mystic beach
Aug. 21st, 2007 08:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radfrac_archive_fullWe crawled out of the brush at about 6 pm, our packs bound with starbursts of twine like sea creatures clinging to rocks, muscles so tired that by the end of the drive into town I could barely topple out of the car, and unloading my gear from the truck was a comedy of immobility; dirty, sandy, sunburnt, sea-chilled, stone-slept, in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lemon_pickle's case dog-nipped--
I can't remember when I last felt so good.
I say gear, but I'm not sure a fashion backpack resembling a sled, one good sleeping bag, and eight litres of water bound to various bits of me with twine counts as gear.
lemon_pickle was careful to leak the challenges of the trip to me in fragments, to soften the whole. I was suspicious, but in the end I went along with it, packing in water, hike, bear warnings and all.
I should like to be able to write a plot like that trail we walked on -- full of odd bits of root and rock that are constantly almost tripping you, especially when you think you have just got past them; full of witty turns like suddenly running uphill for twenty minutes, undoing all the satisfying downhill progress you've just made; losing itself in an open space of trees, a seeming infinity of paths; offering bridges over dry steam beds followed immediately by large puddles; the magnificent ruin of a set of stairs, once banked earth held in place by bolted logs, now simply a series of washed-out pits and a steep slope blocked by rows of log barriers, like a violent downhill course of hurdles; and everywhere the danger of being implicated by sucking, sticky, ineradicable mud. (That would be, I don't know, my ideology or something.)
I should point out that this is a trail of only two kilometres, and I'm sure you could polish it off in forty minutes blindfold and hopping on one foot the entire way, but I felt like a goddamned king.
I finally know the urge to shout "WOO-OOO!!!" and what it is for. I have known, in my small and portly way, the sheer physical exultation of victory. I quite like it.
If there's time, I'll tell you the story of how we were almost marooned and/or washed out to sea, but my coming-in-early-to-illicitly-print-manuscripts time is over. Back to the world.
{rf}
lemon_pickle's case dog-nipped--I can't remember when I last felt so good.
I say gear, but I'm not sure a fashion backpack resembling a sled, one good sleeping bag, and eight litres of water bound to various bits of me with twine counts as gear.
lemon_pickle was careful to leak the challenges of the trip to me in fragments, to soften the whole. I was suspicious, but in the end I went along with it, packing in water, hike, bear warnings and all.I should like to be able to write a plot like that trail we walked on -- full of odd bits of root and rock that are constantly almost tripping you, especially when you think you have just got past them; full of witty turns like suddenly running uphill for twenty minutes, undoing all the satisfying downhill progress you've just made; losing itself in an open space of trees, a seeming infinity of paths; offering bridges over dry steam beds followed immediately by large puddles; the magnificent ruin of a set of stairs, once banked earth held in place by bolted logs, now simply a series of washed-out pits and a steep slope blocked by rows of log barriers, like a violent downhill course of hurdles; and everywhere the danger of being implicated by sucking, sticky, ineradicable mud. (That would be, I don't know, my ideology or something.)
I should point out that this is a trail of only two kilometres, and I'm sure you could polish it off in forty minutes blindfold and hopping on one foot the entire way, but I felt like a goddamned king.
I finally know the urge to shout "WOO-OOO!!!" and what it is for. I have known, in my small and portly way, the sheer physical exultation of victory. I quite like it.
If there's time, I'll tell you the story of how we were almost marooned and/or washed out to sea, but my coming-in-early-to-illicitly-print-manuscripts time is over. Back to the world.
{rf}
