Into the Shade
Written by Roger Kovack Tuesday, 30 June 2009 00:00
We went to the hot springs this week but we didn't take our camper with its kitchen and bed and coffee grinder. Instead, we drove my little pickup truck with its tiny camper shell. No soft bed, no candle to set the mood for sipping wine with a baguette, no place to brush our teeth. It's just a truck that I use to haul trash and carry tools and lumber.
In years gone by, my life used to be so complete and perfect with everything in its proper place. The camper always had its own coffee grinder ready to go and its own bedding and pillows. It even came with its own library, that is if you count a dictionary and a couple of novels that were tossed aside a few decades ago. The camper had its own towels and a kettle for boiling water in the mornings for coffee, and that's how I lived my life when I was sure that the world was my oyster.
These days, having things perfect, and having a complete, pretty picture of life are becoming just more of the things that were lost with youth. Nothing is quite completed and perfection is out the window.
"Let's have something to eat," I said. "We have bagels and sliced turkey and we even have tomatoes and avocados."
"Are you going to bring all those fixings here?" my wife asked. We sat on the spacious, sunny deck at the resort where everything is hosed down clean in the mornings, and the people all around us chatted and glistened with oiled skin.
"I can get all the things we need into my backpack."
"Can you get everything? And then bring it all back? What about the yellow jackets around here?"
"I don't see any bees. But maybe they would find us when we open the food."
"We could go over to the car together and eat there," she said. It was about a ten minute walk to the truck.
"It's hot and dusty in that parking lot. Are we going to tailgate it right there?"
"Let's go look at the parking lot together," she said. My wife likes to do things together and maybe she doesn't care about dirty, unpaved parking lots like I do.
When we got to the scorching dirt lot with our dark gray truck baking alone in full sun, we decided we should move to a more shaded parking strip. That was easy if we just left our stuff strewn all over the car where it was and didn't put everything away. I drove while she walked.
The new parking place was much cooler under the shade of wide oaks but it was still just a dirt strip at the side of a road and other parked cars and it wasn't level. But we got out the beach chairs, and ice chest that we used for a table, and paper plates and a watermelon.
Nothing was quite perfect here. We used an old chunk of a 2x4 under the ice chest to try to make it level so the watermelon wouldn't roll off but it had to be cut on the tailgate anyway. And I never got comfortable in the beach chair because it was on a slope and the view from here was mostly of the undersides of cars and abandoned piles of brush and a few decrepit camping decks.
The watermelon was good, if not very satisfying because I had my tummy set for the bagel and turkey. We didn't even have a trash bag or bucket so I just dropped the watermelon rinds onto the dirty slope.
"Shall we go back to the deck?" I asked after we finished off the melon. We had been chatting about the decaying forest at the side of the parking strip. There was a dead pine tree and a few lines of rocks that tried to outline a path through the trees and a small woodpecker hopping up and down the trunks like a mechanical toy.
"No, I don't want to go back yet," my wife said. "Its quiet and private and shady here and we can watch the birds."
And she was right about that, even though I was still falling out of my chair on the sloping dirt and the watermelon rind was dirty on the ground and there was no place to wash the sticky juice off my hands. The slippery knife and the drenched paper plate were threatening to slide off the precariously balanced ice chest and life on the paved street passed us by as we sat unnoticed on the ground behind our dusty pickup.
But the air was still and shady and the birds called and we were close - and it was perfect.
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written by Les Craig , December 05, 2009
Immediacy--everybody has been there. And everyody has done the fussing-but-not-really thing that you do because you are really comfortable with self and partner. Nice and short but I think that pure sparseness costs you a little--a blop of watermelon juice on a hiking boot or a bony foot, slow smiles and crinkles at the corners of eyes, that sort of thing, give us a peek at the characters. But the feel is basically still there without it. Did you have a word limit?
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