Amtrak to the Trail

March 17, 2004
The Journey begins..

Amcrack Arizona-New Mexico border. Little hexagonal reservation homes sit queerly on the old west train set landscape just beyond the I-10 canyon intersection of these two dry and stunning open states. On board the Jigglebox again. Passed out hard atop my six month pack not long after boarding last night in San Bernardino. A largely empty train means two seats to myself. Not counting on it lasting, but halleluja for now. Rose with the sun at Flagstaff, kinda bleary, kinda freaked. Then from the northern window comes that magical motel from my youth. Now a Travelodge (and perhaps always that, I don't recall) the horseshoe shaped inn once had swings in the wide grassy courtyard where a young man, a boy of 13 sat swinging and watching, counting the cars as endless processions of boxcars and locomotives rolled east and west. The boy was bound for California and a new life, a transition time, the end of a life, the beginning of a new. I remember it with the fondness of a sweet dream of Heaven. And thus we ride out a few not-so-sweet recent memories of Flagstaff, like the arduous and angst-ridden hump across NM & AZ in a dying art car. Poor Duke. Poor me riding the train through here near a year ago on that ugly mission of mental health, that cruel test, that sadistic audition for the lead role in a nightmare I'd been fighting alone for years.

But aaauurrgh! Fuck all that! To better days. Beside me sits a backpack loaded with all the love and logistical genius necessary to sustain one on a six-month trek. In my lap a yard of fleece, a needle and thread with which I stumble untrained through the creation of a camping pillow soft and small. Gallup now, TG& Y Hardware, Busy Bee Laundromat, The Road Runner Motel, and tough love over the Amtrak public address system: "this is the conductor speaking. there is no drinking of any beverages or eating food in the smoking car. The smoking car is for smoking cigarettes only. No cigars, no pipes, no children. If we find remnants of food items or drinks in the smoking car, we'll shut down the smoking." Aside from the smoking children, this strikes me as the most absurd rule on Amtrak. Smoking and drinking go hand in hand. Yet the drinkers can't smoke in the cocktail lounge and the smokers can't drink in the austere iron lung prison-like cell of a room downstairs they call the smoking room. Paula is a painter who paints in oils and rarely shows, the disappointment of years creating for little or no audience or praise shows in her soft eyes, her gently resigned face. I know this look well. It is the face I see in the mirror these days. She asks about my writing and have I been published. I give her the Cliffnotes version of the unsung and unrequited. We compare heartaches briefly, then sit bonding silently, our stillborn dreams conversing subliminally whilst her husband talks of wind sprints and pains more physical. All this over breakfast at one of those cramped little Dining Car tables where Frau Glotzenboza the DC Steward sits you with the curt warning that she WILL be seating others with you. The first to the table, I respond to her threat with "Lucky me!" She doesn't like this and is quick to penetrate my American-bred dining space privacy bubble. Paula and David turn out to be fine company, so all's well. When asked where I'm headed, I offhandedly relate the details of my mission as though it were a trifle. I'm kidding myself, of course. The journey ahead is mammoth, the biggest thing I've ever undertaken. As the red bluffs, tumbleweeds and trailer homes of the west roll away and away, I feel very little, almost numb. Perhaps this numbness is the key. The numbness says: "It's time for a change of perspective." I numbly roll toward Albuquerque, my city of failure full of snapshots and people and stuff, memories just as well forgotten. maybe this is the numbness, a defense mechanism, a deadening of the heart set to last out the afternoon and into night until the train has carried me far away to the east and the blissfully unknown, unscarred, unscathed. My heart is black and blue and smiling still, hopeful, like a toddler badly beaten but beaming with love unconditional for its rotten, abusive parents. God grant me the serenity. - RSM

Dear Mr. McKinney,
It has come to our attention that you will shortly be embarking on a treacherous lengthy journey. Sheer cliffs, poisonous snakes, deer ticks and siren-like women will abound on your journey. We at Mutual of Omaha would like you to keep a few things in mind and in your backpack before you set out:

• Proper walking shoes. No stiletto heels as you are so often inclined to pack.
• DDT. Or whatever the properly approved politically correct insect energy zapping spray may be today. Keep that Lyme disease away!
• Plastic wrap. Siren-like women trap men with their baby makers. You must protect yourself from your unborn children.
• Bribes/gifts for rations from the stills. It's not physically possible to carry enough beer to last this entire journey. Or, at least for me, to carry enough even for one day of this journey. Wine maybe. But I digress. Porno would likely be a good bribe for some swill. Carry 2 or 3 mags with you and a page per bribe/ per drink and you're set for probably a week. Beware of the still owner's daughters, however. We have some statistics on that topic.
• In instances of extreme danger, pretend to be mentally challenged. Truly evil people with bad intentions have an absolute fear of these
  type of handicapped people.
• Write to everyone on the outside. They really wish they could go with you and will be living vicariously through your words.
• Write to your Mutual of Omaha agent more often than everyone else. We at Mutual of Omaha always have your best interests at heart and truly want you to enjoy your lengthy treacherous journey.

LOST POSTING FOUND! (Added 12-7-04!)
Las Vegas, New Mexico. One more stop on the trail of tears & weirdness. LVNM, home to the location shooting of the film "Red Dawn," now a lesser known 80's ratpack flick but one with a strong impact on my teenage years. Red Dawn, the tale of the Commie invasion of America, setting: a rural town in "Colorado." If you've seen the flick, you'd need only a short stroll through downtown to know that you were there, standing smack in the heart of that fiction's real-life location. A weird town, Las Vegas. One of those last stop settlements for freak healers and outlaws and supposedly home to Val Kilmer. I had heard strange tales of the place before visiting there, and now I have my own. For some synchronistic reason I may never know, I took my love, my girlfriend, my common-law wife K there for the novelty of the three hour train ride and an overnight in the old historic hotel downtown for her birthday.. For reasons a little less murky and a whole lot more painful as I stare at the town from the window of a train 2.3 years later, Las Vegas NM is where that love ended for me, where I waited anxious for the last time for her midnight-whiskey-crossover and I, sick from worry the next day, tipped the domino that sent the whole kit and caboodle and commitment ala carte tanking hard and fast like a chopper outa fuel. Out the window I'm staring at the faded sign proclaiming the identity of the no-doubt once-famous "Castaneda" hotel, now boarded up. And inside, deep in my buckshot heart, I know that here, right there whilst waiting for this very train, there is where it ended. I wanna buy the old hotel and burn it to the ground. But hey, Las Vegas NM ain't all bad. There's the semi-public hot springs, some great old crumbling architecture, and of course the remnant memories of Red Dawn, the best of which for me came years after the film when at a private Sheen family dinner, I recognized the red Wolverine letterman jacket on then-Charlie-girlfriend Kelly Preston. Without hesitation, Charlie took it off Kelly and put it on me. In my coming-of-age in the 80s pop culture consciousness, wearing that jacket (even for a minute) held more significance for me than the treasures of Tutankhamen or the holy Shroud of Turin. So Vegas NM is alright. Or maybe it's the Vegas of fiction that I really like, and in the going there, the thinly-veiled fictions of my own life just couldn't hold up.

Further on down the track, or North of Vegas that is, a black print on white background railroad-looking sign says this is "Waltrous" or some such weird name. I can't deny that the landscape here is fascinating to me. I'm stupid with its blonde beauty, its cliffs and buttes and sculpted rock faces forever , its deciduous trees now winter barren of leaves left branched and budded golden and all the golden rocks and the streams running though it and dry desert scrub trees also golden or ochre or a green that borders on black and all that blue, blue, blue sky above. I cannot deny that I am in love with New Mexico, much as I'd like to think I'm not. Worming into AlbuQ from the west and the south, I felt my numbness turn to nausea, vertiginous sadness for all I had tried to be here, for all I thought I had going, and for the finger-snap fast conclusion of it all not two months after my sojourn in Kaseman. I didn't try and kill myself because of her, no, far from it.

Perhaps it was the change of meds. Perhaps it was the balloon crew job and my instant subservience to so many privileged people. Perhaps it was the Ritalin going around, chopped and snorted for something to do, to give TV a run for its money, as it were. But most definitely there with K on the grounds of the Castaneda awaiting our return train, it was a few well phrased words by Herman Hesse and an all out "abandon ship" sensation in the wake of so many, many whiskey psycho drunk "Fuckoff!" messages from the mouth of babes, from the mouth of my lover, my friend, my abusive and amnesiac alcoholic mate, K. The train is well past Las Vegas now, and I am glad. There are no more scarey "scene(s) of the crime" for me now, not on this train route anyway. I am relieved.

Part of me hoped against some silly hope that Dave, who came late to visit me at the station in AlbQ and saw me thus for only a moment, would have roared north in his sleek black Saab (or is it a Volvo?) to intercept me there and ride with me awhile. But this, like so much of my life, was just a fantasy, based on no amount of everyman's reality, and far too much of mine. K and our house and the bottle room I built, they're all gone now. They're there, back there in that weird little city that to rock bands represents a necessary evil, a throwaway performance way point between bigger cities to the east and to the west. They're there indeed, not really gone but there. Like the guy who says "I lost my job.. well, I didn't really lose it, I know where it is, but someone else is doing it now." Or was he speaking of his lost love? Either way, Georgia awaits. And with her a dream, like the tiny Tinkerbell in my pocket, stolen from Duke to charm my voyage strange. Tinkerbell in her tiny lamp, a little piece of a far greater magic. I carry her with me, and faith will carry us both. Farewell then New Mexico. Farewell Casteneda Hotel. Farewell Hesse and sweet love's dying duress. Farewell. The horizon then is bright. It is blank as an empty page. I will write on it. Write on it I will. - RSM

I write-a too mucha today. I loosa my mind. the train jiggles to and fro and on the cafe car. i have always loved her with the love of a boy, the boy who watched her in "A Little Romance" with Olivier and fell hard at 13. "The train track through the Alps before there ever was a train." Turn me over, I'm done on this side. Boy am I crocked. Scott Frank, famous writer and friend, greeted me on the platform in his straw hat and white beard, dark glasses, his blackjack winners getup, he calls it. so nice to see his face there in that queer and unsettling land where I've been through so much and would like to forget, as much. Hopeful of Dave's arrival but not confident of it, we ducked around the corner into some new Thai joint lorded over by blatantly gay guys who happily welcomed us in and poured me a saki and a Singha and Scott a sober iced tea. We drank and reveled in our relative wealth (he from gambling, me from government sponsored gonzo-ness. And that saki and beer sure got me rolling at one o'clock in the afternoon.

Then it was time to chase the train, where of course we ran into Dave, late, and waiting, but almost too late as the train prepared to leave and did in fact pull out three minute later. The boys in solidarity waited on the platform, and as we passed I threw open the downstairs window and howled a grateful "Hoorah!" It was a brief yet sweet moment, a snapshot of redemption to counter the numbness, the nausea, the rolling-into-AlbuQ blues. An hour later I awoke with a start, startled from a drunken stupor by the too-loud and grammatically-strained p.a. announcement about the night's dinner offerings, a true auditory nightmare, especially fresh from a flash-fast gonzo noontime train drunk nap. Medication was definitely in order. And then music. Loud and of an infinite selection, the sort offered by my Archos, the 20 gig jukebox that I swore I wouldn't carry on this long, long journey but which I realized in the last minute that I just couldn't do without. Six months without music? Not likely. If some literature professor someday asks the question on an exam, "What was the principal influence of Rick McKinney's writing?" don't believe the bullshit about pain and depression. it was music that made me write. And beer. Hefe Weizen if possible. Naz Darovia. -RSM

March 18, 2004
Train to Georgia, Day Two
Weird Memories in the Chicago station

This is what they do. They hurry you up, stick you in a gigantic concrete lung of a station that heaves and breathes, a million commuters its nervous blood pumping through, and feed you booze, white beer at $2/pint and serenade you with a cover-band's renditions of Hotel California and Comfortably Numb and you get numb and loose and stupid, all feeling safe and happy, then they make you wait. They delay your train and make you sit, you and two hundred others, all anxious, all waiting on line light Star Wars ticket nuts camped on sidewalks for days. I've been "forced" by this situation to sit beside a sweet-smelling zit faced beauty and her boyfriend, they from some foreign country whose dialect there is no name for in the dimly lit dungeons of Amtrak, Chicago. And I am falling asleep. No, really falling. After a handful of beers and songs and good fun with Alex and Rebecca at the upstairs bar, I am tanked and zonked and in real danger of losing consciousness if I don't get up now. Now! GET UP NOW!

Whew. That was a close one. Awake now and quite sure in recollection that I would have nose-dived the tile-on-concrete floor seconds later if the zit-faced Italian hottie hadn't reached over and twisted my left nipple. This, much to the abhorrence of her machismo boyfriend but hey! The girl knew her VEMT, man (that's short for Venetian Emergency Medical Training) and she acted quickly, purely duty-bound of course. Anyway, the nipple-twisty worked. Woke me right up. And good thing. My train was loading and the aggro-carnivorous sheep were clusterfucking through the gate like so much hamburger through a grinder. I just had to get in on that fun. And I did. But what happened next wasn't really fun. You see, there was this little Asian girl, er, woman I should say, name of Malu. Malu was having a helluva time with her five suitcases and her seven shopping bags such that she was blocking MY entry into MY train car. So, the gentleman that I am, I helped her transport her bags to her seat. However, idiot that I am I didn't seize the Malu day. As crowded as the train was getting, it would have been a gimme to just sit down beside this Asian cutie and avoid the inevitable dead air loneliness that would (and did) ensue the moment I secured a two-seater all my own and no one, I repeat no one, sat down beside me.

In the so-called 11th hour of my two-night train trek from soCal to Chi town, I met Alex. Alex and Rebecca. Two friendly young ladies who not only graced me with their company on and off the train well into the beer-addled station layover hours that followed, but kept me red-in-the-face with compliments. Rebecca focused on my ass, whilst diminutive and well-proportioned Alex at 4-foot-11 seemed better stationed to see my heart, or its whereabouts. Alex went from catching my eye this afternoon to full out thrilling me tonight, all in a matter of just a few hours. As she herself noted, perhaps it was just the beer. But there was something there. And it was GOOD. And it was welcome, both her energy and Rebecca's. And the farewell kiss I planted on Alex felt very good indeed. Why then I am alone again so soon? Welcome to the world of the rogue rail traveler. Hi! Nice to meet you. I'm Boxcar Bertha. But I don't have Barbara Hershey's boobs and I am mute among strangers.

The tide of humanity, fast-footed commuters every one of them, trotted through the station in the two hours we sat there boozing and schmoozing from 430 to 630, exercising criminal amounts of joy and freedom from THAT world. When I'd cross that flow of Grand Central pedestrian traffic to relieve my bladder in the men's room across the way, I was fording a dangerous river, no doubt, a river of stress and hurry-up and muscle & sinew-filled suits that would stomp me like a rock concert neophyte if I weren't careful. It's weird how all the world is moving at such a pace, going places, doing things, moving stuff around, making deals and faking smiles, things I'll never understand. It's amazing and beautiful! I am glad they're out there, doing their thing.

I am 1000-times more glad that I am not, that I am lost & found boy, that I am Wal-Mart Boy abandoned in the store and roaming free, beneath the radar, outside the calendar and clock. Thank you, Lord, that Thou hast given unto us the freedom of choice, the choice to be or not to be, to do or... not to give a shit. I choose the latter, and of course, I am lying through my teeth. I care like crazy. And when the professors entreat their English Lit grad students to dig through all this gibberish of mine and find meaning, they will find that I cared immensely, intensely, that I wrote and I loved and I lived. End of story. - RSM

Chicago's central station was a trip. I thought I'd left behind the weird heebie-jeebies of bungled x-lives somewhere back near the northeastern edge of New Mexico. Not quite. A beer at the upstairs bar at central station reduced my walk to a wobble, my stance to a hunch as I recalled the day in 1996 when there in that very train station bar I had asked K to marry me, and poor as I was, had naught to offer for a ring but a one-shot whiskey bottle screw-on cap, punched through and fashioned into a ring. I’ am sad just thinking about it, about how a fine woman K deserved so much more, and a fine man I would have liked to have had more to offer. But I was poor and struggling hard against a depressive mind, so hard that it was all I could do half the time to just remember to breathe.

I remember that I had to go back to Arizona for some job, which meant regrettably leaving K in Chicago with her sister. So right there in the station with my train rumbling nearby, I asked the girl I loved to marry me, and she said yes. It was the first such request to cross my lips and the last. As it happened, I got on my train and rode it as far as St. Louis before that same heart-wrenching love caused me to detrain and ride right back the way I came, back to K and of course a fair helping of the kind of awkwardness that comes with such rash romantic acts. I never made good on my wish to turn that bottleneck ring into the real thing. Not a year later my mental battles were bad enough that I had to pull out of the engagement altogether.

Marriage is not the sort of decision one makes when half out of one's mind. Or it shouldn't be anyway. So that was I, in 1996 and there again today, sitting a few tables away and fully weirded out with the disheveled and disillusioned deja vu. I am sorry K. But then again, no I am not. Every great moment in life simply IS and must be honored as it IS, not as it happened to be fucked up later on or changed or whatever. That moment of pure love will always exist for me and I am grateful for it. I must admit however that it was a little weird sitting there again, drinking beers and being flirty with Rebecca and Alex while out of the corner of my eye seeing very clearly the Rick & K of '96 going gaga and silly in love just a few tables away. - RSM

Gear. Yes of course gear. I get the impression from my reading that well-hung thruhikers are super gearheads. And they have to be. Just try throwing together a Coleman tent, $40 Wal-Mart sleeping bag, propane stove, army surplus mess kit, full-length foam mattress, fuel, canned tuna, canned chili, and a typical week's worth of your usual clothing: jeans, cotton shirts, cotton socks, lederhosen, jungle pith helmet, cast iron chastity belt, Kevlar vest, you know, the usual stuff, and just see how many megatons your pack weighs in at. Over 50 lbs I bet. More likely 60 or 70. So some smarty pants long distance trekkers started thinking light, figuring I guess that the lighter you packed the further you could go. These guys really got it down to a science, too. They started drilling holes in their watchbands, cutting the ends of their toothbrushes, severing superfluous limbs, a finger here, a little toe there, stuff like that. It got pretty out of hand.

Then I came along and revolutionized the whole thruhiker "thang." While everyone else was spending ten times the money on ultralite gear like sleeping bags made out of origami paper, I invented "negative weight" gear, gear so light it actually subtracted pounds from heavy gear loads. With a tent that weighs in at -5 kilos (that's measured in quantum kelvin divided by the speed of light in a black hole) a down bag made from the feathers of actual ghost geese (ectoplasm extracted of course) and a cookstove so light it actually draws its fuel energy from the negative attraction of atoms in an inverse universe.

Anyway, every good hydraulic system has its bleeder valve, and this train ride is mine. Four foul nights of scant sleep and insatiable questions across a country chock fulla dead dreams and broken love schemes, yes! That's my kinda warmup, my way of bleeding the brakes on this carbonate machine, bleed em now so we know they work then never use em again, not once. Not for the entirety of the 2,200 mile walk. Just go go and go some more. Bad memories bled, masochistic impulses fed and then tucked away in the barn. Got me my negative weight gear and eight six packs of beer (for ballast of course, to keep me from floating away on a hot air balloon pack of negative weight). I'm gonna stomp on the terra!

Coursing along the Ohio River now, pea soup green and choked with skeleton trees beige and brown, gray skies, now and again a bridge, flood plains full of rocks and naked trees, moss and lichen and white caps over shallow spots. Aside from trash and the government-green and cement-gray dam ahead, no other sign of man other than the tracks on which we the train people roll, a water moccasin, a witch on her crooked broom, a caterpillar of coffins linked and diesel pumping boxlike hearts.

And the forest. All around us woods now. And then we cross the river at last, slow as snails, the required speed for an ancient bridge no doubt. On the other side a sign: Hawk's Nest. And behind it in the woods a sign with a symbol.. could it be? The symbol of the AT? I don't know. For all my planning and packing I neglected to bring one map, not even just a xerox of the whole eastern seaboard. Nothing. So though I know this train will very soon pass right over the squiggly line of Earth that is my future home, I'm afraid I won't know it, not consciously anyway. Perhaps I will just feel it. And perhaps months from now while on foot near here I will see the silver snake Am-trak its way right past me, and I'll say, "Aha."

Well, please excuse my flight into fancy, but I needed that. The train crowded in thick in West Virginia, causing my space bubble to shrink by half and coincidentally and messily a Budweiser burst in my bag. I shall return shortly will a full and serious list of my actual, real-life super-expensive hi-tech ultralight gear. Over and Out.
-RSM

March 19, 2004
Train to Georgia, Day Three:
First Contact

Met Doug, don't yet know his trail name. he picked me out of a crowd boarding the train, this my last of three consecutive trains since leaving California Tuesday. Today is Friday. Yah. Do the math. Anyway, so Doug sights my pack and introduces himself. I'm awed and almost a little intimidated to find that not only is he an intended thruhiker like me, but this will be his second time! Jesus. Now that's Gonzo dedication. Back in Charlottesville I dined out with Irena, a sweet grandmotherly woman from Canada who'd been across the aisle from me on the previous train. Both facing a four or five hour layover, we checked our bags at the station and set out together for a stroll down the towns restaurant row, as it were..

I let Grandma Irena pick the place and well she did choose. Place turned out to be a brewery. Naturally I had to sample all their brews, each a six ounce or so glass but by the end of the taste test I was amply baked. Irena told me of her seven children, all well and alive, even her one bugger of a son, as she called him, the forty year old, my age roughly, the bad seed. Irena reminded me of my idealized visions of both my grandmothers combined, sweet, happy-go-lucky, adventurous, and full of stories and enthusiasm for my stated journey. Ours was one of those fast friendships of convenience and trust that rarely occur in the "real" world. Such things only happen in "movies," that is to say "moving life" or life on the road, the rails and who knows maybe soon the trail.

Back on the train I offered to buddy up with her on a seat so she wouldn't have to be seated with a stranger. Having discovered once under way that other seats were free, I relinquished my seat to her that she may stretch out and get some rest. And no doubt I should be doing the same. Myself now in a two-seater, I could lie down but that my recent conversation with Doug has me all excited , thinking about the trail. Or maybe it was the two cups of coffee I drank sipping under the spell of Jamaica the bartender at some cute little bistro across from the train station.

Jamaica. Gorgeous, sultry, wants to write freelance, be a photographer too. I should have been all over that, full of advice or at least inroads to conversation with this Virginia goddess, but no, I was too busy stumbling, nay, stopping my sure-to-stumble tongue before it could say anything. She no doubt found me rather odd and boring. But maybe not. I just don't know anymore. It's been too long and I haven't the faintest idea how women see me. Well, with the exception of Rebecca and Alex yesterday. But surely that was some freak anomaly! Surely those girls were drunk and their comments about my cute ass were said out of pity for my blatant humpback personality, all warped and freakish and sure to live out its life knocking around bell towers and the laboratories of mad scientists!!

Okay. I'm getting weird. It's late and I've been on trains for too damn long. This rail gig is savage and unnatural and I wouldn't recommend it to the Butcher of Lyon. Amtrak is degenerating. The curtness of its conductors is on par with every schweinhund greyhound bus driver I've ever met. Bitch, bitch, bitch. Ah, there's nothing wrong with me a First Class upgrade wouldn't fix. Tomorrow morning Springer Mountain. The beginning. And the end of trains, for awhile anyway. -RSM

So much for sleep. Four a.m. just south of Charlottesville, NC and I'm just about lobotomized with Amtrak hospitality. So, let's talk gear some more! You see, REI has this policy about ticking luggage.. er, I mean about returning sleeping bags. Being one of those comfy owner-operated and year-end dividend paying yuppie neato enterprises, REI promises a satisfaction guarantee on all merchandise. So it was that way back in January I splurged and bought myself a $240 down bag. It had some fancy name like the Ripcord or the Tiger's Ballsack or something and it was all the rave with this year's mountaineers, or so I was told. I was thrilled. I had been learning lately that buying stuff really can be cool and, shallow as it sounds, new stuff really can make you feel better about yourself.

I slept in my new mummy bag for damn near a month down on the boat, but I never quite felt at home in the thing. So, after I'd gotten it good and smelly from sleeping in it unshowered for weeks in the mildew-zealous environs of a sailboat berth in winter rains, I took it back. Oh, the girl as the REI counter loved me for that one. Actually, I think she really did. I think she was one of those kinky pheromone-junkies I've read so much about, you know, modern primitives who turn up their noses at perfumes and deodorants and prefer the good old fashioned musky scents of the animals we really are.

Okay, I confess. I'm really talking about ME. I mean, I think she and I were alike in this way. I've never gotten down and dirty with a woman cloaked in pseudo-smells, be it $1000/oz. perfume or teenage girl tonic from Target. I hate the shit. A well-scrubbed woman to me is an invisible woman. Even if I can see the woman, I'd be hard-pressed to find her erogenous zones under perfumed-stinky sheets. Nope. Gimme a woman unshowered a day or two, and I'll give you a WOMAN!

Oops. Once again I seemed to have strayed far afield from my intended message tonight. Hmmm. Just what was I talking about? Oh yes! Sleeping bags.

So REI takes back my Rick-ripened Ripcord, the blue and black colored straightjacket of a high-dollar bag, and just when I'm getting somewhere feeling out the selection for myself, this profoundly deaf sales clerk overcompensating for his handicapp (barely improved by a set of honkin' hearing aids) touches the softy in me and suddenly I'm following him around buying every vowel-heavy object he reccommends. No matter that I can barely understand a word he's saying and that my deep-seated compassion for the disabled has completely blinded me to what I really came there to buy.

It seems to make the kid really happy to be so adeptly helping me, so I don't fight it and leave the store considerably lighter in pocket and with some weird synthetic-fill bag that's even more confining than its predecesor. The only thing the new bag has going for it is its name: The Nootsack. I dig the name. Something to do with my longstanding love of Farley Mowat's Alaskan wolf study tale "Never Cry Wolf" in which the Mowat's last civilized outpost before disappearing above the Arctic Circle is a quirky "Northern Exposure-on-Acid" village called Nootsack.

Well, perhaps just to get back at REI for sicking that deaf kid on me, I keep the bag another coupla weeks and give it my own brand of moose-dander sweetness, then return it as well. At last alone with REI's fine selection of God's Gift To Outdoor Slumber, I happen upon the Big Cat, a pale olive green bag that's vastly wider in the shoulders than any other mummy they've got. This has been my problem with the other bags: waking up at night fully zipped in and experiencing about 7 seconds of sheer hemmed-in horror as I struggled to get OUT of the damn thing, enough at least to free my arms. And the Big Cat has an advertising ploy that penetrates even my titanium-tough anti-bullshit defenses: The Big Cat comes in two models, a left and right zipper option, so that when one big cat finds another big cat on the Trail, you can zip your expensive-as-shit bags together and do the snuggle and the nasty right under Mother Nature's nocturnal nose. Cha-ching. It's mine.

Copyright 2004 R.S. McKinney
All Rights Reserved