Discard My Friends To Change The Scenery

A friend from my college years unexpectedly showed up at my Indianapolis reading. Until then, we hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in nearly two years. We worked at the Hess station in south Amherst together while I was at UMass and she was at Hampshire. She’s from Kentucky (her mother’s from the Appalachia region of Kentucky), got a perfect score on her SATs, and did better than Elle Woods on her LSATs.

After the reading we went out to dinner in Indianapolis. She poured about half a bottle of Tabasco sauce on her chili.

I asked her how she found out about my reading (since she doesn’t have an e-mail address and wouldn’t have gotten my OTPPUB newsletter). She told me she randomly Googled me a couple months ago to check on whether I’d actually followed through with my idea to write a book about the Department of Mental Retardation and do a cross-country road trip (I used to talk about this all the time). When she saw I had a reading within five hours of her (she lives in Michigan now), she decided to attend and try to recreate the episode of Sex and the City where Big flies to LA to see Carrie give a talk on her book or something. I haven’t seen this episode, so please forgive me if I’ve gotten some of the details wrong.

The reading was relatively late and my campground was only an hour away, so I asked Andrea if she’d like to camp out with me for the night, and she said yes.

In the site next to mine was a camper with a bumper sticker that read, “Monica Lewinsky’s Ex-Boyfriend’s Wife For President.” Does it get any clevererer?

Andrea volunteered to make the fire, though she was nervous about making a fire in front of an Eagle Scout (she’d been reading my blog). I said I’d put up the tent.

She had the fire going before the tent was up.

I asked if she wanted to try some of my campfire food, and she said yes.

I made a pot of macaroni and canned ham and added a lot of pepper because I didn’t have any Tabasco. After trying one bite, Andrea added much more pepper. She finished her half before I finished mine.

I asked her if my beard made me look like Spencer from The Hills (I never had any facial hair when I knew her because a person has to be clean shaven to work at Hess). She assured me the beard didn’t make me look like Spencer.

[I met Lisa Love from Teen Vogue and The Hills when I was a security guard at Walnut Hill high school in Natick, Massachusetts last year. I said hello and told her that I recognized her.

She said, “How do you recognize me?”

I said, “From The Hills,” thinking that this was kind of obvious.

And she said, “Oh does your little sister watch it?”

At this point I realized she’d think I was weird if I told her I was an avid follower of Lauren Conrad and the whole Laguna Beach gang. So I said, “Yes, my little sister watches it and I’ve seen you in passing.”

And then she asked, “How old is your sister? Is she in junior high or something?”

At this point I realized she’d think my sister, a twenty-one year old who currently interns at the State House, was weird if I admitted her real age. So I said, “Yes, she’s in seventh grade.”

Lisa Love smiled and said that was nice. Then she asked me to carry a soggy bag of garbage from her daughter’s dorm room to the dumpster.]

Andrea and I discussed my DMR job and decided that I should give one of those digital picture frames with photos from my trip to each of the two group homes I worked in. Taking the Individuals across state lines requires an act of congress—whatever that means.

In the morning I asked Andrea if she needed to get back to Michigan soon, and she said no.

She currently works for her cousin and her job basically consists of doing his errands on a four wheeler. He’s a machinist of some sort.

I asked if she wanted to go hiking, and she said yes.

We drove to a trail and walked into the woods. After about a mile of walking down the trail, we came across a cave.

I asked her if she wanted to explore the cave, and she said yes.

The opening was wide and we walked in standing up, but pretty soon the passage became very narrow. I had to take off my straw hat and rotate the fanny pack to my backside just to be able to squeeze forward. I used the little LED light on my pocket knife to light our way.

After ten minutes or so, we came to a very very narrow pass. The sticks under our feet were all small; none of the larger ones made it in this far during rainstorms and flooding.

I asked Andrea if she wanted to keep going, and she said yes.

We started talking about flash floods and earthquakes and got each other kind of nervous. Then we started wondering if the cave even had two openings. This was a possibility neither of us had considered when we entered.

We traded choice lines from Deliverance as we walked. She told me her cousin, her employer (also from Kentucky), could squeal just like a pig.

While crawling along through three or four inches of dark cave water (we were both wearing jeans) I again asked if she wanted to turn around, and she said no.

We crawled on and I noticed that we’d passed the point where graffiti covered the walls. I really started to worry that there wouldn’t be an exit and that the cave would be too narrow for us to turn around, or that the battery in my pocket knife light would die.

I’m not sure why, since the settings are pretty different, but I started thinking about that scene in Never Cry Wolf where the dude falls through the ice and can’t find the hole he fell in through. He ends up busting his way out of the ice in another section of the lake or river he’s in.

Then the cave opened up a bit and I noticed the sticks at our feet were getting larger, so I knew there was an exit.

After a while we saw light up ahead that wasn’t generated from my knife. At the exit, we decided to sit on a ledge for a moment before exiting. From where we sat, we could only see the outside world from the reflection of the trees in the water under our feet—everything else was obscured by a hanging wall of rock that we’d have to crawl (swim) under to get out.

Andrea asked me if I would’ve made it all the way through the cave if I was by myself, and I told her no, I would’ve stopped as soon as it started getting really narrow.

Just as I was about to say something about how most people probably don’t make it all the way through the cave, we both heard the sounds of other people’s voices from behind us, back in the cave.

We sat and waited for whoever was approaching. I don’t know why she wanted to sit there and wait (she actually suggested it), but I wanted to see how far away the voices really were, whether they’d make it all the way through, as we had.

About two minutes after we first heard the voices, 15 adolescent girls poured out of the cave—a high school soccer team. Andrea and I exited the cave ahead of them and watched as they all crawled out and decided they wanted to do it again. One girl came up to us and exclaimed that she was five foot nine but parts of the cave were only three feet tall! Andrea and I just looked at her and said nothing—both of us were a few inches taller than her.

Andrea and I hung out back at the camp site for a while towards the middle of the day. Every time I went to the bathroom or walked more than ten feet away from Andrea this older man would swoop into our site from the one adjacent and begin talking to her. His dog followed him wherever he went, but the dog always arrived a few seconds after the owner—he was a very old German Shepard Golden Retriever mix and had very bad hips.

The old man was never not smoking a cigar, and as it turned out, he taught at Andrea’s high school in Louisville, Kentucky about 15 years before she attended.

The man told us about coaching high school basketball (and about how high school basketball is superior to pro-basketball because high schoolers aren’t allowed to break the rules). He told us how he’d had some really good boys—how one of the boys had once returned to visit him after graduation and slipped a hundred dollar bill into his hand.

“Now that was a REALLY good boy,” the man said.

Then he asked me where I was from. After I told him, he said, “Oh, you’re a Yankee!”

And Andrea said, “And he ain’t a good boy either, so don’t expect him to hand you a hundred dollars.”

And the man said, “Oh, so that’s why you like him—’cause he’s ARMORY!” (He actually said ornery but I didn’t understand this until Andrea explained it after he’d gone back to his own site).

Andrea commented on how much she like the word ornery. I told her I’d heard three different people use the word cantankerous in Tennessee. All three times the word was used to describe a horse.

Andrea and I talked for a few hours. She told me about various jobs she’d had, including a furniture moving job in Northampton, MA where the guy she’d worked for had hidden water bottles under various city monuments because he didn’t trust tap water.

She told me that Bourbon is the only American liquor (that she knows of) that is defined by a region (Kentucky) the way that champagne is.

I asked Andrea if she'd attend my reading in Michigan, and she said yes.