June 27, 2015
29 – This Is Our Glamorous Life
Even though a thick canopy of branches and leaves hang above us, it's hard to hear the roar of the engines engines on the highway below over the pop and splatter of hard rain on the fly and the rush of heavy wind through the trees.
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The tent sits on an outrageous slope. It's the best we could do without hauling our gear another few hundred feet higher in the looming darkness last night. It means all of that gear has been shoved up to the high side of the tent and leaned at a severe angle to keep it from tipping back toward us. The sleeping pads and sleeping bag and the three of us lay jammed in the lower half, and all of us drift down toward the bottom of the hill a few fractions of an inch farther every hour.
In some ways it feels like a war. We lose the far lower corner of the tent when water starts to pool in it late in the morning. When one half of the rain fly becomes too weighted down by rain water and the angle of the hill, it sticks to the tent mesh and we have to move everything out of the nearby pocket to keep it from getting soaked. As the rainfall amounts grow to multiple inches by the afternoon, the ground cloth lets more and more water creep toward us from below.
It could all be so much worse. We could be riding bikes in weather like this. Instead we hole up in the tent and make the most of our unplanned day off. Walter gets his teeth and his fur brushed. We edit pictures and write journal entries and Kristen reads to me from an indigenous American history book. We eat so much trail mix and so many granola bars. And at every possible chance I talk using the subtle but charming Pennsylvania accent.
But the day's enduring image comes in the early evening. When a break in the rain appears I climb out of the tent and into the woods that surround us. Perched high above the tailgating drivers I feel the wind blow fat drops of water off the leaves above and onto my head. The ground is soft from the rain, but because of the slope none of it is soaked. The air is thick with moisture and smells of wet earth. It's against this cool, natural backdrop that I balance on the balls of my feet next to the narrow trunk of an oak tree and drop a deuce.
This is our glamorous life.
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