Travelin' Dog

So we've taken the dog on a road trip. He's riding with us in the van, and -- very sensibly -- he spends a fair amount of the travel time asleep on the floor. However, at one point we stop for a restroom/switch drivers break, meaning that Beautiful Wife and I go inside the rest stop while Secondborn and Crotchstomper remain in the van. 

I come back out first, and find that Crotchstomper has moved up from the center of the van to the passenger seat. Like, he's literally just standing there on the front passenger seat looking out the windows. Which is not okay, but it's kind of  okay because it's my turn to drive anyway. So I open the driver's side door, climb in, and give him the standard command for this: "Crotchstomper! Back! Get back! Back in the back!" 

He turns as if to go back to his spot... and then makes a full 360 and plants his butt so that he is now sitting in the passenger seat and looking forward, much as I have been doing for the last several hours. 

"I have an idea," says Secondborn, and goes to open the door. 

"Wait," I tell him. "Leave it. Your mom needs to see this." 

So Beautiful Wife returns to the van to find her loving husband ready to take over the driving, and her loving doggo ready to take over the passengering. Clearly, she is going to have to curl up on the blanket in the middle of the van; there's nothing else for it. 

"Crotchstomper," she says patiently, opening the passenger door, "Come on. Hop down." 

He obligingly exits the vehicle, and she closed the door behind him and the guides him back in through the side door. Anything to reclaim her seat, I guess...

Anyway, the dog has developed very definite ideas about how to travel in the van. 

Um... yeah?

I was going to write something for today, I really was. And normally it would have been pretty easy -- D&D is usually on Monday nights, so I can just drop my notes into a post, clean it up when I get home, and let it go up Tuesday morning. Alas, not this week. This week we're playing on Tuesday, so the game notes won't go up until Friday. And I don't have any particular fictions prepared -- I've been working on the book-length project, and that's where my brain is. 

Plus, I just worked a nine-hour day, of the which probably seven hours were spent catching up on email after being out of town for a week. 

It was a good vacation, but I'm not going to talk about it right now; that seems too much like work. So does downloading the pictures I took of Firstborn on his first college tour. 

Sweet baby Jesus, I'm old.

No, the vacation was good and restful and I am not going to spend my energy on things I think I should be doing; I'm going to put in some time on the writing project (a priority) and maybe Duolingo (a long-overdue but lesser priority), and then I'm going to go to bed (a priority) and get up and exercise (a priority) before tomorrow turns into a raging inferno (an inevitability).

Take care of yourselves; take care of each other. It's rough out there, and its getting rougher. Don't lose hope.

Annnd we're back

We've gone on the Great Family Odyssey to Tennessee, and returned alive if not entirely unscathed. Though we tried to squeeze as much vacation out of it as possible, this has definitely been more of a family gathering than an actual vacation. And it's been a curious mix of splendid fun and horrifying ordeal. And I may come back and explain all that, but...

It's Sunday night.
We just got in today at about four o'clock.
My head hurts.
I have no energy.
I have no brain.
I really need about three days to recuperate and get everything back in order.
I have to be at work tomorrow.

Whuf.

On top of everything else, I have this jagged little cut/bruise/thing on my forehead. (I'll be delighted to tell you any number of fanciful stories about how I got it. My personal favorite is the one about the rogue packs of mutant grizzly bear that roam the Arkansas hills, and how I had to head-butt one of them while they were trying to climb in through the window of our fourth-floor hotel room.) I suppose it might look cool if I was younger, but somehow "The Middle-Aged Man Who Lived" just doesn't have the same cachet, y'know?

Anyway...

Here's a picture of the boys in the one cave we managed to visit:

Under The Waterfall...

So, we took the boys hiking...

When we got down to the waterfall... No, let me back up a little bit. It's a decent hike, but the waterfall itself is one of those places that figures prominently in both my personal history and my even-more-personal mental landscape. The water comes out between two layers of sandstone, and tumbles down to an intermediate shelf, and then falls down another thirty feet or so into a pit and vanishes. There's no stream leading to it; there's no stream leading away from it. The water appears at the top, drops, then drops again and disappears.

Moreover, if you've followed the trail down then you've likely come out facing it from the intermediate level, but on the far side of the pit. So there you are, firmly on the earth, watching a waterfall that begins Above and ends Below. It has a very World Tree feel for me; it always has. It feels like it's connecting the realms, or at least it should be.

So when we got there, the boys took a few minutes to admire it, then noticed the little hole off to the far side: the one that looks like it would allow you to get down into the pit without having to scale wet limestone walls. Which is... mostly true. Naturally, they asked if they could go down there. Which was... mostly possible.

So I climbed down myself, making strategic use of a couple of logs that had fallen (or been shoved) into the hole. Then I had the boys ease over the edge so that I could grab them and lower them down.

Then they proceeded down the slope to the bottom of the pit.

All of this went perfectly well. We found a frog down there, and then a turtle. I even had them stop and pose for a picture together.

Then, we climbed back up. Well... Sort of.

The thing is, neither of them is tall enough to reach the holds needed to get back out. So I took Secondborn, showed him where to put his foot when he was high enough, and lifted him back up to the shelf, until he could find some handholds and push up with that foot. Then I grabbed Firstborn, who is substantially heavier; he ended up using my shoulder as a step, which was basically fine. Then it was time to get myself back out.

This was... more of a challenge. The handholds and footholds are there. Getting myself positioned so that I could use the ones I needed took a bit of preparation. Actually hauling/pushing myself out with them required what we used to call "a metric fuck-ton" of effort. So while I'd been doing fine on the hike itself, this was the strain that let me know that I'd finally really overdone it.

But, I made it out. Then I sat on a fallen log for about five minutes while my heart rate slowed, my breathing caught up, and my energy made half-hearted promises about someday coming back to me. I sat there with my head swimming and my guts hurting in that peculiar way that overexertion sometimes brings. It didn't help that I was at a higher altitude than I'd been in quite some time, or that the air was a lot more humid than I was acclimated to; but if we're being completely honest, neither of those things would have been much of a problem if I wasn't forty-mumble-mumble years old and if my cardio wasn't so bad. But I sat, and I recovered, and after a few minutes we started back towards the head of the trail.

The hike back up was almost, but not quite, entirely uphill.

Yeah.

Firstborn, meanwhile, for reasons that deserve a blog post of their very own, made the entire hike without needing a break and was ready for more at the end of it.

Las Vegas 3-Point Recap

Right, so, we're back -- and, as predicted, happy and refreshed, though it seems clear in hindsight that "coherent" was asking a bit too much. How was our trip? In a word: awesome. So, I'd like to fill in a few things that might have been missing from last week's explanatory email:

1. It turns out we were actually flying on Spirit airlines. Spirit's business strategy is to sell their plane tickets really, really cheap -- and then charge the everlovin' snot out of you for everything they possibly can. Want to choose your seats? That's an additional charge. Carry-on luggage? Additional charge. Checked luggage? Big additional charge. Drinks or snacks on board? It'll cost you. (If you read their literature, they're very insistent that they actually do this for your benefit -- after all, you only pay for the things you want!) Fortunately, we discovered this before we packed, so we were able to limit ourselves to sub-carry-on baggage. Five days worth of clothing in a case small enough to qualify as a "personal carried item": it can be done.

2. It turns out we were actually staying at the Cosmopolitan. We had a lovely, lovely room with a balcony that overlooked the Bellagio's fountains. Now, I wouldn't ordinarily consider polyamory -- nothing against it, it's just not for me -- but by the second day we were seriously considering making the giant bathtub and the walk-in shower full partners in our marriage. We did a fair amount of just hanging out in that room, trying to come to grips with the fact that we didn't have to be anywhere or be doing anything. I think it took us two days (and in my wife's case, a massage) before that really sank in. There was also a pool area with a hot tub, and we made good use of that, too.

3. Neither of us likes to gamble, so we saw some shows instead. (The end result is the same -- you go home with less money than you arrived with -- but we actually got something in exchange for our money.) We saw Zombie Burlesque and Absinthe and I would recommend them both very highly. Zombie Burlesque was exactly what it sounds like, corny and fun and funny, with singing and dancing zombies, wise-cracking zombies, a humans-versus-zombie rendition of the newlywed game, and an instructive dance to explain the mating habits of Jello and vodka. Absinthe was... how to describe it? Absinthe was what you might get if you took a Cirque du Soleil performance and shrank it down to fit in a circus tent, so that the performers were right there on a small round stage in the middle of the audience, and then dipped the whole thing in Raunchy Sauce. The host was a perfect distillation of the quintessential Vegas Asshole, from the rumpled suit to the slicked-back hair to the sleazy demeanor; he was also hilarious. And his assistant was a sort Manic Pixie Dream Girl Of Smut. I don't think I've laughed that hard in at least three years. We also went downtown and saw the Freemont Street Experience (in daylight, though, so arguably we only got the experience and not the Experience), and visited the Mob Museum.

All in all, it was a great time -- and the Beautiful Wife and I were long overdue for that sort of vacation.

An email to my mother...

Last night, I composed an email to my mother, who called me in the middle of the busiest day I've had in months to ask whether I had a few minutes to tell her where we would be staying on our long-weekend getaway to Vegas and perhaps chat for a bit about the events of the day. I have, finally, at 9:03 p.m., managed to assemble a comprehensive and informative answer, which should lay to rest any questions she has and waylay any and all of her concerns. It reads:

To: My mother
From: Me (naturally)
Subject: Las Vegas

I have, at this time some twelve or fourteen hours before our flight leaves, absolutely NO idea where we're staying, or what flight we're on, or when we leave, arrive, leave again, or arrive again. It's possible that we're staying in the Savoy, or maybe I only think so because I'm watching The Importance Of Being Earnest while I pack. It's possible that we're flying on Vision airlines, or maybe I just think so because that's the name of an album by Queen and it sounds comfortingly familiar. I suspect that if you really, desperately need to get in touch with us, the best route would be to call one or the other of our cell phones. Mine is XXX-XXX-XXXX. I remain passably certain that we will be in Las Vegas... somewhere. Also, I may just have packed a toothbrush and some Neosporin with which to clean my teeth.

Loyally Yours,

Michael

Perforce, there were very likely be no further posts on this blog until at least the middle of next week. Still, you're all lovely people, and very bright and capable, and I'm sure you'll all find ways to muddle through without me. You are welcome to assume that I shall be thinking of you fondly, or even missing you desperately, while the Beautiful Woman and I finally take a well-earned vacation together, but I'm afraid that simply won't be the case. Do take care of yourselves while we're away, though. With any luck, we'll both return happy and refreshed and perhaps even coherent.

Vacation Adventures: Family Picture

Okay, one last one: on the way back into Sewanee from the valley, we stopped at The Giant Rock On The Side Of The Road. (I'm sure it has a proper name, but I have no idea what that might be.) On the highway side, it's maybe twelve feet high. On the far side, of course, it's a sixty foot cliff. The boys went up it immediately.

On the top, we found a couple of Harley-riding Good Ol' Boys, who'd come up from Alabama. (We may have interrupted them in mid-cannabis, but I'm not sure; I only caught the vaguest whiff of something.) They were kind enough to take a picture for us, so here's our family photo from the top of a sixty foot cliff looking out over the valley. I've run it through a filter for artistic effect.

Vacation Adventures: On The Rocks

So, for my last installment of vacation pictures, here are various places where we took the boys hiking and exploring. Shortly after we arrived, we had the opportunity to go and listen to a performance on the Sewanee Carillon. (For a link that actually gives you some feel for the experience, watch this video.) Afterwards, we got to go up in the bell tower itself. It's... quite an experience:

Giant bell, with faces at the top.

Vacation Adventures: It's A Good Beginner Cave!

The second cave on our itinerary was Monteagle Saltpeter Cave. As the name suggests, it was used during the civil war to gather saltpeter (one of the primary ingredients of gunpowder). The cave itself is a dry, winding, two-level labyrinth. It's not complicated enough that there's any danger of getting really lost, it's dry enough that staying warm is easy, and the main passages are large enough for adults to walk comfortably. In other words, it would have been an ideal follow-up to Dry Cave, and in theory we wouldn't even need to hike to get to it.

Unfortunately, well... the cave itself is on public land. The easiest ways to get to the cave, however, require crossing private land. The route we used in my youth has been closed for years (the landowner doesn't want people hiking through his place), but there's an alternate route just a little ways away that involves driving through a quarry. Our plan was to stop at the quarry, get their permission to drive up to the cave, and go. This proved unexpectedly problematic, because the fellow who runs the quarry no longer owns the land -- as of fairly recently, he's just leasing it. As a result, the workers and the company owners don't have the authority to give people permission to drive through. The actual landowner does, though, and he has a little place just a bit further back up the road... only he wasn't home when we tried to find him, and he still wasn't home when we came back after going to get lunch.

During this time, we'd been texting and telephoning with people from various local outing clubs, and one of them suggested that we try Bible Springs Cave, instead. Bible Springs Cave wasn't one I'd been in before (or even heard of, for that matter) but it was widely considered "a good beginner cave", it didn't require any hiking to get to, and it wasn't all that far from where we were.

Now, my brother and I had spent most of the middle of the day scouting for a way to get to Monteagle Saltpeter Cave, while our wives and parents had stayed up at the house with the boys. By the time we'd decided to switch over to Bible Springs Cave, Secondborn had gone into full meltdown mode. (He's four, and he has molars coming in, so his moods are... erratic.) My wife ended up staying behind with him, while my brother's wife came down with the two older boys and their grandfather. Once we had everyone together, we caravaned over and (with only a little searching) found the entrance to Bible Springs Cave.

It's a crack in the rock. I suspect, at a less... August... time of year, that it usually has water flowing out of it. We took a quick survey, and decided to go for it. My father and my brother squeezed down through the crack, and we passed the two boys down to them. They immediately found themselves knee deep in fifty-four degree water, with a strong breeze blowing out of the cave. "Beginner cave my left buttock," observed my brother.

To be fair, it probably is a good beginner cave... for a group of fit, outdoorsy twenty-somethings with the proper equipment. Our group consisted of a grandfather in his seventies, three parents in their late thirties/early forties, and a pair of boys aged seven and eight; and we'd come equipped for a dry, winding cave. We forged boldly ahead anyway.

On the plus side, it was basically impossible to get lost. There was only one side passage that we encountered, and it reached a dead end almost immediately. Also, if there was any doubt, you could follow the wind towards the entrance: it was a constant, steady presence. On the minus side, after slogging through the cold water, we hit a waterfall about twenty feet in. The only way to go was up. It wasn't terribly high - maybe six feet, six and a half feet to the point where it started to level out again. So we sent my brother up to the top, and then I positioned myself so that my back was against the far wall and my foot was planted beside the waterfall, and we passed the two boys up to my brother. His wife went next, I followed, and Granddaddy came up behind us on his own.

This section of the cave was kind of a tight scrabble, and went to a crawl just beyond that. My brother's wife considered this, and said that with her claustrophobia she didn't want to try going any farther unless it opened up further ahead. So my brother went forward to scout, and found that while it did open up from a crawl, it was still a fairly constricted tunnel; there didn't seem to be any open rooms coming up any time soon. So his wife waited, and the rest of us went on.

Bible Springs Cave had one interesting feature that I don't think I'd run into before: rather than stalactites or stalagmites, it had bridges:

The boys were intrepid, undaunted by the cold water, the steady breeze, or the relatively tight confines. (Admittedly, it was a lot less tight for them...) So, while we were snaking our way back, I made them stop so I could get a picture:

Cousins. Intrepid. Undaunted.

We continued on, passing the boys around a corner which happened to feature a deeper spot of water, and then continued a bit further... to the point where the water got really deep. By then we were a bit out of our original marching order, so my son ended up lying on my brother's back, while my nephew ended up riding on mine. The idea was that we, the adults, would do the cold, wet slogging, while the boys would remain reasonably warm and dry by riding on top of us.

So there I was, hunched over in waist-deep water (at fifty-four degrees fahrenheit, mind you) with a steady breeze blowing into my face and a seven-year-old on my back, following my brother. (He apologized for the view.) I had a mess of glow sticks in the side pocket of my cargo pants; now that they were two feet underwater, they promptly floated out. My nephew had a good time grabbing them out of the water. My camera, by the way, was a gift from my brother and his wife. They bought it after my original camera died a horrible death on a playground, and it was designed to be impact resistant and waterproof to a depth of sixteen feet. I don't know about the "sixteen feet" part, but it survived a decent trek under a good eight inches of water.

Then, perhaps inevitably, the cave narrowed again. We could probably have gotten through it, but not without getting the boys (and ourselves) all the way into the water. I could already feel the water sucking away my body heat and my energy, so there was no way we were going to put the boys into that. I have a lot more... um... padding... Well, okay, fat... than either of those boys do; if the water was doing this to me, they'd have been shivering and miserable immediately. So, instead, we turned back. Well, not turned, exactly. We more sort of backed up until we finally could turn around.

Then we retraced our steps, lowered everyone back down the waterfall, and squeezed back out the entrance. At that point, we declared victory and went back to the house.

So at this point, all three boys have been inside a large cavern with no running water, and the older two have been in a tight, twisty, crawly cave with a stream running through it. That was, quite frankly, a bit more of an Authentic Caving Experience than I'd had in mind for them, but they handled it beautifully.

Vacation Adventures: Dry Cave

Last week was a family vacation - out of town, with essentially no Internet connection. So, basically, we took three families and stayed at a house in the Monteagle/Sewanee area of Tennessee, about halfway between Nashville and Chattanooga. Our crowd (myself, the Beautiful Wife, and the two boys) had one bedroom; my brother's crowd (brother, his wife, their son, and their dog) had another; and our parents had the third. One of the goals for the trip was to introduce the boys to caving, the way my brother and I had grown up with it -- and, not incidentally, do some spelunking ourselves.

The Entrance to Dry Cave.

This was the first cave we tried on this trip; it's called Dry Cave, presumably to distinguish it from Wet Cave, which is just down the road a bit (and currently not open to visitors). Basically, you start in Sewanee, drive down to the foot of the mountain, and then hike back up a ways until you come to a massive sinkhole; the entrance to the cave is off on one side of the sinkhole.

Dry Cave is basically one big room, with a high ceiling and only a single side-passage (and that not terribly long). It's a good beginner cave: a reasonably larger entrance, plenty of room so you can stand up straight, and (of course) dry, so it's easy to stay warm enough. The most difficult part of it was the hike, which was fairly steeply uphill on the way in. I went around the walls leaving glow sticks (chemical lights) at regular intervals; then we had everybody stand in the middle and turn their lights off for a minute. (Then, on the way out, I had to go back around the walls and collect all the glow sticks -- don't want to trash up the cave, after all.) The boys all seemed to enjoy the experience; so did their grandfather.

My father, sitting on a stalagmite, because he can.

My two boys in the middle of the cave.

Also my two boys in the middle of the cave.

After that, we went back outside...

My nephew emerging from the cave.

Firstborn emerging from the cave.

Our second attempt was going to be Monteagle Saltpeter Cave, a site where they'd gathered saltpeter for gunpowder during the civil war. That one... didn't go quite as expected.

Vacation Adventures: The Bathroom Of TERROR!

This will be the first in a series of vignettes from our recent vacation. For those coming in late, we just spent a week on the Cumberland Plateau, in and around Monteagle and Sewanee, Tennessee. This particular event occurred on Saturday, on the drive back home, as we were crossing ::melodramatic shudder:: Arkansas...

The parking lot was in poor shape: worn, patched, then eroded further. Its pitted, uneven surface jounced the car as we rolled across it, and puddles from the recent rain splashed as we drove through them. The gas pumps were deserted, and the only vehicles in sight were a tractor-trailer rig parked way off at one edge of the lot, and two or three smaller vehicles around the back. The sign in the window said "OPEN", but there was nobody in sight. If it hadn't been an emergency, we would never have stopped here; it looked like the opening scene to every horror movie ever made.

Unfortunately, when you get on the highway and your eight-year-old says, "I know my timing is really bad..." Well, you stop at the next available toilet, no matter how it looks. It had taken six miles -- six full minutes -- to get here. I didn't know how much time we had left.

So my beautiful wife edged the car into one of the spaces beside the door, and Firstborn and I got out. We made for the nearest door, which had a sign on it: "This is a SMOKING FACILITY. No one under age 21 is allowed inside." I opened the door and motioned for Firstborn to follow me in.

It wasn't a gas station; it was a dive bar that shared the same building, and it was dark, smoky, and warm. The sign wasn't kidding; the air inside was positively soaked in cigarette smoke. The only occupants were a couple sitting at a table in the back, smoking. If they were the sole source of the smoke in the room, they must have been at it for hours -- or possibly days. I said, "Y'all got a restroom we could use?"

The man nodded towards the door which connected the bar to the gas station store. "In there. It's kinda dark, though. We're having trouble with the power."

"Dark, we can handle," I said. "Thanks."

Me and my big mouth.

So we crossed into the store, and obviously they were having power trouble. The overhead fluorescents were on... but only barely. They were faint glowing beams on the ceiling; most of the light came from the windows. I wondered about the drinks in the refrigerated cases, but I didn't stop to look. We crossed to the hallway that led back to the restrooms; it was darker than the main area, but we could still see well enough to pick out the door for the men's room.

It was almost completely dark inside. There was somebody coming out just as we came in; he'd been using the screen of his phone as flashlight. I decided to follow his example, and we stepped inside. Firstborn wasn't visibly perturbed by the idea of stepping into very-nearly-pitch blackness; possibly he was too desperate for a toilet to care. We let the door swing shut behind us.

The only light was the overhead fluorescents, and they were just faint glowing streaks on the ceiling. If we stood there long enough, our eyes would probably adjust enough to see by their light, but for the moment they were essentially the only things visible. I couldn't even tell what size of room we were in. I raised the lighted screen, and Firstborn said: "That looks like a potty."

We opened the stall door, and I took a moment to make sure that the seat was clean and the dispenser had toilet paper in it. Then I let the door swing mostly shut, and stood outside it with my arm stuck through the opening so Firstborn could see. He went about his business, and I waited. After a moment, something rattled, and Firstborn said: "The toilet paper isn't attached too well."

This didn't surprise me at all. "It's okay," I told him. "Just finish up." I still couldn't see anything around me, and I was having flashes of both the Silent Hill bathroom scene and the elevator ghost prank video.

Finally, he comes back out of the stall... but, just as we've taught him, he has to wash his hands. Our eyes have kind of adjusted (though not nearly enough, yet) and we can see the sinks. I take a moment to wave the screen around the room: two stalls, two urinals, some sad-looking walls, the two sinks, and a pair of mirrors with indecipherable script written along the bottom edges. It looks like the stuff that taggers leave behind.

So we step back out into the hallway, and find the paper towel dispenser on the far wall. Once his hands are dry, we head for the car... only there are probably three guys standing in the store, and even out here it's dark enough that I can't really make out their features. They're all smoking, of course; I speculate that probably do it just for the momentary relief provided by their lighters against the darkness, but I don't say anything out loud. Firstborn navigates between them fearlessly, heading back the way we came in: through the bar. "This way, Firstborn," I tell him. I indicate the door that leads directly outside. "Go towards the light."

One of the guys chuckles. "Go towards the light," he repeats -- not mockingly, but like it struck him funny. Probably just a bunch of perfectly ordinary guys... you know, the kind who enjoy hanging around in extremely dark and smoky buildings in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the day. I grin at him, radiating friendliness like it was some sort of social armor.

Firstborn and I go outside, and get in the car.

"So, how was it?" asks my wife.

I make a little comme ci comme ça gesture. "Eh."

She puts a hand on her seatbelt. "Can I go in now?" she asks.

"No," say Firstborn and I, in concert.