lucky, I could pick up Deutsche Welle. That didn't deter me from trying to find more, however, and sometimes I would even listen to the static, trying to discern a voice or a tune--anything that would indicate some sign of life in the chaos.

My all-time favorite movie is Contact. The protagonist, Ellie Arroway, is an astronomer whose passion is the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence. She's dedicated her entire career, much to the incredulity and scorn of the scientific community, to proving that the human race isn't alone in the universe. She's staked her reputation on it and just as she's about to lose funding for her study something extraordinary happens--the message that humankind has been sending out in the form of television transmissions is repeated back to Earth from an extraterrestrial transmitter array orbiting Vega. As more is learned about the message, Ellie is vindicated in all her years of study. In the beginning of the movie and interspersed throughout, we see scenes of Ellie as a young girl, speaking into a ham radio and waiting patiently for an answer to her question. It's the question at the heart of Ellie's ultimate pursuit and it's what every human being seeks to resolve by some means or another. Is anybody out there?

To be continued...

Look at Me! True Confessions, Naughty Pictures, and Letting it All Hang Out

I recently read a book called Mortified: Real Words. Real People. Real Pathetic. by David Nadelberg. It's a collection of embarrassing childhood diary entries, love letters, pictures drawn, and dirty stories written by twelve year-olds and adolescents with only a notional idea about sex. Anybody that reads these and remembers anything about stories they penned as a kid will be instantly pricked with a sense of mortification as a long-forgotten, unwelcome memory comes flooding back to remind them of how ridiculous they actually were sometimes.

I recall a time when I was three or four years-old and I went through a phase where I kept drawing "anatomically correct" bunny rabbits. I can't imagine what my preschool teacher must have thought. I don't know what made me fixate on this subject for my pictures, but likely it was something rather mundane. At that time, my mom had bought me a book about the human body written for younger children. It was illustrated in bright colors and had a few pages dedicated to human reproduction. Of course the book was written for a younger child--not enough detail to tell you how IT really happens, but enough to let you know that you weren't brought by the stork. IT still had that aura of mystery. Looking back, it all seems so Freudian. How weirdly ironic that as a four-year old I connected the most basic human act with an animal known primarily for its prolific reproduction and in bygone years, a pregnancy test.

When I was in high school, I discovered that my mom had saved these masterpieces, I was horrified. I begged her to throw them out. I was certain I would have died of embarrassment if anybody had ever seen them. Never in a million years would I have posted them where people could see them. That's the way diaries and secrets used to be and there used to be a term for pictures of people in compromising positions: blackmail photos.

So why do people these days feel compelled to post their deepest secrets and humiliating pictures on the web for the world to see? It's coming back to bite them in the butt. A young woman who graduated from teacher's college was denied her teaching certificate by the state when they discovered compromising pictures on her blog. She's not the only one. Employers commonly look for potential employees' blogs and websites and they're not hiring people who post pictures of themselves in their most risque moments.

It's not just blogs either. We live in a voyeuristic society. Look at the glut of reality shows. In spite of their different formats they all have one common denominator--LOOK AT ME!

In spite of the fact that we have more information at our fingertips and more ways to connect with the world around us than ever before, we're more cut off from each other than at any other time in human history. I walked into Panera Bread one day and witnessed three or four people sitting at a table together. They were all working on their own laptops completely disengaged from each other. Together, but still alone.

Not only has cable TV, video games, and the internet contributed to a society of sedentary couch potatoes, they've made the world a lonely place. We now have a generation of people who have no idea how to connect and desperately want to. People want to be known and the only way they think they can make that happen is through message boards, forums, and blogs. That's hardly a suitable substitute for real relationships. Now we have a world of people screaming LOOK AT ME!