We were hiking up the mountain, all 27 of us. It was cold; summer had begun to be replaced by autumn, and the high New Hampshire winds intensified the chill. Last year we'd done this same trip, with incongruous results, as the 90 degree weather had rendered us each so dehydrated that upon our return to the campsite we each gulped gallons fervently from the water-pump despite its iodine tang. Expecting such heat, I wasn't dressed for the occasion, wearing a single white t-shirt, unwashed during the past three days of camping, spackled with paint, boldly proclaiming "No More Censorship". I had long pants on, but they were traversed by a wide, splitting tear that ran so high up the pant leg that my undergarments were heartily exposed. Most importantly, I wore a pair of plastic spatulas around my neck, which swung auspiciously as I pushed myself onward. They were included in our cooking kit, but I was so enamored by their mystical quirkiness that I confiscated them for my own purposes. Schwabby and I were discussing the fact that New Hampshire seemed to have an overwhelming hobo population. Made sense. After all, the state slogan was "Live Free or Die". Bundled men, howling hairy-faced, hobbled on their decrepit walking sticks up the mountain. We began to spontaneously compose a little ditty about these Bodhisattvas. By the time we'd fashioned a chorus, "Scoop scoobie, hobos smokin' doobie", I began to scribble the lyrics on my arm with a ball-point pen for posterity. We made plans to perform it as a gospel duet for the group when we gathered around the campfire that night.
When we reached the top of the mountain, the trees no longer offered protection from the snarling wind, which chewed at our faces without remorse. Digging the thrill of masochistic ice, I ran crazy about the ridge, my severed pants blowing behind me as if a third leg, my braids so whipped by wind I coulda sworn they were gonna snap off my head any second and settle in the river 10,000 feet below.
We huddled together in a cove formed by the rocky ridge and marveled at the view, blue as smurfs, unsullied by any clouds. We feasted ravenously on trail mix, spread some peanut butter on pita bread for good measure, and split, rushing back down the mountain in pursuit of warmth.
Schwabby and I continued our conversation as we descended, discussing the different types of hobos, mapping out a taxonomy of sorts. Sad hobos, happy hobos, hairy hobos, very hairy hobos, shy hobos, extroverted hobos, traveling hobos, stationary hobos, artist hobos, preacher hobos, ecstatic hobos, inert hobos… hobos that looked like Jesus, others like John the Baptist, like Robin Williams or perhaps a Rastafarian.
When we reached the base, we immediately set out to make fire. We'd kill two birds with one stone in creating heat for ourselves and heat to cook dinner. Everybody assembled into task forces. Some collected sticks, some leaves, and others concerned themselves with the actual building and structure of the fire. I, on the other hand, took a unique responsibility upon myself. It was my job to secure the approval of the gods for our incendiary endeavor.
I did this by removing the plastic spatulas from my neck, and using them to perform a mystical shamanistic dance. I jumped crazed around the fire, making wild swoops with my arms, slapping the spatulas together, extending them into the escalating flames. I threw my shirt aside and felt the burn of sparks upon my skin, the steamy blusters of smoke stinging my eyes, transferred all my energy into the spatulas, and sure enough the teepee of sticks burst into flames. I was a fuckin' dragon, yo, and all were pleased.
"Keep it up, Platypus," applauded my comrades as they huddled around the fire and gathered their disposable cameras to capture my peculiar rite.
"The spatulas never fail," I proclaimed, and proceeded to give an esoteric lecture explaining their supernatural powers by citing the studies of the alternative botanist Carlos Castaneda, and explaining how glad I was that I could forego peyote and use a mere pair of spatulas to attain such power.
Instead of unanimous awe at my sagacity, I only received Brody's irreverent reply, "That's great and all, Richie, but uh… we kinda need the spatulas back so we can… cook dinner…"
"How dare you try to pry my steadfast ally from my hands! Surely you fear my power! You are in cahoots with the CIA to render me impotent! I'm on to you all! Outrageous heretics, every one! And to think I built you a fire! Now I shall drench you with rain!"
"Yeah, Richie!" congratulated Alison, but her attitude of praise was a clear minority.
"Real funny, man, but the spatulas aren't yours. We need them."
"If I wasn't a goddamn pacifist I'd slap you! But I shall take more peaceable measures, and contact the Pope with my request that you be excommunicated from the Catholic Church for you egregious blasphemy, unless I receive your written apology before night falls." And with that I stormed off, betrayed, spitefully retaining my spatulas, and harboring sinister intentions. Moose was the only one who joined me, for, being a clumsy lad, he was eager to avoid the duty of preparing dinner. I instructed him to begin hugging trees with wild abandon so as to appeal to Mother Nature. After solemnly apologizing to the gods for my fickle behavior, I removed my shoes, threw them at the nearest tent, and without delay launched a rain dance of equal intensity.
I leapt bafflingly through the center of the campground, swinging my arms in flabbergasting motions, screaming vulgar epithets and Jimi Hendrix lyrics at the sky, which immediately befell a bizarre green tint whilst the clouds turned to a menacing black. Within the minute, I felt raindrops on my shoulders. And a magnificent wind had gathered, outraged by the ungrateful actions of my company, as strong as that which we had experienced atop the mountain, but far angrier.
"Richie! What have you done!" Alison cried when she first felt the rain.
"Oh my god, I can't believe it! He actually made it rain!" cried Karin, a once-again devout soul, and indeed the rain suddenly became very great.
"Prins dude, you're crazy! Make it stop, we gotta sleep in this!" Schwabby lamented.
"Never! I shall not stop until just punishment is exacted for your heresy!" I announced, and with that, one of the tents collapsed in the whirling wind and flew haphazardly through the air, ruffling until it befell a tree. I was unaffected; I had chosen to sleep on the grass, under the stars, instead of in any perverted contraption so detached from nature as a tent.
"Screw the fire, save the tent!" was the consensus, yet their efforts were in vain, for at once the other tent fell. Because their flaps had been left ajar, they were immediately inundated by the powerful rain, which was now joined by fuming thunder and lightning which tore like scissors through the sky.
Moose asked if he had to keep hugging trees now that lightning was in the picture.
"Stop hugging trees? Are you kidding? Do you know what would happen to the word if we stopped hugging trees? The ecysostem would shrivel up and die for want of love and karmic vibes! Hug the damn trees, Moose, and gimme some Hare Krishna chants too, or I'll rip off your antlers!" He returned to hugging trees with renewed vigor and exaggerated goofiness.
Within ten minutes, all the tents were gathered together into one pile, soaked, with no attempt to erect them again. It was 45 degrees out. None of us were wearing anything more protective than a t-shirt, and our clothes and bodies were sopping wet.
"Yo, Platy, is there any chance that, you know, you can make this stop?" Koegel inquired.
"Hey, man, dig what I'm about. I'm an artist, right? Whether it's poetry or spatulas, the same theory applies. I create fire, I create rain—but I can't take anything away. That'd be no better than censorship. I'd be a veritable Tipper Gore. And you know how I feel about being a Democrat. Like Utah Phillips says, it's like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The weather's all up to the gods or Ralph Nader now, man."
"Well I'm freezing, let's get the hell out of here!"
"What do you mean? We can't just leave... we have no place to go".
"I was just at the bathroom. It's warmer in there…"
And so at once we abandoned all our gear, and ran up the hill to the common bathroom. In different circumstances one might think our dinner had been spliced with laxatives; of course, we had not been able to eat dinner. The path was laid out by pebbles, which bit my still-bare feet. Outside the bathroom many families on camping vacations gathered about the public sinks, washing their dishes and taking paid showers. Imagine their bewilderment at this horde of grungy teenagers piling together into the restroom. "One hell of a rainstorm, eh?" asked a hairy, middle-aged man with a potbelly and two pubescent children at his side.
"Yeah, it's all his fault", Moose responded, pointing at me.
"Oh, is it now?" chuckled his wife.
"Aw yeah, I kinda got a little carried away with these here spatulas. But don't worry, I don't think the lightning will strike you or anything— we're the ones being punished."
There were a few problems with the bathroom. It smelled of stale urine indeed, which was only exaggerated by the chemical sterilizers, but that was a small price to pay for refuge from the wet cold and battering wind. But it was a very small bathroom. We could hardly all fit, such that we had to fill the one stall. Which led to the main problem: The toilet gave shelter to a jaw-dropping, rank, hideous mess, which none of us wanted to come within ten feet of. Dave, in a chivalric attempt, pulled the flushing-lever, to little avail. And so it was up to me; I bravely approached the beast, came down to my knees, and waved the spatulas over the toilet in order to banish all malevolent spirits from the region. Then I pulled the lever, and watched the clutter vanish in the voracious whirlpool. Now the group cheered me; O how erratic are the masses! I would have exacted a damning harangue, but all this intimate togetherness in the bathroom, where we huddled together to generate added warmth, caused me to feel significantly less anti-social. And hence when Alison demanded that one of the boys demonstrate in full the wonders of the urinal, I didn't say anything about Freud, but complied jovially.
"This is what it's all about, man—27 people together in one bathroom, all watching me relieve myself. Can't top that. I love you all!"
Naturally, the humorous depravity of the situation got me and Schwabby talking about hobos again. We raided the toilet paper and wound lengthy strands raggedly around our heads and arms. And, although we had planned to perform the ditty we had written around a campfire, fire was obviously out of the question. So we decided the bathroom was suitable enough as a venue, and entreated everyone to clap their hands as we belted out each verse, and join in on the chorus: "scoop scoobie, hobos smokin' doobie" rang mightily through the bathroom, until two minutes later the same heavyset father we had encountered earlier peeked cautiously into the bathroom and told us to be quiet, for chrissakes, so his family could sleep. We apologized profusely, and this got us to thinking about sleep ourselves. This proved quite a conundrum, as the rain showed no sign of subsiding, and the bathroom didn't have enough room to even sit, let alone lie down.
"We don't need to sleep tonight!" was my claim.
Brody disagreed. "Yo, I don't know about you, but I hiked up a 10,000 foot mountain today. And I didn't get any dinner. No way I'm pulling an all-nighter."
"Then come sleep under the stars like I do."
"If the stars weren't raining that'd sound a lot nicer, Jesus!"
It was Moose who had the brilliant idea of returning to the vans. They would be relatively warm, and although congested, the seats were soft enough to sleep on. And so we made our exodus, and ran wildly down the hill in pursuit of the parking lot. Alison and I were sprinting side by side, screaming with awe at the chill, when suddenly the ground disappeared from beneath our strides, and we each found our faces plunged into moist muck.
"What the fuck is this!" was our mutual first question, and then we remembered that right in front of the parking lot was a drainage ditch, a five-foot-deep trench that felt like quicksand, but much dirtier.
"I lost my shoe!" she cried.
"Screw it! We'll look for it tomorrow!" I urged, having suffered no similar misfortune myself as I had no shoe to lose. I helped her back up to the level ground, and we ran desperately for the van.
Indeed, the van was not as warm as the bathroom had been, and we were wary about turning it on in order to generate heat because of the possible safety risks. We had a short period of conversation, mainly concerning our cold and hunger, and who we should kill first in order to eat and use their hollow carcass for warmth. Then we slowly drifted off to sleep. We had two vans, neither of which fit more than 14 people. And because we were 27 in all, we had 13.5 people in each van, a situation that was fine for travel, but not so idyllic for sleep. Some of us sat up straight, and slept with their heads against the frigid windows. Others slept stretched out under people's feet on the floor of the van. It was crowded, but we made it work.
I woke up prematurely to a familiar sound coming from the driver's seat. It was familiar in two ways: on the one hand because it belonged to my friend Brian, and on the other hand because it exactly emulated the sound of a rhino in the act of fornication I had heard on the Discovery channel a few years ago. I was about to yell at him in futile exasperation to demand that he quit snoring, but then I heard a high-pitched female voice that I could tell belonged to his close plutonic friend Vanessa, gasping ecstatically under her breath. I put two and two together, and decided that telling him to stop snoring would be most imprudent. I was unsure exactly what would be the prudent thing to do; cough and let them know I was listening? Hadn't they the right to know that their privacy wasn't unconditional? Or should I call upon the endless wisdom of Adam Sandlers masterpiece "The Waterboy", reason that "what Mama don't know don't hurt her", and try to get back to sleep? Or perhaps I should call Jerry Falwell himself and demand that he immediately send one of his finest evangelists to expose their degenerate minds to the evils of pre-marital sex so that Jesus might have pity on their poor souls, lawdavmercy! Or should I just step right up and join in the fun myself?
Fortunately, I didn't have to make a choice, and their encounter remained my secret, because just as the seat had begun to shake, Mike Jones, whom I had often heard before amidst vicious nightmares, filled the van with his desperate voice: "What! Where am I! Help! Help me!"
Everybody woke up and tended to his call of distress, reminding him of our whereabouts. I noticed that it was no longer pitch-black outside; light was peeking through the clouds. We tumbled out of the van. I went back to the ditch with Alison and wallowed in the muck until we dug up her shoe. It was dirty. So were we all. And cold. And shivering. But our spirits were high. Brian and Brody were beginning to fix breakfast. Brody called out to me, "Yo, Platypus, if I ask you for the spatulas are you gonna start another rainstorm?"
"Nah, man, I think we both learned our lesson well enough already," I replied, handing over my potent kitchen utensils, "Treat them with respect."