I'm a worrier--not all the time, but when I know there is chaos in the air. And, with this unusual Southern weather (and it is very unusual according to the people around me here in Athens), chaos was literally in the air. Yes, I may have conquered fear, but thinking the worst is going to happen seems to be my habit. Maybe you use this same kind of system? What I do is assume the worst, and then let myself be pleasantly surprised when small things make it better than I thought. It's a little game I play with myself. And, I'd say that about 90% of the time it works quite well. It is the last 10% that seem to reinforce my system. And, maybe there's nothing wrong with that.
I have found ways to get around the constant anxiety of the rain, leaks and other concerns of sleeping in the woods here. One of them is to read my ebook (The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss). So it did. It was engrossing in only the way that a psychedelically minded person could appreciate. It did much to alleviate my worries and helped the hours pass more quickly.
As the rain pounded down upon my location, I kept expecting that least wanted of all things: the drop on my forehead. That would mean that the little hiking tarp had finally given way and was allowing water through to the tent tarp below. There were no other lines of defense left up my sleeve. Thankfully, that never happened. Still, the corners of the tent were loading up with water, and I had to keep feeding them napkins, which worked very well--as long as I had more napkins. Starbucks had very generously, yet involuntarily, donated to this cause in the last few days. And despite my hatred of corporate logos, seeing that little green mermaid face with the Spark above her head in my backpack whenever I reached in for more napkins, sure put a smile on my face.
The inevitable other thing that makes for misery is the eventual saturation of the floor of the tent. Because of my limited experience with multiple nights of rain, it has only ever happened in a small degree, with wet grass and such. But, upon sitting up to check the corners of the tent, my sleeping bag was partially pulled away from the floor, and sure enough, the floor wasn't just damp, it was wet.
This sleeping bag has been more than I could have asked for. It is small enough to squish into the bottom of Saggy the wonder pack, warm enough to sleep comfortably, down to about 20° F, has a special lycra/nylon construction that allows moisture to be transferred out of the inside while retaining heat, and isn't too hot in warm weather. But even it has its limitations. To its credit it takes a great deal of soaking on the bottom before water will leak up inside of it. In fact when I made my misjudgement of sleeping on the beach in Portland, Oregon, waking when the tide had come in around me, the inside of the sleeping bag was the last thing to get wet. It wasn't my stuff floating away into the river that woke me, but the eventual water in my sleeping bag.
Even now, with the ground below me becoming soaked to the point where the tent floor was sopping and the sleeping bag bottom was as well, the inside was still dry. But I wasn't in it. The air was warm enough for me to lie on the outside of it. All the while, it just was another pin in the voodoo worry-doll. The napkins kept appearing like the fish and loaves in Jesus' miracle basket, and if used judiciously, should last the rest of the night.
At some point, the sleepy feeling creeping up on me conquered the frustration and anxiety. I clicked off the tablet and this time, docked it with the keyboard so neither would get wet. In doing so, I realized to my delight that the keyboard was working again! It must have dried over that last afternoon at Starbucks. This was a great thing, but now I was also stuck with a new oversized keyboard that I would need to get rid of somehow. It cost me $24.That was the price of a good meal. Even if I were to donate it to Goodwill, it wouldn't be a huge financial loss. But, I'm tighter than that. I planned to try to return it first, which meant finding a lull in the next eight days of rain to walk all the way back to WalMart and sweet-talk them into taking it back without a box (I kept the receipt).
Here is a picture from the day before, to show how big the now-unneeded keyboard was...
I fell asleep with heavy raindrops beating like little drummer boys above me. And, I began to dream...
* * * * * * *
In our hysterical reveries, we somehow ended up going south (not a direction that would be very helpful to me). And, by the time I stopped fooling around and looked out through the windshield to notice that the sun was directly ahead of us, instead of behind us, it was too late to do anything about it. In one stupid day, I'd lost about ten days of walking. As they drove away, I realized that I was in a rural place, but no idea where, and no way to check online. This felt very real, but it was not a lucid dream (I was not conscious that I was asleep and dreaming).
The sky was beautiful with a deep orange, then red, then violet smattering of wispy clouds as the sun set. I was walking on a road, headed east and north. I figured that, at the very least, I would eventually run into the Atlantic Ocean and better marked streets.
Before long the night covered everything. Spring must have been on the way, because the trees in the woods I'd found to camp had tiny green buds all over their branches, and the air was fresh. I found a flat leafy area. For some reason, I didn't have the tent. I only had my old green tarp (the one stolen in Spokane, Washington). I laid it down, pulled out the sleeping bag, stuffed my plastic clean clothes bag in the hood as a pillow and crawled inside. In the dream, I closed my eyes...
And when I opened them, I was standing on a pier in Portland, Maine. It was summer and a Casco Bay Lines ferry was docking. I heard seagulls, a sound I hadn't been privileged to hear since visiting Duluth, on Lake Superior with my kind hosts, Allyson and Dart. It was truly music to my ears.
Something was different. There was a large island I'd never seen before, right out by the entrance of the harbor. It looked like it had always been there--with trees covering it, and even a few deer walking by the water's edge. Odd. Then, suddenly from the center of the island was a tremendous flash, like from an immense camera, everything around turned whiter than snow. It was just like the flash I'd seen in another dream described in this blog.
* * * * * * *
It was lighter out, and I checked my watch, surprised to see that it showed 7:26 am. I must have been tired to have slept about five hours without waking. The next minute the watch alarm beeped (set for 7:27 am, back in New Orleans--a convenient time that has persisted since).
I did my best to mop up the water on the tent floor and from the bottom of the sleeping bag. It was due to rain all day, and I made the strategic decision to leave the bright blue tarp and my poncho on the tent tarp, even though they stuck out in the otherwise bland woods, then walked down to Starbucks to work. Since my song "Noah" was still looping in my head, I felt I had to publish it, along with the lyrics, in that day's post. It fit too perfectly into my life at this moment to not share it.
I was still feeling pretty down, but a bit better than the day before. Writing out my feelings about that previous day helped to get the blues a bit out of my head. Sharing always helps with that kind of thing. Of course, the trick is to be able to have enough ambition to work my way out of whatever partial paralysis my depression might have foisted upon me. I did.
Nevertheless, as evening approached and intellicast.com showed severe weather alerts, the heavy feeling of anxiety set in again, less the sadness of the day before. I'd made it through three of the ten days of rain predicted. I wish I'd been able to make notches is a piece of wood of some kind.
It was only light rain when I left Starbucks. The break gave me almost enough time to head to the Texaco Station to buy some food incase I got stuck in the tent the next day. On the way back to the sleep spot - since I had only a blueberry scone this day - I stopped at Burger King and got a chicken sandwich meal. As I ate in the completely empty restaurant, the TV turned from Judge Judy to the local news, from Atlanta. A huge weather system was sucking moisture off the Gulf of Mexico and smearing it across Mississippi, Alabama and all of the Southern states, of course, including Georgia.
There was the slim but possible chance for a tornado, definitely a full night of thunderstorms, and at least two inches of rain predicted. I don't even sigh anymore. I just stuffed the last french fries into my mouth and headed out into the now-strengthening rain.
When I arrived back at my forlorn looking campsite (now complete with a plastic tote - that I'd wanted to use as a seat, but hadn't had the chance yet - I'd grabbed it from the same abandoned site where I'd found the little blue hiking tarp), I really felt homeless, or maybe more like your typical vagrant, accumulating junk to protect himself from elements. The area just looked like a cliche, made real...
There was no time to stand and ruminate outside. The rain was really letting me have it. I dreaded opening the tent flap, fearing water had accumulated on the floor. But, as I did, I saw that except for a few puddles in the corners and a still damp patch in the middle of the floor, things weren't too bad. It is lying on the floor that presses the water under it, up through. And, unfortunately, that is what I was just about to do. There was no way to avoid it.
Kneeling on the floor, I felt the cold dampness soak into my knees, while I pulled out the sleeping bag and laid it across. The surface of the top of the bag wasn't wet, surprisingly. And, I stretched out across it, taking out the food and aligning it against the new napkins for the tent's head end corner, to keep them in place. The clean clothes went into the hood of the sleeping bag as my pillow. And, after an hour or so of shoring up all the leaks and doing my best to mop up the floor water, I grabbed the tablet and fired up my precious ebook for the night's entertainment.
I got through a couple hours, while the rain outside only increased in intensity. There were no obvious leaks to be seen, but eventually when I took a break and lifted up the edge of the sleeping bag, I was not pleased to see that the entire floor beneath me was covered in water. Until this night, the spot I'd been sleeping on had been spared a pool of water. But now nothing could stop it from filling.
You learn to choose lower standards - to accept larger and larger defeats if necessary to stay sane - and keep fighting in situations like this. Painted by water into the situational corner, I simply stopped worrying about the floor. It was a loss, and psychologically it needed to be cut loose or I would go stark raving mad. The top of the sleeping bag was still dry, and there were other layers of the bag to get through before the water would reach me. Because the tent has a crease across both the head and foot ends, there are essentially three separate pockets. The floor-water was only in the middle and largest one. But the backpack and pillow and the head end and my shoes at the foot end remained dry.
I took a moment to bring you into this "bedroom" of mine...
The lightning was moving in from the south. I watched it and listened for the thunder that always follows. With the good ole' "flash-to-bang" method learned in childhood, I estimated the distance of the storm as it approached. In case you've forgotten this calculation, it is really quite simple...
When lightning flashes, count the seconds until you hear the thunder bang, then divide that number of seconds by five. Every five seconds is one mile (light travels faster through the atmosphere--186,282 miles per second, and sound travels much slower--1,088 feet per second). The storm passed right over head, like a Star Wars Star Destroyer, pelleting the ground with beams of light. (I'm a geek, what can I say?) The count went from thirty seconds (or about six miles--the minimum before someone should "find shelter", according to the National Weather Service, as I just learned), and shortened down to five seconds. The cloud was about a mile up in the air, so it was directly overhead.
Two consecutive flashes hit out on the roadside, about 300 feet away. I could feel the static charge in the air. I wasn't afraid though. Not because I'm brainless (which I might be), but, because what the hell was I gonna do? Go scampering out into the rain, expose myself, and run, shrieking and sobbing to some closed business just to stand there? Not exactly! Ha!
Aside from being indoors, I was probably in the safest possible outdoor place I could be...
If you are caught outside, stay away from tall, isolated objects like trees, flagpoles, or posts. Remember that, contrary to the myth, lightning doesn't always strike the tallest or most conductive object - it can strike anywhere.
Stay away from shorelines, railroad tracks, and metal fences which could bring current from a 'far-away' lightning strike to you. Although still not as safe as being indoors, dense woods provide a little protection due to the large number of trees that decrease the chance of lightning strike to a tree next to you. However in this (and any) case, don't stand close to any of the trees.
[stormhighway.com]
I was lying down, in dense woods, away from large metal or tall isolated objects. I knew I wouldn't be struck. And obviously, I wasn't. The winds grew, but not to the intensity predicted. There was only one time when the side of the tent was receiving more rain than the top of the tent. Tornados were not really likely, as I found out today (while writing of yesterday), they died over the Appalachians, or skimmed just northwest of Georgia.
As with the night before, I grew tired and put my ebook away at about 1:00 am. Lying on my side, I felt the cold of the water seeping up through the sleeping bag, but never got wet. I slept straight through to the next morning.
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