Chapter 12.
From Santa Rosa Island to La
Canada
Straight off the pier, the boat swung left and throttled up to full speed. The crew started remounting the rails on the back. The one on the port side had a broken support. The hand was talking to a passenger, “Don’t lean on it,” joking as if they’d had this discussion before. Later I tested it and decided that it was in fact not a good idea to lean on it.
I turned on the GPS receiver. The batteries were fresh; I would just leave it on through the whole trip and get a good course. I could leave it in the top of the daypack with the daypack sitting upright and it would probably track well enough. Also, anytime I liked, I could check the time, position, and ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival).
People started settling down for the long cruise, staking out benches and places on the deck with their gear and themselves. We were on the inside side of the last bench at the port stern. This bench faced north where there was nothing to be seen, but as people moved about, I had opportunity to sit across on occasion and face south as well. Katy staked out the bench mostly for reading and napping.
One of the women who we had seen sitting by that last creek walked by. She was wearing a hearing aid, though she must have been younger than me. In the other ear (she walked back past the other direction in a moment) was an earplug made of tissue paper. I pointed this out to Katy.
“Why didn’t you do that,” she asked. “You could have gone swimming.”
“It wouldn’t do any good in water, but it would have been great in the wind at night, if it blocked any noise.”
Santa Rosa was fading into the background in the same way that it had appeared. In the ever-present haze, barely any detail was visible any more. There were just the two points and the island in the middle.
At Katy’s urging, I went up into the cabin and stuck my head into the bridge, asking what kind of candy they had. For a dollar each, I bought two Milky Ways and one Coke, forgetting again that Katy wasn’t supposed to drink a soft drink because of her braces. I looked straight up, there was Andrea sitting in the back of the bridge on the bulkhead.
“Oh, there you are,” I said, surprised and not knowing what to say.
“Yep.”
Back out on deck, I handed over our civilized foods.
“I like Milky Ways,” Katy said, “They’re like Three Musketeers but with caramel. I like caramel.”
I hadn’t noticed until now, but we were making a beeline for West Point on Santa Cruz. There was a buzz among the passengers. Against the towering cliffs that made up the point were great waves that resulted when modest swells collided with them. I took a picture, our little camera ever unable to grasp this grandeur. Each scene was different, fascinating. I pointed this out to Katy. She acknowledged and went back to her book.
I was content for this half-day trip to just sit and watch the scenery change slowly, especially as we were near the long Santa Cruz Island. This was a rare opportunity.
We stayed close to the cliffs, sometimes it seemed like we were less than 100 yards off the rocks. I wondered about all those wrecks out here. Surely all the reefs were known by now. Surely the skipper knew all that was known. Surely he had been here many times before without incident.
Painted Cave
Soon it was apparent why we were hugging the north coastline of west Santa Cruz so closely. We were going to visit Painted Cave.
At first it appeared to be just another cove in the rock, a dangerous place for boating on the sea side or for hiking on the land, but our boat slowed and began to turn into a small lee and a great cave opened before us between the rocks. Andrea got on the microphone and described Painted Cave. This had been a sacred place to the Chumash. That was easy to believe. Far up the negative-slope walls, we could see smaller side caves.
The skipper jumped up to the controls on top, donning a hat and looking quite serious. Most of the passengers crowded the rails at the bow. We slowed some more but continued to coast forward into the dark opening. We were proceeding on into the next chamber, one that was perhaps only fifty feet wide and fifty feet high. Large enough for the boat, if no one moved much. We could see the rocks illuminated in the water below. The aroma was that of beneath an outhouse. A dead sea lion floated in the water ahead decomposed to the point of looking like some kind of litter, perhaps a lost deck chair.
Our eyes adjusted to the light here one or two hundred feet into the cave. Andrea was telling about the various plant life growing on the walls that gave it the “painted” appearance. She also said that the cave was known to go half a mile deep into the island and that beyond that it was said that it continued to an exit elsewhere in another cove, but no one but sea lions had ever discovered the whole route.
We were inching forward still. The next chamber entrance appeared to be only about ten feet wider than the boat and the skipper would have to duck if we kept going. Handling the dual diesels with finesse, he brought us to a stop right at the threshold. All of the grown ups on the bow were beginning to look very nervous. Some even turned to indicate to the skipper that we were too close. Katy was reaching over the rail trying to touch the wall.
“Closer! Closer! Awwww.” She was disappointed, couldn’t quite touch it. I couldn’t either, quite.
There was nervous laughter. A good swell could wash us right onto the rock face. We would probably live, but it would be a long wait getting rescued and all. The crew had probably checked that no container ships were passing just then before we went in. The wake from one of those had produced the only important swells on our cave kayaking trip two weeks ago.
It was clear that a kayak could go much further into the cave. In the deepening darkness within, we could only see another one or two hundred feet and another couple of chambers. All was quite calm and still.
The skipper had had enough. With the same care and delicate finesse, he began to back out. The pneumatic relays could be heard as he coaxed the relatively huge boat back out exactly the same way it had entered. The rocks below were still there as we passed the next level, so were the side caves above. We were getting to where we could see full daylight beyond the lee once again.
When the opening had reached a width that I wasn’t sure I could turn the car in, he swung the rear to starboard and coasted the nose over to the outward direction. People were drifting back to their places in the back. We weren’t even past the outer rocks in the opening yet when I passed the bridge and, glancing at the skipper, saw him laying in what must be the course for Oxnard on his control panel. He seemed to be sighting right over the compass. We were back at full throttle and soon back out in full sea and sun.
The Painted Cave receded behind us, gradually becoming just another dark inlet in the variegated side of the island.
The sea wasn’t as smooth now as it had been coming out, perhaps because it was later in the day, but it didn’t matter. The following sea and winds weren’t quite keeping up with our clip. We would come up on swells from behind and ride over them ever so slowly. The diesel smoke sometimes hung just behind us and sometimes drifted a little backwards.
We were moving away from the island gradually as our “little bit north of east” course took us towards the mainland. The passing coves and cliffs weren’t nearly as close anymore. The rhythm of the twin diesels sounded just right. The ETA was most of an hour earlier than scheduled. I began making mental notes of the features on the island so I could track our progress visually. This was difficult. Although each section of the island was unique, I had no mental handle on how to distinguish any one set of cliffs from another. More particular familiarity with these areas would be the only solution.
The boat slowed. Passengers started looking around. I came out of my reverie.
“Katy, maybe it’s a Blue Whale.” People were moving to the front. The skipper and another crew member came back and asked us all to move to the bow area. We all began moving forward. They opened up the seat that was the hatch to the engine room and light smoke drifted out. This wasn’t diesel exhaust however; something was hot down there. Hotter than it was supposed to be.
I snapped a picture of the skipper going below. The film stopped, meaning that it was the last one on this roll. I started rewinding. The boat coasted nearly to a stop, the skiff wandering off to one side behind us. Andrea came back and started handling its tow line.
One Blown Engine
We made our way to the starboard bow. The scenery wasn’t changing much now. Things were being said in the cockpit from which I might have caught a hint of what was going on, but nervous passengers were babbling around us and I couldn’t catch enough fragments to piece together a coherent story.
“You ready to swim?” the man behind me asked, motioning to the cliffs of Santa Cruz, a mile or two away.
“Absolutely!” my way of dealing with the stress was to project total, irrational confidence. Swimming to shore, now that would be something to do.
We bobbed in the waves, now catching us easily. The scenery still wasn’t changing but we were still moving forward slightly. An engine surged. We moved forward faster then it stopped again. More bobbing in the waves. One hand discussed with another why this was dangerous. The other one indicated that in heavier seas, the waves could wash over the boat from the back. He had seen it happen. You just had to brace yourself, hang on, and expect to be cold.
These waves weren’t going to wash over the boat, not unless we got into the rocks way off over there.
Word filtered up that we had a blown engine, something about a burned up valve. This wasn’t that unusual, somebody was saying. It was one of two engines. Ah…. I turned to the guy behind me again, “I hate it when my car does that; it only has one engine.” He wasn’t that amused.
One of the mates turned the boat around, now we were headed upwind, the way we came. Maybe this was to blow smoke out of the engine room. We really danced in the waves now, and to a different view. The sun’s current angle made beautiful green and blue colors of the waves. The skiff followed the U-turn in a nice, clean circle. The scenery to the south still hadn’t changed.
The skipper returned to the bridge and made an announcement over the public address system. I wasn’t near a speaker and didn’t catch all of this either, but it looked like we would be returning to Oxnard on one engine, the other being shot beyond field repair at the moment. He started to swing the boat back to the east as we returned to our benches.
The remaining engine didn’t come up to the accustomed RPM and seemed to struggle more in the waves. Also, the boat fishtailed for the rest of the trip, swinging a 15-20 degree arc with the center presumably being somewhere close to our desired heading.
I wondered how this all worked.
Was there a transmission that coupled one or both engines to
whatever props there were? If so, it
was doing a completely different job now than it had been before, one
that it
could certainly do but for which it was far from optimized. How much slower would it be?
Once we were cruising again, I checked GPS
and found it wandering from 17-20 kilometers/hour.
We were probably doing about 18, some 70% of the two-engine
speed. The ETA was had returned to the
scheduled
6:30 p.m. No problems with wanting to
be picked up early after all. See?
That made sense, the speed at half power would be much more than half speed because the resistance of the water and the trim wouldn’t be anywhere near linear in this operating regime. I noticed, though, that the pitch of the boat no longer had the bow 5-10 degrees up, sighting a railing against the horizon. It was nearly level in the water. A flat run.
Well, so we were having a little adventure after all. Returning on one engine and my pair of glasses. Single string both, now.
Katy continued reading her book, unimpressed.
Someone had a bag of microwave popcorn. Katy wanted one too. It did smell good. I said, “No, we’ll make a batch at home,” thinking that $3.00 was enough to spend on junk food on the boat.
The skipper came around talking to the concerned passengers. He assured people that everything was under control. He seemed a bit older and less jovial than before, the burdens of command, perhaps, but he didn’t seem the slightest bit worried, the sign of a true commander, whether an accurate reflection of reality or not.
We were getting too far from Santa Cruz to see much detail. I got Dostoevsky out and looked over the next chapter. It wouldn’t be a bad prioritization to read a chapter or two while we fishtailed for the next couple of hours. I started the book titled “The Boys.”
The boat slowed again. “What now,” everybody thought. One of the San Miguel parties seemed very nervous this time. The skipper went down to the engine room again. The hand above said, “He’s trying one more thing.” So this meant hope we might get back to two engines.
We puttered ahead for a few minutes then ran on both engines for five seconds, then back to sloshing in the waves. The skipper came back up; we got going again with the one engine. Guess not.
Someone else had popcorn. Katy pestered me about it again. Still “No.”
Let’s see, we were down to one engine. If it failed for some reason it would mean a rescue. That wouldn’t be too bad except that we would have to wait while another boat came out to us, then we’d have to transfer over, then we’d have to motor back in it. It would be late tonight before we got to the dock that way, four or five hours from now at the least. Or maybe we’d be towed in. That would take a long time too.
Other parties were talking and gossiping around on deck, acting nonchalant about the discomforts of camping, trying to act suave as if they were at the office, or wherever they were when they felt most clean and comfortable. One woman said, “I’m hungry.” Somebody in her party replied to the effect that they had plenty of camp food. “None of that stuff,” she retorted, “I want real food.” I didn’t know what “real food” was for her, but I was looking forward to Jack In The Box myself, not so much for the food itself, but just on the principle of being back on the busy mainland.
Another woman in shorts and chaps came briskly back from the bow and stood at the stern railing. “The seasick remedy” I thought, not as empathetic as I might have been. She stripped down to her swimsuit top, seeming determined to conquer and stood there breathing the diesel fumes with a purpose.
We weren’t going fast enough to stay ahead of the waves and winds now. Sometimes the exhaust would hang behind us; more often it would overtake us. The waves slowly came up from behind, contributing greatly to the fishtailing. The engine would grind down into a swell then race a little ahead in the trough. I concentrated on the pattern so it would seem familiar (as the two engine version had for the previous five boating hours) and then I could think about other things without subconsciously worrying about the boat.
Kind of like all the little aftershocks on earthquake day. You start at every bump until you get trained.
Now the family of three was eating popcorn. Katy pleaded yet again. “OK, go ask how much it costs.” She leaped up and was gone for five minutes.
“Two dollars.”
“OK, here,” I handed her two more dollars, dutifully writing it down on the record card in my wallet. Writing down each expenditure was as much an impediment to spending money as anything else you could do.
She was gone five more minutes then appeared in the door of the cabin. Most of the people spending the whole ride in the cabin were asleep.
“What are you doing?” I called out.
“Waiting for it to pop.”
In yet another five minutes she brought back a bag of microwave popcorn. We opened it, the seasick lady, apparently done, immediately returned forward and disappeared towards the bow.
“Thank you daddy.”
“You’re welcome, sweety.” I spoiled the children at times. No wonder they had learned how to whine.
I guessed even with one engine there was enough power left to run the microwave oven. Actually, I thought, there was probably a separate motor for the electricity, based on what we’d noticed while on the buoy back at the pier. Even when the big diesels were off, a smaller motor had kept running.
We finished the popcorn. I went back to sightseeing, Katy to her book.
“What’s that?” I asked her, pointing to the starboard bow where it appeared there were two big boxes in the water near the horizon east of east Santa Cruz.
“I don’t know,” back to the book.
They were kind of sandy-rusty colored and seemed to be just sitting there. They were certainly a matched pair of container vessels in the shipping lane, but it was hard to see the objects from this distance in any way that looked like a ship at all. For the next hour, the view of them slowly changed. They never looked like ships
The Red and White Towel
After a couple of chapters and another GPS consultation, I was tired of my book and back in a sight seeing mood. The Anacapas were silhouettes in the south. There had been no more stops. On one engine and going slow, I doubted we would be going out of our way for any more wildlife viewing. GPS said we were about ten miles out, about another hour at this rate. I would have to speak to my “oil crises” discussion group about maritime fuel usage. It was clearly a different beast from land mobile. I took out the ham radio, set it to the frequencies that I knew Viann’s radio was supposed to be on, and gave one call, “WD5EHM from N5BF.” This was a long way for direct, but it was all over water. No reply, she probably wasn’t listening. Probably wasn’t even there yet. We had not made prior arrangement; this was the only call that I would make.
I walked up to the front. The skipper was at the wheel, concentrating on his driving, Andrea was sitting on the box at the back, and the rest of the crew was on the bridge. The radio said something I couldn’t make out, they all smiled. Somebody back on land was joking with the skipper about his engine problem. There they all were, responsible for our lives, acting calm, showing no tension, but I knew what it was like to be twenty-or-thirty-something and in charge of the equivalent of a boatload of people. It looked like we had it made. They were joking around to dissipate tension. There had been a time when I would have envied the “insidership” of this banter or even tried to join in as an outsider, but not now. They had their roles and I had mine. Mine was plenty complicated. I watched the waves from the bow for a while then returned to Katy at the back.
The sun was getting low enough that the sea behind us was drifting from bright to yellow to orange. The elder Katherine was on the seat across from us, folded up, staring backwards. I looked that direction. There was nothing but bright sea and sun; all islands were out of view in that direction. She seemed totally contented, totally at home in this place, in this whole experience. She smiled toward the beginning of the sunset the same as she had on the road when we had passed her in the truck yesterday.
Now that was enviable. She had a sense of peace and belonging and feeling that this was exactly the right place to be. Still, I didn’t see what she saw out there. Maybe it wasn’t just seeing.
I was reading a lot into people without saying anything to them. My neighbor Chris Smith wouldn’t do that; he would strike up a conversation and learn what was going on with such a person. Now that I wasn’t sea sick, I could see how a man could love the sea, how they could spend much of their life on boats going back and forth to wherever somebody willing to pay sent them. I was able to project that contentment onto the current trip, slow going though it was. I wasn’t impatient at all, but my thoughts were all to the east. This trip was tiny compared to a real sea voyage, and the sea state, at worse, quite calm compared to what was possible out there.
I checked GPS again, 20 minutes. We should be seeing the mainland now. Yes, there was the power plant over to the right and Ventura on the left. The viewing was fairly clear. A sailboat was tacking around just outside the harbor far ahead. I couldn’t make out the buoy yet. I looked at Katy’s book; she was nearly finished.
Why don’t you finish that chapter and then we’ll go stand on the front and wave.
“OK.” She continued reading, absorbed, as we fishtailed on towards Oxnard.
It was getting a little chilly. I got out my chaps and put them on. Katy was wearing her pink sweatshirt but had been nearly from the beginning.
“You know,” I said in a low stage voice, “camping is just spending the weekend fooling with cantankerous zippers.” I was trying to get the zipper on the chaps just right.
Nobody in earshot thought this was funny.
I checked the time against Katy’s book progress, getting nervous. I didn’t want to miss the homecoming. She finally came to the end of the penultimate chapter. I stopped her before she went further. “Come on, let’s go.”
We went to the starboard bow, but Katy thought we should stand on the port bow. We argued this for a minute then decided to stay starboard. This would have the most direct view of the water break where John and Viann had waved from Friday.
The sailboat was off to starboard too, still tacking around. After sailing at Catalina I had a little better feel for the leisure pace of sailing in boats of that size. He turned broadly as if to follow us into port. The buoy was coming into view on the left. The red and green colors were correct for a boat departing. That didn’t seem right, but it must be the convention. There were no sea lions out this evening.
I tried explaining to Katy the convention about sailboats and steamers. On the sailboats, the wheel was at the back and the bilge at the front, down wind. The wind was mostly behind you blowing over a sailboat from stern to stem. In addition, it was easier to rig the wheel back by the rudder. When they introduced steamers, this convention changed. The wind was mostly in your face; the bridge went to the front and the galley to the back. Of course, both conditions could happen on both kinds of boats, it depended on the weather but the conventions dealt with what was usual, not “always.”
The skipper came on to give the obligatory Island Packers commercial and our instructions for arrival. We were only 11-1/2 minutes late. “Not bad,” he said, “considering just one engine.” Day hikers would get off first then campers would form the bucket brigade from the boat all the way up the dock to unload everyone's gear at once.
A kid was swimming at the beach ahead to the right. He seemed to be alone there. He got out, ran up in the sand and got a towel. His motions with the towel looked familiar and distinctive. “That could be John,” I thought, scanning for Viann. Yes, there was someone reading in a chair up the beach. It nearly had to be them.
“Katy, is that John there?” I said, pointing.
“No, I don’t think so…. Wait, that’s a red and white striped towel just like ours. Maybe it is John. Where’s momma?”
I pointed. We started waving; John saw us and started waving back. He ran up excitedly to his mother and she got up and started waving too. We were nearly home.
“Where’s Viannah?” Katy asked.
“At band camp.”
”Oh, that’s right.”
The skipper was announcing items that Island Packers had for sale. The office was still open. They had books and those little park patches that people collected.
“You can collect National Park patches for your backpack,” I mused. We had seen some on people’s gear and clothing. “Grand Canyon” seemed a favorite in our crowd. If I had one of those, maybe I would get one of these. But I didn’t and so I didn't. I didn't have my own pack to put patches on anyway.
We slowed to harbor speed. Five people were out in a racing canoe practicing their stroke and maneuvering. One of our passengers cheered them on. They were quite proficient, chopping at the water with exacting, abrupt strokes under the command of the man in the front.
“I thought the guy in back was giving the orders,” Katy said.
“I think it’s the guy in front, he can’t see anyone else.” I really didn’t know.
They came about smartly, the rear paddler providing rudder for an exact amount of time, and headed the other way.
We coasted past the bait barge, “No Trespassing.” Then it was the Park Service boats and the Island Packer’s pier. There was our slip. The skipper was up on top again. I remarked to Katy that he would have to bring it in on one engine and that would be a little different than he was used to.
“He would have had that as part of his training,” she countered.
“Yes, but he probably doesn’t practice it very often.”
We were swinging around to back in. You couldn’t tell watching from a distance that anything was unusual. One hand was bringing the skiff up. Another was waiting on the lines right by us.
“We’ll see how he does on one engine,” he muttered in my direction.
“Yeah.”
You couldn’t tell watching from the rail that anything was unusual either. In standard form, there we were coasting up to a perfect stop in place just the way we had left on Friday.
We made our way to our daypack and canteen at the back. Viann and John were waving from the shore.
“Well,” I announced to Judy and the other fellow campers getting their things together in our area, “Lived through another one.”
They all nodded assent.
I reached in the daypack and turned the GPS off. We were 0.1 km from ISLPKR. That sort of error was typical.
We stepped off the boat, carried our day gear up to the land-end of the ramp, said our hellos and got hugs, then went back down to join the gear brigade. We were in the middle, Katy before me and the dad from the family of three after. Gear started coming off. Those surfboards were ultra light! Most packs, including ours, were lighter than they had been. A lone wheel went by.
A couple of kayaks came up. One brigadier diverted them off to the dock. “Hey, you broke the chain,” I hollered over.
Pack after pack, some large, some just hand items. The rest of the cart and the other wheel went by. “Now this is a good idea,” I said to the man next after me.
“Yes, something like that would be very useful,” he agreed.
We had not seen the cart in use on Santa Rosa. We could have missed it or it could have been going to San Miguel.
More gear. Viann was helping at the top of the ramp to spread things out where people could find them. Some were already loading cars.
More gear. More kayaks from down
below. Finally we were done.
We were released. We headed up the
ramp.
“Do you want me to carry your pack,” Viann asked.
“Oh no, I’ll get it.” One always has to finish what one starts. This was my irregular interpretation of that saying.
The two intrepid kayakers passed by carrying their two boats. “See ya, good bye!”
Andrea went by with a storage box full of her stuff, “Good bye.”
People were dispersing. “Do you want to say good bye to anyone,” Viann asked.
It was kind of all or nothing. We could introduce everybody around, learning names that we hadn’t learned in three days together, or we could make our way to the car and drive away like everybody else was doing.
I decided on ‘nothing,’ “We had plenty of bonding time on the boat,” I said.
Jack In The Box
The van was right there. We lugged our stuff into the back and went around to get in ourselves. Katy and John were already fighting about something, placement, use of some toy, the towel, something.
Now we were home.
Viann started up, we drove away. I didn’t attempt to write down mileage or anything as I had in all the prior trips, I just scribbled “7:07” in my notes. Surely it didn’t matter did it? There was her radio on the floor. She had brought it anyway. I checked it. Yes, it was on that frequency that I thought. I turned it off and put it back down.
It was over. I didn’t feel
sentimental. Didn’t have the energy.
John had just turned ten; we were letting him stay home alone now, when necessary. He had done this today. I asked how it went.
He had been asleep when Viann left for work, then she called him later. He had played a little Nintendo, watched a little TV, used the computer some. That sounded totally normal. Then about noon, Viann had called Mandy Farrington, Bryce’s mother, and had her come pick him up for the afternoon. That had gone fine too.
The bill at La Quinta Friday had been a little higher than expected; the Nintendo costed per hour, only the first hour was free. I had noticed something about this on Thursday night, a “free time” counter ticking down. It had been $7/hour for three additional hours.
“Why did you play that when we have Nintendo at home,” I asked.
“Because they have games we don’t have,” John replied. The answer was obvious. We passed the stoplight and exited the harbor. The people in an adjacent car looked familiar but on closer inspection, they weren’t anyone we knew from the trip. A couple of miles further, we passed the La Quinta and got on the freeway.
“How did Viannah do Thursday night?” I asked. Viannah had been home alone herself Thursday night, Maggie across the street was supposed to check up on her.
“She came home sick, early. Maggie didn’t know about it until later. She did OK. You want to go eat?”
We both did. “I want to go to Jack In The Box, but it’s real hard to find from here, it’s in an awful location.”
We passed a Burger King; I thought it was near that. We got off, circled back, didn’t find it.
“I think we missed it,” I said, irritably.
We got on the freeway going back, and came all the way back to the Victory Exit again. Viann got off. We turned under freeway to get back on eastbound again. There was La Quinta again, and the ice cream place next door.
“It’s nearly impossible to find, I said, let’s just go on.”
“Is it the one over on 23?” she asked.
“No, that’s a Wendy’s.” This kind of confusion made things even worse, it seemed to me. “Just go on, we’ll eat at home.”
“I don’t think we went far enough.”
“OK, whatever.” I was irritable too.
We started telling the major stories of the trip. Katy wanted to start from the beginning. I wanted to start from the end, the part that I remembered best. We covered the dolphins, and Painted Cave, and the blown engine, and the lost contact lens. And the wind.
“You like wind?” I asked. “You’d like these islands.”
“Is this where it is?” Viann asked, referring to the Jack In The Box.
“No, we must have passed it, it’s nearly
impossible to see.”
“I think it’s here.”
”Well, get off then.”
We got off. There it was. We drove around to it. It wasn’t that hard to see. Or get to. Not if you knew where you were.
We went in and ordered. I got the standard #5 plus 7 stuffed jalapenos. The Dr. Pepper wasn’t working. John and I, disappointed, got Root Beer. My pants were still filthy; they were the only thing I had to wear. My shirt was too, but I didn’t take off my chaps and they were OK. We continued to talk about the outlines of the adventure: the winds, the flapping tent, the hikes, the beach, the frogs. Katy and John bickered like it was any other day.
Viann asked, “Did you have any earth shaking revelation moments where you figured out something important?”
“Yes,” but I was unwilling to discuss it further, at least here and now.
Back on the road in the dusk, Viann pointed out the string of lights up into the pass ahead. Katy thought it was pretty. We went back the same way we had come, catching up on trips and events back home on the way. Viann had worked Saturday, Sunday and Monday as scheduled. No one had gone to church Sunday, as we had feared.
We arrived home at 9:30, carried our packs in to the staging area, and went off to clean up and get some sleep. There was no wind, but the freeway was just as noisy.
Judy Wipf had called and Viann had arranged babysitting work for Katy Tuesday morning. We got up just in time to get her off to that. I had taken Tuesday and Wednesday off to work on The Book while I could still remember any detail.
After breakfast, I drafted out an Introduction and e-mailed it to all our friends and family. Then I wrote the major outline as a Table of Contents and wasn’t very pleased with how it went. “Sixteen Chapters,” I thought, “when am I going to have time to finish that?” I needed to do the critical six, from this trip, as soon as possible. The rest, from notes or reflections afterwards could wait. I would go in the order 9, 12, 11, 10, 8, and 13. Later, I swapped to 9, 11, 10, 12, 8, and 13. Later still, a chapter would be left out, its outlined material appearing in another. This would change all the numbers.
All the gear still lay on the floor, blocking all paths. I started into Chapter 9. “…The skipper … yelled up ‘OK, see you back here Monday at three!’” It was like being there again. I didn’t feel like eating. I didn’t feel like I knew what I was going to do.
Katy was really a third little kid, a third big kid, and a third young lady. Warren had noticed this when we were out kayaking and told me his daughter had been the same way at this age. This was useful. I expected her to be all young lady; maybe from projecting Viannah on her, maybe from just not thinking about it enough. In many ways she was still a little girl, though she was already taller than her mother. This discovery was a surprise; I would have to treat her more appropriately.
Viann had been at work for the morning and forgot to go pick Katy up on the way home. Katy called on the phone, Viann stuck her head in the door; we drove off to get her together.
We picked her up. “We’ve got to empty out the backpacks this afternoon, yours has to be back at Sport’s Chalet before they close today,” I said.
“OK.”
Back home, we had lunch then carried our packs outside to keep some of the island dirt out of the house. My pack was easy to empty. I took the trash, what little there was of it, right out to the trash and the bag of laundry right down to the laundry. Both sleeping bags had a fine layer of dust on and in them. We detached them and shook them out, then took them to the laundry too.
Katy’s pack contained her bunny and the bolt and latch from the prior campers in our site that she had found. We opened up the food box to find the toiletries. That’s where we had put the toothbrushes! The contact lens case had the remaining right lens in it but the container had a bunch of dirt in it too. I took it off for a rare enzyme soak then picked up the phone and ordered a replacement left one from the optometrist. It would take a few days.
The sleeping pads were OK, a little bent but no damage.
“You know, I’m going to take this pack back to Scott next time we see them. We’ll have a little ceremony and give it back. If I’d rented it I would owe him about a thousand dollars now.”
“Yeaaah.”
“I think I have enough experience with this type. If we do any backpacking in the future, we’ll just rent packs and I’ll see what other ones are like. If we do a lot, we’ll know what to buy that way.”
We had to do the tent. I unrolled it and laid it all out, went for the broom, and tried sweeping it off. That didn’t do much. Katy took the broom and swept off Pumpkin’s doghouse that had been sitting on his grave now for two years.
The cat got out. We chased him all over our yard and the neighbor’s yard. The neighbor’s house hadn’t sold yet.
Re-packing the tent meant unrolling the larger one too. Katy didn’t want to do that, but we did anyway. She didn’t think the whole thing would fit into the bag, but with enough stuffing it did. She went in to watch Power Ball, or was it Dragon Ball Z? “I haven’t seen any TV in days,” she protested. This was the usual complaint. My usual response was to tell myself, ‘You haven’t seen any TV in days, that’s a good start, keep it up.’ To the kids, though, it was entitlement in arrears.
“OK, but we have to take your pack back today.” I brought it in and checked that it was empty then took Scott’s to the garage and hung it back up by the bicycles.
Now there was a loose pile of odds and ends on the floor where the packs had been. I would want to go through this slowly, concentrating on the critical central chapters of The Book as I went along.
About six we took the pack back to Sport’s Chalet rentals, the part of the store with the sculptor of two kids playing leapfrog out front. The two attendants were snappy when we hit the door this time. The pack was still empty, it had worked out fine, that was all we needed to do, thanks. They checked it in by its number and carried it to the back. We went out to the van and home to dinner. The adventure was a little more over.