A Fine & Pleasant Misery

by Patrick McManus

  Several of my friends were knocked silly by flying objects of the preposition, but long before there was any threat to my own cherished ignorance, the old fantasy would carry me to safety. I would be roasting a fresh-caught trout on the rocky shore of some high and distant stream, or maybe just striding along under the sweet weight of a good pack, and it would be morning in the mountains, with the sun rising through the trees.

  Mr. Rumsdale once lowered the battering ram he used for a voice and told me that I had better stop this constant dreaming. Otherwise, he predicted, both he and I would probably die as old men in seventh-grade English.

  Even I knew by then that the Big Trip, for all its utility as an antidote to boredom, could not endure forever simply as fantasy. One day I would have to turn it into the real thing. I would have to take the Big Trip back into the mountains and face great hardship and overcome terrible obstacles. To that end, I began serving an apprenticeship in the out-of-doors.

  I practiced "sleeping out alone" in the back yard, my ears ever alert to the approaching footpad of some hairy terror, until at last I conquered my overpowering fear of the dark and the ghastly things that flourished there. I learned to build fires, using nothing more than a few sticks, a couple of newspapers, and a box and a half of kitchen matches. I studied the art of camp cookery, and soon could serve up a hearty meal of flaming bacon, charred potatoes, three-pound pancakes, and butterscotch pudding with gnat topping.

  After a longer time, I even taught myself to eat these things. Through practical experience, I learned that it is best not to dry wet boots over a fire with your feet still in them. I learned that some sleeping bags are stuffed with the same filler used in dynamite fuse and that it is best not to let sparks land on one of them, particularly when it is occupied by your body.

  Thus did the Big Trip shape my life and give meaning even to its failures and disasters.

  As I grew older, I went off with friends on numerous lengthy trips into the mountains, thinking each time that perhaps at last I was making the Big Trip. But I never was. These were pleasant, amiable excursions, occasionally distinguished by a crisis or two, but I was always disappointed by the realization that they fell far short of the Big Trip of my aging fantasy. So one day in the summer that I turned seventeen, I decided I would at last, once and for all, plan and execute, or be executed by, the Big Trip.

  When I announced and elaborated on my plans for the benefit of my mother and stepfather, there was great wailing and a gnashing of teeth already well gnashed from my previous and much lesser excursions into the wilderness. From then until the day I left, my mother could scarcely take time out from climbing the walls to make the beds and cook our meals.

  The plans were indeed formidable, and in my unsure moments they even caused me to wail and gnash a little. The terrain I planned to cross looked on a topographical map like the scribblings of a mildly demented chimpanzee and spanned a distance of some thirty miles as the crow flies. If the crow walked, as they say, it was more like fifty. The area was unmarred by roads or trails. It contained plenty of tracks, though, some of which belonged to grizzlies. And as everyone knows, a grizzly, if he happens along at the right moment, can transform a quiet walk to a privy into a memorable experience.

  Preparations for the Big Trip were remarkably simple, since by this time I knew that nothing destroys a Big Trip quicker than a surplus of comforts or a dearth of hardships. And a Big Trip is defined by its hardships.

  These hardships, of course, could not be left to mere chance. A number of them had to be prepared in advance and taken along, in the pack, so to speak, to be trotted out any time the going got easy. The basic formula for creating hardships is to take no nonessentials and only a few of the essentials.

  One of the essentials you leave behind is most of the food. My stock of grub consisted of pancake flour, a slab of bacon, dried fruit, butter, sugar, and salt. For emergency rations, I took a bag of dehydrated chicken noodle soup, enough, it turned out, to feed an army of starving Cossacks for upwards of three weeks.

  About the only gear I took was a sleeping bag, a knife, and a rifle. I carried along the rifle in case I ran into a grizzly, since my idea of hardships did not include getting eaten by a bear. Although I knew a .32

  Special couldn't stop a charging grizzly, I took comfort in the notion that I might be able to take the edge off his appetite on his way to the table. In the early days of my fantasy, I had conceived of building a stockade each night as protection against bears, but when you have a grizzly coming for you, no matter how much encouragement and incentive he might offer, it is difficult to get a stockade up in time to do much good. So I was taking the rifle.

  At practically the last moment, I decided to take along a companion.

  In light of the other meticulous preparations for the Big Trip, it seems incongruous now that I should have selected my traveling companion so casually. Retch, as he will be known here, had just moved to town recently and was probably the only person of my acquaintance who had not heard of the Big Trip. This gap in his knowledge may be the reason that he was the only person I could find who was ready and willing to accompany me on the expedition. Perhaps in my last-minute desperation for companionship I skipped a few details and did not impress upon him the full magnitude of the trip.

  "How would you like to go on a camping trip?" I asked him. "Spend a few days hiking around in the mountains, catch some fish, cook out?"

  Retch said he thought he would like that. Somehow he got the impression we were going on an extended fishing trip and marshmallow roast. Later, under somewhat harsher circumstances, he was to reveal to me that never in his whole life had he nourished any fantasies about a Big Trip. I was appalled that a human life could be so sterile, so devoid of splendor.

  Even by the time my parents were driving us to the jumping-off spot, Retch still did not fully comprehend the full portent of the Big Trip.

  My stepfather's funereal air, my mother's quivering lips, and my own grim silence, however, began to undermine his confidence.

  "It isn't as though we're going to be gone forever," he would say, attempting to console my mother. She would reply with a low, quavering moan.

  By the time we disembarked from the car, Retch was convinced that we were going to be gone forever. As things turned out, he was nearly right.

  For two pleasant days, the Big Trip did seem as if it were going to be nothing more than an ordinary camping trip, and therefore not a Big Trip at all. The sky was an impeccable blue, the firewood dry and fragrant, the trout in the lakes fat and hungry, the huckleberries sweet. I could scarcely conceal my disappointment at the good time we were having.

  On the third morning I was awakened by a howl of anguish from Retch.

  "The deer got into our packs and ate everything but the bacon and chicken noodle soup," he yelled.

  My heart laughed up. This, finally, was a real hardship.

  "Don't worry," I said. "We can always live off the country." Then I looked around. The country didn't seem to be very edible. Perhaps the trip would be harder than even I expected.

  Later that same day, we came across what we thought must be fresh grizzly tracks. Concluding that where there are fresh grizzly tracks, there are likely to be fresh grizzlies, we quickened our pace. Near the top of the next mountain, we slowed to a dogtrot, which we maintained for the rest of the day.

  That night we camped on a barren ridge without water, and ate fried bacon and soup for supper. The soup, which wasn't much good with water, was even worse without it. (The fact that the deer had not touched the chicken noodle soup proved to me once and for all that deer are animals of good sense and discriminating taste.) After dinner, we sat around the fire picking the bacon out of our teeth with noodles.

  "I've got an idea," Retch said.

  "What?" I said.

  "Let's quit," he said.

  Our quitting then would have been like a skydiver's quitting halfway to the ground. "Don't worry," I said. "It will be a
lot easier from now on."

  Storm clouds were rising in the west when we crawled into our sleeping bags. Soon the heavy, black thunderheads were over us. Lightning licked the peak of our mountain a few times and then started walking down the ridge toward us. When it struck close enough to bounce us off the ground, I predicted, breathlessly, "It's going to pass over the top of us. Next time it will strike down below. .

  By the time I was this far along in my prophecy, it was evident that I didn't have much future as a prophet. It didn't seem as if I even had much future.

  When you see lightning hit from a distance, it appears that the bolt zaps into the ground and that's it, but when you are occupying the ground the bolt zaps into, it's not that way at all. First, a terrible bomb goes off and you're inside the bomb, and then streams of fire are going every which way and you're going every which way, and the brush lights up like neon signs in Chinatown, and there are pools of fire on the ground and high voltage sings in the air. Then it's dark again, black, sticky dark, and the rain hits like a truckful of ice.

  The first thing I noticed, upon regaining consciousness, was that I was running to beat hell down the side of the mountain. I was wearing only my shorts. I do not know if I was fully dressed or not when the lightning hit.

  Something was bounding like a deer through the brush ahead of me, and I hoped it was a deer and not a grizzly, because I was gaining on it.

  Then I saw that it was just a pair of white shorts, or reasonably white shorts, also running down the mountain. I yelled at the white shorts that I thought there was a cliff up ahead. The white shorts gave a loud yelp and vanished.

  I found Retch sorting and counting his bones at the bottom end of a ten-foot drop. He said he might have been hurt worse, but some rocks cushioned his fall.

  "You didn't happen to bring an aspirin, did you?" he said.

  "No, "I said.

  "I didn't think so," he said.

  While we were draining our sleeping bags (it was raining, remember), I made one last attempt at prophecy.

  "Well, Retch," I said, "think of it this way: things just can't get any worse than they are right now."

  In the days that followed we were to look back upon that moment as a time of great good fortune and decadent high living.

  The driving, ice-cold rain continued through the night. The next morning we crawled out of our sleeping bags, stirred around in the mud until we found our clothes, put them on, and with an absolute minimum of jovial banter, spent an unsuccessful hour trying to start a fire.

  For breakfast we stirred up some chicken noodle soup in muddy water.

  The muddy water improved the flavor and texture of the soup considerably, and by drinking it through our teeth we could strain out the larger pebbles and even some of the noodles.

  On all sides of us, as far as a bloodshot eye could see, was a vast, raging storm of mountains. Our soggy map told us we were ten miles from the end of the nearest trail, more than twenty miles from the nearest road. Retch and I stared at each other across the pile of steaming sticks that represented our aborted effort at fire-building, and I could see a reflection of my own misery and despair swirling in his eyes. "What do we do now?" I thought.

  Then I remembered a sure-fire remedy for predicaments of this sort. It was recommended to me by a fierce, old man who knew the mountains well and knew what they can do to a person. "When everything else has failed, there is only one thing to do," he said. "You tough it out."

  So that is what we did. We toughed it out. We went down mountains, up mountains, around mountains, lunged over windfalls, through swamps, across rain-swollen streams, and we ate handfuls of chicken noodle mush, and then surged on across more mountains, streams, and windfalls.

  Had we run across a grizzly we would have eaten him raw on the spot and strung his claws for necklaces. There was nothing now, perhaps not even a beautiful red-haired lady in perilous distress, that could have interrupted our relentless march.

  And then one day--or was it night?--we walked out of the mountains.

  There were cars going by on the highway, people zipping comfortably along through their lives at a mile a minute, looking out at us in mild amusement and wondering what muddy, bloody fools were these. We had triumphed over the mountains and over ourselves and over the Big Trip, but nobody knew or cared what we had done. We limped along the road in search of a farmhouse with a phone, our clothes torn, bodies aching, jaws clenched on the bullet, and the last dehydrated chicken noodle soup we would ever eat in our lives still matting our wispy beards.

  Then I heard a strange, small sound in the empty air. I glanced over at Retch to see if he heard it too, and he did, and there was this little pained smile on his cracked lips. As we slogged along the sound grew in volume, swelling up and filling the silence and emptiness, until it reached a great thundering crescendo.

  It was the sound of applause and cheering--the sound of a standing ovation.

  The Theory and Application Of Old Men

  EVERY KID SHOULD HAVE an old man. I don't mean just a father. Fathers are all right and I'm not knocking them, since I'm one myself, but from a kid's point of view they spend entirely too much time at a thing called the office or some other equally boring place of work. If you're a kid, what you need is someone who can take you out hunting or fishing or just poking around in the woods anytime you feel the urge.

  That's an old man. Doing things like that is what old men were designed for.

  If you've never had an old man of your own before, you may not know what to look for or how to use one once you find him. I am something of an expert on the subject, having studied under some of the best old men in the business.

  Someday I hope to get into the field myself. In any case, I am eminently qualified to advise you on getting and caring for your first old man.

  First off, let us consider the problem of identifying old men in the field. All old men are male. This is important to remember, and even then one can make a mistake. Occasionally, on hunting trips I have discovered that what I thought were men turned out to be old women.

  Had they turned out to be young women, I would have been a good deal less disappointed, but that turn of circumstance almost never happens to me.

  Here is a good basic description of an old man: He is a male person with white hair, a stubbly beard, wrinkled hide, bifocals, long underwear, chewing tobacco, and the disposition of a bull walrus with a bad case of the shingles.

  If you find a female person with these basic characteristics, she would probably work just as well.

  Old men come in various vintages. The sixties are good, the seventies are excellent, and the eighties are prime. Nineties are fine too, but there is always the risk they won't make it to the punchline on a good story.

  Every youngster should be properly trained in the safe handling of an old man before he is allowed to take one out alone. One good bit of advice is to treat every old man as if he were loaded. If a kid accidentally triggers an old man, he is liable to get his vocabulary peppered with colorful expressions that will send his mother into shock the first time one tumbles off his tender lips. As a boy, I once addressed a piece of malfunctioning machinery in the appropriately descriptive language of my own old man. Quick as lightning my grandmother struck, deftly boxing my ears in a one-two combination.

  Fortunately for me, she used a small box. "You been hangin' out with that blinkety-blank old Rancid Crabtree again," she said. "He jist ain't the sort for a blinkety-blank young boy always to be traipsin' after, and I'll tell him so next time I lay eyes on the blinkety-blank!" ("Blinkety-blank," by the way, was one of Mr. Crabtree's favorite words.) The very next time the old man was in our kitchen, ol' Gram lit into him, and he grinned like a shaggy old dog, sitting there dunking a big sugar cookie in his coffee. He was very good at concealing his fear of Gram.

  Mr. Crabtree, by the way, had a definite aura about him, a presence that seemed to linger on in the house long after he had gone home.

 
Frequently, my mother would comment on it. "Throw open the windows!"

  she would shout.

  Let us next consider the proper technique for starting an old man.

  When you are older, you can start an old man simply by loading him or, in the more common expression, "getting him loaded." While you're still a kid, however, you will have to use empty old men, who are a good deal harder to start. The best technique for starting an empty old man is called "priming." You say something like this to your O.M.: "Mr. Jenkins, I'll bet fishing is sure a lot better nowadays than when you were a kid." That bit of priming should not only get him started but keep him going for a couple of hours.

  A kid may come across an old man who gambles, drinks, lies, cusses, chews 'n' spits, and hates to shave and take baths, but there's also a chance that he will run into one with a lot of bad habits. There are two kinds of old men in particular that he wants to watch out for--the Sleeper and the Drifter.