Make the Sentence Make Sense.

 

One of my goals in 2020 was to fastpack the Trans-Catalina Trail.

That sentence doesn’t make any sense. Let’s unpack it.

One of my goals - Goals were things people used to have in the Before Times. A goal is like a future desired outcome. It is the kind of thing a person can envision and plan for if and when they are confident that there is a future in which that outcome can be achieved. In times of adversity, it is normal for a person’s sense of the scope of the future to narrow to only a time when the adversity is over. There is a subset of people who have been able to plan and make progress toward non-adversity-related goals during the pandemic and those people are called sociopaths.

in 2020 - Math and science will tell you that there was once a calendar year that took place between 2019 and 2021, but sociologists will more accurately explain that in a bizarre and unheard of twist of fate, the year 2020 was actually replaced by the year-long month of March 2020 and that somehow simultaneously absolutely nothing happened and everything happened in that month. No one yet knows how this was possible, but physicists suspect dark matter or mass delusion. See: The New Chronology.

was to fastpack - Fastpacking is like backpacking, but very fast. It can even involve running. It requires packing as little food and gear as possible, allowing a person to cover as much distance as possible. It necessitates almost obsessive planning and reflection on one’s needs and abilities. It is one of those activities that forces people to be honest with themselves, because if they lie to themselves about their needs and abilities, they could freeze to death at night trying to sleep on a mountainside with the wrong gear and not enough food or fire.

the Trans-Catalina Trail - Catalina Island is a little bean shaped island about 26 miles off the coast of Long Beach. It is surrounded by clear waters and deep kelp forests. The island itself is rocky and hilly and there is a trail that runs up and down along the spine of the island. The trail is about 40 miles long and only has a few specific way points for sleeping and refilling water. The interior of the island is populated by wild boar and bison. An elevation map of the island looks like a worrisome cardiogram.

So that sentence has obviously been rendered meaningless by the black hole suck of the supposed year 2020. Let’s replace that sentence with this one:

One of my goals in 2021 is to fastpack the Trans-Catalina Trail.

 See? That’s better. The sentence makes sense now.

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#45placesIhavepeed

As part of my ongoing “minimizing all the shit I own” project, I have been going through all these plastic tubs of notebooks I own and throwing out all the notebooks/notes that are really of no value to me as a writer.

I just came across some scrawled notes that I had completely forgotten about. They can only be an early idea for a blog post that I never got around to writing (because it is harder than it looks!), but here now I have completed (below) the post that I envisioned so many years ago! You’re welcome!

Here’s the idea: places I have peed!

This should totally be a thing! #45placesIhavepeed

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45 Places I Have Peed.

45 Places I Have Peed

by james bezerra

01. Lemoore, CA

02. Paris, France

03. Placerita Canyon State Park (~3,000 feet up, in the fog.)

04. Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite, CA (In the meadow. Very early in the morning.)

05. 18402 Halsted Street #36, Northridge, CA 91325 (Very long bathroom.)

06. 23851 Arroyo Park Drive #409, Santa Clarita, CA 91355 (Poor lighting. Made out in the tub with a dark haired girl who doesn’t respond to my emails anymore.)

07. 3217 Johnson Ave, San Luis Obispo, CA 93401 (Bathroom just inside the front door. Lots of potpourri.)

08. West Beach Inn Santa Barbara, CA 93101 (We peed just outside of the RV we were sleeping in. Because sometimes peeing in the parking lot is just more fun.)

09. Manhattan (Peed all the hell all over the place! Without discretion.)

10. Harvard Square, 57 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (Coffee shop behind a gift shop.)

11. PVD - Providence RI train station - 100 Gaspee Street, Providence, RI 02903 (Portas.)

12. Brown University Providence, RI 02912 (Fuck them.)

13. The Shelburne Museum (The greatest museum in the world!) 6000 Shelburne Rd, Shelburne, VT 05482

14. New London, CT (At a bar. I think. Was it a bar?)

15. Keeper’s: A Country Cafe Rt 106 & Bailey’s Mill Road, Reading VT 05062 (Hook instead of a sliding lock.)

16. 4100 Bar (The best bar in LA! Peeing here make you feel like Sinatra.)  4100 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90029

17. Catalina Italiana 346 Hanover Street Boston, MA 02113 (Candle light dinner kinda place/dim bathroom.)

18. The Block Island Express Terminal 2 Ferry Street, New London, CT 06320 (Worst quesadillas on the east coast! Bathroom isn’t much better.)

19. Deja Vu, Bakersfield, CA 1524 Golden State Ave, Bakersfield, CA 93301 (The bathrooms are regrettably well lit and they make you question your value as a human being/you count your available cash.)

20. LAX

21. BUR

22. BOS

23. LGA

24. JFK

25. SEA

26. LAS

27. SLC

28. LHR

29. CDG

30. LTN

31. The 1st & 3rd floors of Jerome Richfield Hall Northridge, CA 91325 (I don’t pee on the 
2nd floor.)

32. 829 East Kensington Road Los Angeles, CA 90026 (2nd floor Egyptian-themed tile.)

33. 25016 Walnut Street #10 Newhall, CA 91321 (Red plastic shower curtain. Somehow the best sex happens in the poorest places.)

34. That one place in Brooklyn, just across the bridge from Manhattan, that’s between a yogurt place and a pizza-by-the-slice place

35. Michael Jordan’s Steak House NYC 23 Vanderbilt Ave New York City, NY 10017 (Where we got hedge fund guys to buy us drinks by sending my brother’s underage girlfriend to ask for them.)

36. 25016 Walnut Street #22 Newhall CA, 91321 (Hardwood floors. Big master bedroom.)

37. 9826 Reagan Road #218 San Diego, CA 92126 (Two bed, two bath, or pee from the balcony to the pool.)

38. 10292 Camino Ruiz #5 San Diego, CA 92126 (Bathroom is through the bedroom. On the right.)

39. The San Diego Pet Memorial Park 8995 Crestmar Pt. San Diego, CA 92121 (Down the hill there’s a bathroom in amongst the ruins.)

40. Pear Lake CA, Latitude: 38.8918521   Longitude: -120.2568578 (Phoenix toilet.)

41. The Auction House (Quite possibly the coolest little bar in the world!) 300 East 89th St, New York, NY 10128

42. Ben & Jerry’s Factory 1281 Waterbury-Stowe Rd, Waterbury, VT 05676 (Hippies. Standard bathrooms.)

43. Trinity Church Boston 206 Clarendon St, Boston, MA 02116 (Just kinda awesome. You should go there.)

44. Parson’s Landing, Catalina CA (One of my favorite places ever.) Latitude: 33-28'22'' N Longitude: 118-33'06'' W

45. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (One of my favorite museums.) 280 The Fenway Boston, MA 02115.

(This list was much more difficult to compile than I had ever expected! You try putting one together! If you do, I will post it.)

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Poetry, Economics, and Backpacking.

I’m in the mood to do a little thinking out loud tonight and I find that I enjoy that most when I do it here. Knowing that all those internet bots and my one reader in South Korea (Hi South Korea Guy!) will be seeing my deep thoughts, forces me toward concision (Though you would never know it based on how long this post is!). All that is my long-wind-y way of saying that you will likely find this to be a terribly boring and self-involved post (Sorry South Korea Guy!)

Below are two “poems” that I have been futzing around with for my poetry class. I use the scare quotes there because these are barely passable as poems in my class (The second one certainly is not. I mean LOOK at it! It isn’t even a poem at all!). There are two reasons why these are barely passable:

1) The particular class I’m in seems to be geared toward the production of a specific type of poem. What I tend to consider the poem of the ‘specific image’. That’s how I think about it anyway. Poetry that is refined down to its most razor sharp images and those images are dagger-like in their deeply cutting meanings. There ain’t nothing wrong with that if it’s your thing, but it just isn’t mine. I like mess and the heat of a little chaos. I will take my writing in its rawest, most energetic mayhem, thank you very much. I prefer that to the precision diamond-cut writing any day of the week! But that’s also why I’m a terrible poet. As writers go, poets often have to be surgeons. Writers like me are more like Civil War surgeons.

That’s the first reason I’m totally going to fail my poetry class. This is the other:

2) The class is actually about “poetry as history” or “history as told through poetry”. So when all these poems we’re anguishing over get collected up into portfolios at the end of the semester, we’re supposed to be able to say, “This is the history of X”. One girl in class is writing the history of witches in America. This one guy is writing the history of acid rock. Another guy is writing a history of addiction (his brother’s). And since I’m an asshole, what did I decide I wanted to write the history of? Capitalism.

Yep. That’s how I roll.

The thing is, I have read a ton of poetry about love and heartache and memory and more heartache and loss and even more heartache, but you know what I have never read poetry about? Macroeconomics.

And I have had economics on the brain for awhile now, and I had wanted to take a poetry class (in the hopes of maybe learning to write more artful dreck for you) and I had wanted to take the particular professor, so I figured why the hell not?!

And so here we find ourselves now. Basically a month from the end of the semester and with nary an effective poem yet written about the history of Capitalism. It is almost as if what I had perceived as a mysterious lack of poetic commentary on the subject of the free market is actually due to the fact that writing poetry about economic systems is REALLY HARD! You know, actors have a saying, “Dying is easy, making people laugh is hard.”

I have it in my head right now that all that heartache in all that poetry out there in the world has a whole lot to do with the fact it is simply easier to write emotion into razor-sharp diamonds than it is to write economics into them.

After all, it is easier to be anxious and say something like: My heart vibrates slow/ a clean engine waiting./ Dark tissue and/ wet small explosions/ hum in my valves.

Then it is to be all like: Karl Marx wasn’t completely/ wrong about the wealthy./ He just didn’t foresee that/ money is the opiate/ of our democracy.

And anyway, all of those things I just wrote rhyme way too much. Rhyming seems to be frowned upon. Do not get all rhyme-y in your poetry!

So that’s why I’m totally going to fail poetry class, then fail out of school, then fail out of life, and then start living in a van down by the river with my cat.

I blame all of this on a backpacking trip, by the way. So when the police come to your house and they’re all like, “Yeah, we found a body in a van down by the river. Looks like he died of being bad at poetry. Do you know anything about it?” Then you can invite them in for tea and explain where it all began. And it all began with a backpacking trip.

Several years ago my friend Mike the Director and I both wanted to go on a vacation. We were both in the mood to just get the fuck out of town. I had recently gone through an extremely difficult break-up (which is pretty well-documented on this here blog. I’m sure y’all remember that.) and the Director had his own stuff going on (I’m too much of a narcissist to remember what his deal was at the time though. Also, it’s none of your business! Go read his blog if you wanta know: True Things). Well eventually we hit upon the idea of going kayak camping on Catalina Island (that trip is pretty well documented on this here blog as well) and since neither of us were exactly outdoorsy types previously, I did a metric shit ton of reading about how to be outdoorsy.

In the process of learning about camping and backpacking, I stumbled across the “ultralight” backpacking movement, which - in a nutshell - advocates taking as little as is reasonable with you when you go out there into nature. The reason being that it is physically easier and more enjoyable when you have ten pounds on your back instead of sixty, but also that you’re more able to participate in your own experience when you’re not obsessing about the blisters you have now because you decided to take three cast iron skillets and a camp chair with you on your hike.

Now I have still never quite gotten down to a ten pound pack on any of my subsequent adventures, but I have developed the appropriate level of anal retentiveness required to eventually get there. What was interesting though is that trolling the internet for information about ultralight - or “minimalist” - backpacking led me to stumble ass backward into the “Minimalism” movement. This is basically the same idea - get rid of all your useless shit - but applied to one’s entire life. I totally got hooked on the whole concept.

I don’t like to proselytize, so I’m not going to say too much about it (you can google it yourself after all), but minimalist living is sometimes also called “intentional living”. It isn’t a cult or anything, just the idea that maybe we don’t need so much crap in our lives. If you step back and look at all the stuff you own and ask yourself, “Do I really need all three of those crock pots?” then you’re basically on your way. Or take a look at all the stuff in your closet and really be honest with yourself about how much of it you actually wear. And if you don’t actually wear it, then get rid of it!

That’s the idea anyway. For me it has been a very slow process over about two years (I’m a whore for books and clothes after all), but it has been useful and even, dare I say, rewarding. I wouldn’t have been able to do the things I’ve done the past year - quit my job, go back to school, live in my own apartment, etc. - if I hadn’t started this minimalist thing and really evaluated my spending and my consumption of stuff. I was never a high roller by any means, but just being actively conscious of how I spent my money and why I spent my money, has been enlightening. And once I started to become aware of what I was buying versus what I actually needed, I also started to wonder about WHY the hell I owned so much stuff. And once you get into the WHY it turns into kind of a rabbit hole, or at least it did for me. I started to notice ALL THE ADS EVERYWHERE! I started to realize that you can’t watch TV or read a magazine or drive down the street without being bombarded with the message that you should BUY MORE SHIT!

But of course I knew this already. We all already know that, but when you move from knowing it as an abstraction to actually knowing it in your own daily existence, it flips a little switch someplace. I started to think a lot about the culture we live in and the economy we live in and I started to really wonder if this is the best we can do. I haven’t become a bearded Communist or anything, but I have found that I’m deeply troubled by the state of the culture at the moment. No big surprise there, right? But I think there’s more to it than just my slow descent into curmudgeonhood. It has just started to seem to me like we - Americans in particular, but not exclusively - really have conflated the ideas of happiness and consumption. This was all dawning on me while I was running an accounting department and killing myself sixty or seventy hours a week to make sure that some rich people stayed rich. I paid the bills of rich people and I found myself constantly asking, who the hell actually gives a shit how nice looking another person’s car is? I certainly don’t (You should see the beater I drive, BTW, imagine what a scab would look like if you attached it to four wheels and an axle.) I just don’t want to participate in any of that, at all. I never really have, but that was passive of me. Now I am actively and consciously opting out of the whole thing. It’s easy for me to do that: I’m single and don’t have any kids and I don’t really own shit anyway, but I’m also not trying to pass judgement on anyone else. I have just found something that works for me and which I can feel good about. I like that my clothes don’t have branding on them and I like that I’m slowly whittling my life down to just the things that bring me some bit of usefulness and happiness. Between you and me and South Korea Guy, I feel better than I did a year ago. I’m happier than I was a year ago. There are many reasons for that and this whole minimalist thing is one of them.

All of this has led me to a lot of thinking about Capitalism and I wrestle with it a lot (because I’m the sort of person who wrestles with things he has no control over nor any ideas how to fix) and I am still wrestling with it all and I thought that maybe it would be interesting to try to distill my thinking about macroeconomics down into the sharp little diamonds of poetry. So that is really why I ended up taking this poetry/history class and that is really why I am going to fail out of school and die alone (but for my cat) in a van down by the river. And that is what you should tell the cops when you invite them in for tea. You should tell them that it all started with a backpacking trip.

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50 Miles of Fun.

I have ended up in something of a sour mood today.

So I’m reading online about “fastpacking” which is just hiking really fast with a very light pack. Some people even do it running. Reading about this stuff always makes me feel better because I want to do it and reading about it tickles the parts of my brain that look forward to doing things out in the world. Right now I’m reading about the Trans-Catalina Trail which runs the length of the island of Catalina from end to end. The trail is 37.2 miles long but if you’re hiking it you’re going to do more than fifty miles on foot. In four days. I’m in a place today where that sounds awesome. Am I in good enough shape to do that? No way. Do I have the right gear for it? Nope. Is there 49% of me that would like to wake up tomorrow and drive down to the ferry and head out? You betcha.

This is a picture from Parson’s Landing when I went to Catalina in 2011.

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Reblogged.

From time to time I re-fall in love with life. I just had one of those profound moments of reflection.

Alfred Hitchcock said, “Drama is life with the dull parts taken out.”

Well I agree that 70 – 80% of life is tedium and monotony, but that other 30 – 20% is pure wonderfulness.

I realized that I have been to New York and Boston. I have been to London and St. Louis, Paris, Orlando, and I have eaten fried chicken in Philadelphia with my grandmother (whom I miss dearly). I have had sangria on the roof of the Met (one of my favorite places in the world) and I have watched the sky turn green in Ozark Missouri before a thunder storm. I’ve been to Branson and Las Vegas. I have stood at the top of the Eiffel Tower and at the top of the fake one at the Paris Casino. I have been thrown out of bars in San Francisco and loaned my jacket to a naked stripper in Fresno, who was trying to catch some ZZZs on the couch. I have been lucky enough to fall in love and unlucky enough to get stranded at Heathrow for two days. I’ve had fish thrown over my head at Pike’s Place Market in Seattle and I have stumbled ass backward into fist fights in Sun Valley. I personally discovered that the snow in Park City Utah is nature’s best beer cozy and also have experienced a couple of sublimely perfect days in Salt Lake City; there’s nothing quite as perfect as being in love in the cold. I have smoked cigarettes in San Diego while listening to Nada Surf live while landing jets passed overhead. I’ve driven a rented Vauxhall (on the wrong side of the road) all the way to Stonehenge and walked the world’s best museum in Shelburne Vermont. I have nearly died on a kayak off the coast of Catalina and I have been deliriously in love on 17-Mile-Drive around Pebble Beach. I have straddled the Prime Meridian and the US-Mexico border; for that matter I have flown a kite under a pier on a Mexican beach and personally haggled over the price of a lobster dinner. I have watched a Minute Man III missile launch from Vanderburgh before the sun had come up and I have stood on the flight deck of an operational aircraft carrier, with Tchaikovsky blaring in my headphones. I have known more amazing women than is fair and I have been lucky enough to love some of them and to be loved in return. I have unhooked corsets in dark rooms and made love on a bare stage (empty audience). I have been found guilty in court of a misdemeanor and I have cried in front of more than one therapist. I have fallen in love with the Brooklyn Bridge and been terrified by the Coronado Bridge. And next week I will go white water rafting on the Sacramento River and the week after I will hike into the Grand Canyon and then ride a helicopter out of it. There is no end to the things that I love about life, and while life never seems easy at the time, it is simply and always worth the effort.  

From time to time I re-fall in love with life.  

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Re-In Love with Life.

From time to time I re-fall in love with life. I just had one of those profound moments of reflection.

Alfred Hitchcock said, “Drama is life with the dull parts taken out.”

Well I agree that 70 – 80% of life is tedium and monotony, but that other 30 – 20% is pure wonderfulness.

I realized that I have been to New York and Boston. I have been to London and St. Louis, Paris, Orlando, and I have eaten fried chicken in Philadelphia with my grandmother (whom I miss dearly). I have had sangria on the roof of the Met (one of my favorite places in the world) and I have watched the sky turn green in Ozark Missouri before a thunder storm. I’ve been to Branson and Las Vegas. I have stood at the top of the Eiffel Tower and at the top of the fake one at the Paris Casino. I have been thrown out of bars in San Francisco and loaned my jacket to a naked stripper in Fresno, who was trying to catch some ZZZs on the couch. I have been lucky enough to fall in love and unlucky enough to get stranded at Heathrow for two days. I’ve had fish thrown over my head at Pike’s Place Market in Seattle and I have stumbled ass backward into fist fights in Sun Valley. I personally discovered that the snow in Park City Utah is nature’s best beer cozy and also have experienced a couple of sublimely perfect days in Salt Lake City; there’s nothing quite as perfect as being in love in the cold. I have smoked cigarettes in San Diego while listening to Nada Surf play live while landing jets passed overhead. I’ve driven a rented Vauxhall (on the wrong side of the road) all the way to Stonehenge and walked the world’s best museum in Shelburne Vermont. I have nearly died on a kayak off the coast of Catalina and I have been deliriously in love on 17-Mile-Drive around Pebble Beach. I have straddled the Prime Meridian and the US-Mexico border; for that matter I have flown a kite under a pier on a Mexican beach and personally haggled over the price of a lobster dinner. I have watched a Minute Man III missile launch from Vanderburgh before the sun had come up and I have stood on the flight deck of an operational aircraft carrier, with Tchaikovsky blaring in my headphones. I have known more amazing women than is fair and I have been lucky enough to love some of them and to be loved in return. I have unhooked corsets in dark rooms and made love on a bare stage (empty audience). I have been found guilty in court of a misdemeanor and I have cried in front of more than one therapist. I have fallen in love with the Brooklyn Bridge and been terrified by the Coronado Bridge. And next week I will go white water rafting on the American River and the week after I will hike into the Grand Canyon and then ride a helicopter out of it. There is no end to the things that I love about life, and while life never seems easy at the time, it is simply and always worth the effort.

From time to time I re-fall in love with life.

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It Hurts. So Much.

All four of you who read this blog are probably already familiar with the fact that I have been doing some outdoorsy things as of late. Weird, I know. It is like I have developed some tumor inside of my brain and the tumor really likes the outside. It is the only tumor in the history of Western medicine that has ever made someone healthier. Although who are we kidding, I’m not doing any of this to be healthy, I just want to look better naked. But even that is not the full extent of it. There is a part of me (the tumor part) that is lately very interested in just doing things. Wanta camp? Done. Wanta hike? Done. Wanta kayak? Done. Wanta run? Done.

Yes, that’s right, I have started running.

I have only been out a few times (because my body takes a while to recover, as you might imagine).

I have been as mystified as anyone by this recent shift from non-physical activity to physical activity,. So, much like a Sherlock Holmes-ian detective, I took a step back and logically (though not really) retraced the series of thoughts and events that ended up with me – yesterday - huffing and puffing as I ran down a paseo by my apartment, while sobbing and screaming, “IT HURTS SO MUCH!”

Okay, here is what my completely scientific (though not really) investigation revealed:

1) I have always liked camping stuff, just not the outside. Show me a tiny multi-tool with pliers, 17 kinds of screwdrivers AND a bottle opener and I am all over it. I just never bought one because I never needed one because I never went outside.

2) Recently my friend Mike the Director and I wanted to get out of town and have adventures (without spending a ton of money) and we randomly settled on Catalina: kayaking and camping. Because it sounded like an adventure (and proved to be because of how bad we are at adventures).

3) Since I have skinny little chicken legs and arms, I started trying to get in slightly better shape so that I would not die on Catalina. This mostly involved walking around my neighborhood every night.

4) Which turned out to be a good thing because we did a lot of unexpected hiking on Catalina, which – despite expectations – I kind of enjoyed. I also liked the camping and wanted to do more.

5) Since camping alone is something I’m not skilled enough to do yet (and since almost nobody wants to go with me!) I started hiking so as to still have some of the outdoorsy thing going on.

6) In this process, I discovered the concept of “trail-running” which just seems (to me, for some reason) like the most badass thing that a mere mortal can do on a regular basis.

7) However I’m not in good enough shape for that yet, so …

8) In preparation for that awesomeness, I have started jogging.

As part of this whole process, I have done some fun hiking and some camping and some general exploring. I have read lots on the internet (which is a series of tunes) and now know even more about backpacks (which I have always loved) than I did before! And can tell you about them for hours on end if you would like to spend a few hours of your life listening to me talk about them (I do birthday parties! Book now!).

Also, did I mention that I am hiking the Grand Canyon in September? Yeah, that’s happening.

When next you see my facebook status and it says that I am going jogging, if you open the window of the room that you’re in and quiet your breathing so that t is almost silent, and turn your ear toward the wind, you might just hear the sound of me out there running. I will be the one screaming, “IT HURTS SO MUCH!”

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Adventure!

Recently I took a trip with my friend Mike the Director. We both needed to get the hell out of Dodge for a little while and we settled on a kayaking and camping trip to Catalina Island, which sits off the coast of Los Angeles (more or less.)

Catalina has two towns, Avalon which is the cute but tiny town where the cruise ships dock and where everyone drives golf carts. The other town is Two Harbors and it is so small that it doesn’t even necessitate the need for a golf cart. The camp site we picked was called Parson’s Landing and it sits at the top of the island.

In broad strokes, our plan was to arrive in Two Harbors, kayak up to Parson’s landing, camp, kayak back, then catch the “Safari Bus” down to Avalon and take showers.

Sounds fun and easy right?

I should mention here that neither Mike or I are what you might call “outdoorsy” and I had never been on a kayak in my life. Also, I have a general distrust of nature, wildlife, the ocean and rocks. I just try to stay inside most of the time.

Enjoy:

Catalina #1

For this post, things to know:
- I am not a smarter person.
- Mike packs too heavy.


We left Friday afternoon. On the ferry ride from San Pedro to Two Harbors the water was very choppy. The ferry was smaller than any ferry I had been on before. Probably twenty-five feet across and maybe 100 feet long. The point is, it was pretty small, but fast, which meansthat as the water got choppy, the ferry would ride up the waves and then drop down the other side. It was like a roller coaster! You totally got that DROP feeling in your stomach when the front of the boat came down. People were rushing off to the bathroom with sea sickness. I - because I am awesome - was just having a great old time. Mike, on the other hand, was getting queasy and turning green. He didn’t throw up though, which clearly means he is a rockstar.

If I were a smarter person, two things would have come to mind to me at this point. The first would have been, “Gee, the ocean is kind of rough, I wonder if it will be like this all weekend?” and “Gee, I hope that this doesn’t mean that my first ever kayaking experience will be more potentially deadly than I had anticipated.”

I, however, am not a smarter person.

The ferry arrived in Two Harbors. When you step out onto the dock you are struck by what a tiny and primitive place it is. The water is super clear. Not crystal clear like a brochure of the Caribbean, but still clear enough to see down several feet. It would be generous to call Two Harbors a “harbor” at all. It is really just a large cove. The hills are high on either side but tapper down steeply to the “town” (which is also a generous word). When you’re standing on the dock, there is only a half a mile of land between you and the Pacific Ocean on the other side of the island. A good wave could take the whole place away.



So when you’re standing on the dock taking in Two Harbors in all of its Spartan glory, the beach looks nice and yellow-brown. If you look closely though, you see that the “beach” is mostly small rocks worn smooth by the water. There isn’t much sand. On the hills up to the right there are tired old houses where the locals live (virtually everyone in Two Harbors works in the tourist industry). Up to the left is a campsite. That’s about it.

Straight down the dock and on the left side is the Visitors’ Center. A small building with some windows on the side where we had to check in for our campsite, get the keys to our lockers (At the campsite there are metal lockers. Each one has inside a bundle of firewood and 2.5 gallons of water. I had purchased two.)

On the right side of the dock is the dive shop. It is a little white shack and next to it there are about two dozen kayaks stacked out on the sand. They are yellow and blue and orange and look pretty sitting on the rocky beach under the shade of some palm trees.

As you walk off the dock, straight ahead there is a little “restaurant” with a patio on the front. This is the only “restaurant” in Two Harbors. On the patio there is a little bar. To the right of the “restaurant” is a general store.

We arrived about 2pm and I knew that sunset would be about 7.30pm. I did not know how long it would take to kayak the 4.2 miles to camp, so I wanted to get moving. Instead of being prudent and hitting the water ASAP however, we decided to get some lunch.

Mike ordered a burger and I got fish and chips and both were quite good. As we sat there on the deck we took stock of our bag situation. I had spent the better part of a month packing and repacking my bag and tossing things out and getting it lighter and smaller. My bag has an internal frame and an internal volume of 40 liters (they measure these things in liters, apparently). Fully loaded my pack weighed about 30 pounds. I had been reading a lot of ultra light hiking websites and that compulsive/addictive thing in my brain started pulsating and saying, “Lighter. Pack lighter. Pack lighter.” Please understand that I didn’t pack light because it was smart to do so (I’m not trying to convince you that I make smart decisions or anything), I did it because it became a minor obsession in the weeks leading up to the trip. 30 pounds in not actually considered ultra light, but for my first ever outing, not too shabby.

Mike was in a very different situation. He went for an external frame backpack that was much larger than mine. It has an internal volume of about 50 or 60 liters and it was STUFFED FULL. Loaded up it probably weighed about 55 pounds. It would take Mike about thirty seconds to lift it, get his arms in it, adjust it and be ready to walk with it. Now I will say that he had a lot of equipment that I didn’t because he was essentially documenting the whole trip. He brought his good camera for video and pictures as well as a tiny camera (the sort that you clip to your body when you go skydiving), and remember that traveling with that kind of gear means that you’re also traveling with lenses and batteries and extra batteries and waterproof cases and Mike even had a battery pack for charging the extra batteries.

So that was our bag situation. We finished eating and reflecting and that ended up taking about an hour.

Around 3pm we walked over to the little dive shop to rent our kayaks and then they told us that there was a small craft advisory and they couldn’t rent us kayaks.

NO KAYAKS!

I tried explaining to the dive shop lady that I HAD A PLAN! I even offered to show her a copy of The Plan, but alas, it did was to no avail.


(The Plan)


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Catalina #2

For this post, things to know:
- I had been checking the weather in Catalina constantly and the low was supposed to be 55 overnight for the nights we were there.
- I had been reading a lot (and becoming obsessed with) lightweight and ultra light camping.

So they could not rent us kayaks.

This was a huge disappointment but not a catastrophe. One of the reasons I had chosen the campsite I did at Parson’s Landing was because we could hike to it. I had originally figured that if we kayaked in and everything went all to hell, that we could always hike out to safety. The small craft warning just meant that we would have to hike in.

I asked the dive shop lady if there were any lockers in Two Harbors where we could leave some of our things (to lighten the load). She said there were and told us where to find them.

We went to the lockers and I opened up my bag. This is when I made a pretty big mistake.

You see, since I had been obsessing about ultralight backpacking I knew that one of the single biggest differences between ultra light and regular backpacking is that the ultra light people don’t take a tent. They take a tarp that can be fashioned into a small shelter to sleep under. I had watched (an embarrassingly large number of ) videos online about how to make such a shelter and was confident I could do it. So into the locker I put my tent and tent poles.

Ironically, THAT was not my big mistake. My big mistake was that I also left behind my base layer. Your base layer is supposed to be the stuff you put on first under your clothes. In warm weather you can just wear the fancy sweat-wicking boxers and shirt (which I was) but in colder wearer you are supposed to wear a pair weird synthetic long johns under your pants to keep you warm. That is what I left in the locker.

Also left behind: my second set of clothes and about half of my snacks and food and some other random things. It probably lightened my bag by about seven pounds. Mike decided that he really couldn’t leave behind anything except his extra set of clothes.

We went to the general store where I bought water to fill up the hydration bag inside my pack. The water added about another two pounds. So all of that took almost an hour. We walked to the edge of town where we had been told that the trail started.

Turned out that the trail actually started at the top of a steep hill on the edge of town, to get there we had to hike up the hill at about a 30 degree angle. At the top there was a bench. Mike wanted to stop at the bench to rest. This was about five minutes into the hike.

The lady at the dive shop said that the hike was about six miles. I doubted that and thought she was trimming some distance off. I had looked at the trail online previously. About three quarters of it ran along hills on the coast and the coastline had about a half dozen coves on it, which meant that to get around each cove you have to hike inland to the back of the cove and then back out to the coast. These are called “switchbacks” and there were a lot of them, some as long as about a half a mile. So even if a cove is narrow and only a quarter mile across, it could take a mile of hiking to get around it.

My feeling was that we would be lucky to make it to camp before sunset.

A note here about Mike the Director. As a film school graduate, he is incapable of doing anything without somehow trying to make it a film school project. He had previously decided that he would make a “show” out of the trip. So While I was hiking, we was filming plants and dirt and talking to his camera a lot. This slowed us down considerably, however I think that some of the footage is going to look marvelous. The basic idea for the show is that we would take these interesting and short and relatively inexpensive trips that anyone would be able to do if they applied themselves. We’re not climbing K2 or anything, and that’s the point. Sure, it is fun to watch Bear Grylls leap out of a helicopter and bite the head off of a terrified tarantula, but is that something that you want to do? Probably not. The same for watching Rachel Ray try to spend ONLY $40 a day in a Tuscan village. It is $40 a day on food alone, not to mention airfare to Italy. I think that it might be fun to watch a couple of people who are totally unprepared and under-qualified, try to take on some nominally difficult adventures. Maybe that’s what we should call it: “Nominally Difficult Adventures”! You can come on the show if you want, just let me know and you can come with us. The only stipulation is that you aren’t allowed to be any good at this stuff. If you know how to SCUBA dive, then you have to go rock climbing. If you know how to rock climb, then you have to go hang gliding. You get the idea.

So we are hiking! The first couple of switchbacks were fun and really pretty. You could look down into the coves and see all the pretty little sail boats moored in them. Some of the coves had small buildings, some of them were private. Catalina is known for its kelp forests and from up on the hills we could see them waving in the water down below.

About an hour in, Mike started to get blisters. Remember that we hadn’t planned don hiking. If he’d known then he probably would have packed differently. As it was, he had a lot of weight to shoulder.

But onward we hiked. And hiked and hiked and hiked and hiked. It started to get darker and darker and I was starting to get frustrated because we weren’t making very good time.

After about three hours we got to the North end of the island. This is where our trail cut in for the last half mile or so to the campsite. This was a strange stretch of land that was very different than the scrub brush and cactus that we had been hiking with. It was a different environment entirely. All tall grass like a savannah and rolling hills rather than stark, high cliffs. The sun was just about setting when we came over the top and finally we were able to look down to our campsite a quarter mile off. So we excited and scrambled down pretty fast. The sun had set by the time we actually got down there and I have to tell you, it was already getting pretty cold and with a breeze in off the ocean.

There were two other sets of campers on the beach. We found our specific site and went about getting wood and water out of the lockers.

I should mention here, we did not bring stoves of any kind, because Mike had been confident that we could do all our cooking on the fire. I had told him that all I needed was the ability to boil water for my dehydrated food and my coffee. He said that would not be a problem.

Well, it turns out that was a problem.

The wood in our locker was damp. Probably condensation inside the metal locker had been marinating it for a couple of days. Mike was only able to ever get a fire going for a few minutes using some industrious fire-starters that he had made out of cotton balls and Vaseline. So while he tried and tried to start a fire, it got darker and colder.

I set up his tent and then went about creating for myself a shelter from tarps. It was actually pretty easy. You lay down one tarp on the ground and stake it down. Then lay another tarp on top. You stake down the back end and then (using a walking stick or, in this case, Mike’s monopod) you pitch a little opening in the front about a foot high and with cord you tie the front corners down (I tied the corners to rocks of which there were many to chose from because our beach campsite was all rocks). Inside my little tarp home went my foam pad and sleeping bag.

A note here about how bad I am at stuff. It was a good thing that I had two flashlights because I would keep turning off the first one and setting it down, then I wouldn’t be able to find it in the dark and so I would have to use the second flashlight to find the first one. I’m totally the best camper in the world!

Eventually Mike had enough of a fire going that we were able to (almost) boil water to pour into the dehydrated food bags. It was so cold by this point that I had on my jacket and even put my food bag inside the jacket just for a little extra heat.

We ate quickly without saying much and then I slipped into the awesome tarp tent thing that I had made. It was okay at first, not a lot of space, but there isn’t supposed to be. Someone who gets claustrifobic might not have liked it, but I was okay. At first.

As the night got colder and colder, I realized that it was way below 55 degrees. Eventually it occurred to me that all those times I had checked the weather, I had probably been checking the weather in Avalon, not the weather at our campsite, which was twenty-some miles away from Avalon, on the other side of some mountains, facing a different direction and right on the beach and exposed to the wind from the ocean. So it was much colder than I had expected. I kept waking up every few hours because I was shivering. My sleeping bag is rated down to 45 degrees and I was wearing pants, socks, a shirt, an over-shirt, a Northface soft shell jacket, a hat and a scarf over my face. And I was still freezing my ass off. I don’t think that I was dangerously cold or I would have retreated to Mike’s tent, but I was very cold. Since (obviously) a shelter made of tarps isn’t sealed or windproof, the breeze from the ocean would slip right inside. And I would lay awake thinking about my base layer. That nice warm, tight black base layer that I had left in a locker in Two Harbors. I decided right then that I would never ever ever never ever again leave it behind. Ever. I don’t remember that last time I was that cold.

But it was not all awful. if I poked my head out of the shelter,I could see across to the mainland. it was clear enough that I could see all the way across to the lights of San Pedro and Long beach. For some reason that made it very lonely though.

So that first night was very cold and lonely.


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