Amazing Columbus Day Weekend. I wasn't lucky enough to get paid a lot of dough to discover a new route to old land, ignorantly insist I knew who the native inhabitants were, enslave some of them, steal their stuff and bring them home with me. But, there was some cultural confusion and I may have inadvertently made a few box turtles ill with my foreign microbiome, stowed away some dust mites on my irritated skin and forgot to get a $2 redemption on a glass bottle of fresh unpasteurized milk.
In the process of searching, finding and losing shelter, I packed and unpacked our bags several times over three days, nearly landing my son and I a few nights at a classy hotel in White River Junction, a heated barn on the southern tip of the White Mountains, and job at the co-op at the collegiate epicenter of agro-hipsters. After a couple of moon-tossled Mercury-dazzled nights, we finally set sail into a barn-dabbled, red maple-sparkled, orange-leaves-sprinkled vortex that spit us out in a tree heaven at the foot of a sign that read: "Creekside Cabin", with an arrow pointing south. After being nearly attacked by guard dogs, guard goats and guard chickens and trudging ankle-deep through a dangerous dungfield and touching an electrified fence, we were led to a screened platform covered in a hodgepodge of old doors leaning against a single paper-thin wall a few yards from Mosquito Rapids. No electricity, no kitchen, no outhouse, no fire pit...No problem.
But, there was one problem. A building needs walls, don't you think? I'm not a big fan of commercial logging, but houses need wood. While I may be a paper-waster, I can use more than my fair share of sycamore leaves TP or mullein napkins if the mood strikes me. I can eat dry cereal for breakfast, I'm no Polythene Pam. Huddling in a pile of familial bodies under paper-thin blankets with paint splotches and cat hair on a dusty sunken mattress, breathing in deeply and exhaling onto each others' faces to keep warm under musty polyblends, is lovely in a chilly cabin with a wood burning stove working hard to keep you pneumonia-free, but this is a chicken coop in October in the mountains and there's no heating or insulation of any kind! Give me a car, a yurt, or a tent and I can survive the night. Hell, give me a sukkah, a bottle of Manischewitz and three feverish bearded rabbis under a mess of camel-fur prayer shawls, and I'll make due...but don't turn my boy's tears into icicles. These runaway guests need to finish their staycation, STAT!
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