tofino and back again

[radfrac_archive_full]

I lived!

A long time ago, chromemagpie made me promise to go camping, despite the fact that my usual experience of camp involves a feather boa and a big attitude.

"I don't get it." I said. "You're damp. You're uncomfortable. There's nowhere to get a latte. What's the appeal?"
"You drink." He and stitchinmyside explained. "and set fire to things."
"Ohhhhh." I said. "That makes way more sense."

I've lived on the island for mmphteen years, but I've never acclimatized, in the sense of making use of the resources of a place to their full. I didn't camp. I didn't surf. I didn't hike. Let's face it, the only reason to be in Victoria is because you can get out of it quickly into somewhere green.

Now that half my life has been spent in this place, maybe I should admit that I live here and actually try to enjoy what it provides. I'd never been to Long Beach or Tofino, and that was where chromemagpie and stitchinmyside wanted to go; so stitchinmyside booked a campsite and emailed "Are you coming?" and suddenly there I was. Outdoors.

Now, I tend to be a tiny bit... cerebral. So even a deeply physical experience like camping is something I see in terms of the ideas that arise from it--ideas about physicality.

Physical Competence

Setting up camp made me see how limited I am, not by my actual competence, but by my ideas of my competence--in this case, that I have none. I actually quite like putting things together, but not when people are watching. Even something like hanging a tarp scared the crap out of me, not because I thought I'd suffer a terrible tarpaulin cut, but because I am so worried about Doing Things Wrong.

It turns out it isn't all that easy to get hanging a tarp wrong, and if you do, it's more or less a collective thing, and you just fix it. And no one starts hurling volleyballs at you en masse.

Competence is an odd phenomenon. Skill and ineptitude both reinforce themselves. If you're good at something, you're rewarded for it, from within and from without, by satisfaction and by praise. If you're not good at it, people will mostly be uninterested in, annoyingly sympathetic about, or contemptuous of your efforts, and internally you have to work to a subtler idea of personal satisfaction.

It's hard for even well-meaning people who are good at something to really understand what it's like not to be, and especially to feel not good at it. It's hard for people who don't have a natural aptitude for a thing to see the joy in it.

Physical Joy

This goes to that earlier discussion about running and being a body. These are things that are revelations to me, but that you may well take for granted, or have noticed years ago and forgotten. Or maybe, like several people I know, you had them once to take for granted, and then they were taken away from you by injury or illness.

We went bodysurfing at Long Beach on Saturday. I've never been bodysurfing before. chromemagpie and I bought half shares in a boogie board with all three of a) skulls b) flames c) a rainbow.

You're in the wild gray sea. Wave after wave rises and breaks along the length of the shore, and the foam rushes past you. The sand sucks out from under your feet, and you feel how much the wave wants to drag you out with it. It was a calm day, but the waves still felt twice as strong as I am used to.

I've rarely felt that kind of uncomplicated physical joy. Sometimes since I started running, when suddenly all of your muscles start to smoulder and you realize you've been running for a long time, and you could run now forever.

This had something else, too: the joy of calibration. Of calculating when to get into a wave, how to position your board, what's going to take you farthest, what might be too dangerous to try. It's mental activity, but it's different from the kind I'm used to, because of the constant play between body and mind. That kind of physical calculation only comes when you're intensely involved in a bodily experience.

And something else I've never felt. I thought, "This is great, but you know what would make it more fun? If there was more upper-body work." Yes, that's right. It entered my mind that effort would be desirable.

What am I becoming?


There was the full moon through the trees. The idiots who started singing at 5:30 in the morning and I wanted to crawl outside and yell "YOU'RE FLAT!" Seeing chromemagpie and stitchinmyside staggering about in well-earned exhaustion after their surfing lesson. The cola and mentos experiments. The drink-when-you-say-something-accidentally-lewd game. Flat Stanley.

It was SO FSCKING FUN.

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