Give Me Headlights, Streetlights, Hell Even Gaslights, But Don’t Leave Me Here To Fend Off The Wolves And The Deadly Fishes By Myself

By Will Bradley, Junior

I don’t know if under the now couple of year old editorial management of Greg Green it is a requirement that you have to be what somebody, one of the old-timers, called a city-slicker, a denizen of the urban landscape to the exclusion of maybe heading to say the Grand Canyon for a vacation or the wiles of West Egg  in Long Island down the road. It sure looks and sounds like it though when you go around the water cooler to hear people talk about where they have been or where they are going. Plenty of talk about Paris, London, Berlin, Frisco town, LA but not a peep about say King’s Canyon or Yosemite, or even Hoboken down New Jersey way. Under normal circumstances that is fine with me since I was born and raised just a shade off of Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. So I appreciate the streetlights, the safe noise of automobiles (except maybe that incessant buzzing when a car alarm goes off forever), people walking, talking, maybe loudly   to and fro at all hours and the convenience of say all-night drugstores and supermarkets (to speak nothing of gin mills open until very early in the morning).     

Others seem to share my good sense, so it was rather weird, startling to find myself being assigned by that very same editor to go report on the doings in a place called Lake Dennison located near the New Hampshire border in Massachusetts. Not just any doings but the doings of his friends Jane Rugg-Hurley and David Hurley who have been going up to that locale every summer for something like twenty-five years to camp out, to do a thing called kayaking, another thing called canoeing, some bird-watching which I have previously heard that people do, some fishing also heard of (for supper no less) and, let me put this one in quotes “communing with nature” for a couple of weeks.

The genesis of this assignment is of some interest since apparently from what Greg told Seth Garth when he turned the assignment down flat Jane and David had been putting increasing pressure on him, Greg, to both come up and do that “communing with nature” business and to write a story about the place and them. Naturally Greg claimed “conflict of interest” in that he could not possibly do justice to a story where he knew the parties so well. That led to his first asking Seth to do the deed knowing full-well that if Seth ventured these days further than 125^th Street he would get a nosebleed or some other horrible injury. Also knowing that the senior staff the way things are set up now to a person have the right of first refusal on any assignment (the privilege does not go the other way with grabbing juicy ones that is done in some totally byzantine way as far as I know). Everybody, every senior person, suddenly aware of their physical well-being if they could not see a streetlight nearby, could not run to CVS at 2 AM or order take-out after midnight exercised that right. Leaving a junior person, me, Will Bradley to carry the spear on this one.       

  

Greg, who had originally wanted me to stay a week finally settled on three days once I balked and pointed out that I had done the hatchet job on hoary legend of so-called private detective Sherlock Holmes and his in-house lover Doc Watson for him when every senior person bailed on that one. I was off one sunny August morning heading north through Connecticut and up to the borderlands (meaning where the trees outnumbered the houses by a lot). Despite all the advances in modern technology, Google Maps, GPS, travailing, concerning putting together a simple directions package when push came to shove I got lost in a place called Gardner for the very simple reason that once you get out in the boondocks all the modern technology in the world will not help if you are not satellite-connected, if you fall out of range. To start the sojourn off on the wrong foot Jane and David had to come to some location, a couple of streets I could identify to meet me in order to follow them to their campsite.

This campsite needless to say was fairly primitive meaning you had to chop and cut firewood or I guess buy some in order to cook meals or whatever else you need a campfire for when no stove or microwave is available. Meaning that your bodily function needs were addressed by some compost, environmental commode I never could figure out but which smelled to high heaven. Meaning also that despite the real-world jobs and money that the Hurleys possessed, which I found out later was considerable, they were “roughing” it in a dinky camper/jerry-rigged tent setup they had been using for years. Meaning on the latter a place where I was also set up to sleep in.

I won’t even describe the ordinary function hassles of camp life except to say I am not quite sure how the Union Army did what they did based on their camp life doings that I have read up on. I really didn’t sleep much but I don’t want to dwell on that stuff or the hardcore problems with daily hygiene since this is a “mood” piece, a piece about my reaction to that “communing with nature” noise that Greg advised me to center the article on. Meaning how the Hurleys (and their assorted brethren of the camps) spent their days. Day number one centered on this kayaking business which they were all excited about since they were so close to the lake that all they had to do was to slip the boat, ship or whatever the hell it was from the nearby lakefront and they were waterborne. Yes, they had no problem maneuvering their two-person kayak but when they showed me how to deal with this object (including the thankfully obligatory lifejacket) and I was actually in the water I flipped over, capsized they called it. Same thing the next day with the canoe which was supposed to be a little more stable but despite lifejacket at the ready was as capsize-worthy as the freaking yellow day-glo kayak.   

But that is all in a day’s work for a “city-slicker,” to be expected I guess for somebody who is woods and lake clueless. What was truly weird, what was scary to these ears were the desperate ravenous howls of the wolves who kept their noise up all night and throughout the day as well and who sounded like they were about fifty feet away (which they were not but some kids spotted a couple within the camp grounds). Here’s the real madness, the reason I am glad as hell that we are in an increasing urban country complete with those beautiful streetlights and other civilized amenities like a local Whole Foods market to buy real food. David decided on that very last day of my “imprisonment” to take me along with him as he went fishing (for supper he said). That seemed simple enough at the time but when we got to his favorite bountiful location along the lake about fifteen minutes from their campsite and he set up his and my fishing poles somehow I snagged a fish, some fearsome looking fish that I swear bit me, had teeth although David claimed it was only a Lake Dennison bass and harmless.

Fortunately I was able to get out of that locale alive without further damage but I swear despite all the good cheer of the Hurleys and how nice they must be when they get back to the city I think they have been out in the woods too long, too many years. Told Greg as much when he wanted to balk on printing this last paragraph. 

   

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