Everything's Gonna Be OK

my hands were worse.  they would barely work and hardly hold the pencil (that i keep just in case the ink in my pen won’t flow.)  i swear that even my brain was frozen.  half of it anyway, the creative half.  i could only write fragments in my journals.  so.  put away your reading glasses, [...]

“THIS MIGHT SOUND STUPID BUT I THINK I JUST FELT THE HEAT OFF THAT LIGHTENING STRIKE!”

at nine forty seven in the morning, my bearings are off. i’m hiking downhill. i’m hiking in a southerly direction. i’m hiking down a river drainage. those fit and seemed to be the good news. as i looked back from my map, to my surroundings, to my compass, to my map, the mountains were all wrong. i had jagged peaks on my left and nice sloping hills on my right.

i had a plan once; it started in new jersey. i’d been hiking and i got swarmed (my thought at the time) by mosquitoes. i would swat them by the handful and leave the carcasses smeared on my skin. like a scarecrow, or when ranchers hang dead coyotes in front of their fences, i figured seeing their dead cousins would be the deterrent of all deterrents.

Dumbass finds tent and stake bag three weeks after losing them the first night.
“where did you find them”
“in my pocket”

what we’ve got is a trip that started years ago. it started with a camera. a camera worth a thousand words. (and camera bag could tell some good stories too.)

first days are like first dates that are about to go terribly and painfully wrong. EXCEPT it is the first date and you are blinded by the beauty and excitement…