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The setting: Algonquin Park. A seedy campsite mired between a rock bathhouse and fresh water, surrounded by drunken idiots from North Bay. Three tents are set up on-site: one is the Taj Mahal of tents, a massive structure designed to shelter several adolescent elephants. Instead, it holds two girls, a giant air mattress and all their worldly possessions. They are truly "roughing it." The second tent is small and yellow - it is occupied by me and Chad. It smells bad inside for a wide assortment of reasons and the airtight tarp doesn't help matters. The third tent is a site of sordid debauchery, a sodomist's delight. That would be Kyle's.

The story: We're camping. Isn't it obvious? We are soaking up the prototypical May Two-Four Outdoors, surrounded by everyone else who had the same idea. I am not much of an outdoorsman at all; in fact I would firmly like to stress my deep and meaningful relationship with technology. It keeps me happy and alive, and I try not to betray it with notions of Back-To-The-Basics and Organic Lifestyles and Prancing Veganism and soforth. I'd say that it's a symbiotic friendship, as much as a boy can be friends with a nebulous concept of progress. But every once in a while I don't mind cheating on technology with Mother Nature. Somebody once told me that monogamy is a lie.

The other stuff: Ooooh yeah. At the top of Hardwood Trail Lisa lies on her back in a massive entanglement of roots and orange pine needles, uncomfortable in her body. The sun is raping her, she says, and then it leaves and the wind moves in for sloppy seconds. In Nature personified, everything is forceful. I laugh hysterically and have to bite my fingers as a family of bright-eyed Australians come up the hill. They can't know.

The highway stretches on forever. A line of us ambles down the shoulder, each carrying a very special walking stick that we have adopted (or maybe the stick adopted us). This is the longest road in the history of human transportation. Oooh, but look! A yellow seaplane! And a fox!

Mizzy Lake proves to be a hurculean effort. The trail frequently breaks off into vast expanses of mud which reminds me of a video game; find a path of barely visible stones peeking out of the bog and shimmy your way across. No bottomless pits, but the prospect of a foot of mud crawling up your shins is incentive enough to play the game right. The sticks come in handy. The sticks become bonded to our very souls. Mine and Sarah's became twin musicians on the boardwalk, scraping and thumping in staggered unison.

The journey was arranged; the organization complete. I was Peevay (of English Passengers fame), the surly native guide with a tongue in the weather spirit's ear and a mind for bloody revenge on all White Scuts. I failed to kill my fellow voyagers, although I was able to satiate the Old Gods and drive the rains away on at least two occasions with my Authentic Native Tribal Chant (TM). We made it back alive, swinging through the branches, and my devotion to technology was duly repaid when I partially rolled my ankle bounding down some rocks. I sit happy with my scars, lazy and unfit.

Sarah and Lisa made a spectacular pasta salad, and Kyle was the meat man. Starting a fire began with the wood (3 bundles, not 6 - oh God, not 6) and pyromania quickly took hold. Our sticks were sacrificed to the blazes one by one; except for Kyle's and Chad's, which were fitted together in a most erotic way (for wood, at least) to hold up our tarp. As the night died, ashes turned into a tiny civilization and Kyle the Malicious Diety dealt death to the under-dwellers with dreadful streams of water from his mouth. The downtown core was decimated and the ruling aristocracy displaced again and again. We finally left a small clan of survivors spread evenly across the fire pit - a communist collective to rule the night.

That night, I slept in two sweaters and a jacket and it was cold. Chad wanted to spoon but I was all like, "Wouldn't Jen be jealous?" And then he was totally like, "Well, yeah maybe, but she wouldn't have to know..." It was fuckin' rad.

The much-anticipated conclusion: We came home and went back to our jobs. I am back from my illicit sojourn with Mother Nature, scratched up and smiling, the stick exchanged for the keyboard. The summertime is fleeting but our hearts are in all the right places.

Posted by Chris at 02:48 PM >> Commentations (2)