Nay, we are but men. Rock!

Here I am sitting in my house three days before I was scheduled to be home from my backpacking trip.  I checked the calendar before I left and sure enough it said August.  I checked the map and sure enough I was heading to central Oregon.  Then why in the name of everything that is holy did the weather act like something out of a Charlton Heston movie?  When we got to the trailhead it was sunny and about 104 degrees, typical for the geography and time of year.  That night the wind moved in, 30-35 mph gusts.  The next night the lightning moved in to go along with my friend Mr. Wind.  The night after that Rain Jr decided to show up to the party.  And last night Rain Jr’s father Papa Downpour decided to dance on the face of my shelter with his friend Cyclone Jim.  I mean there were torrential downpours and wind gusts upwards of 45 mph or more.  Last night was probably the most miserable night I have ever spent in the wilderness.  I was laying in my rain-soaked down sleeping bag looking up at the bottom of the tarp and just waiting for it to give way and fly off into the night leaving us even more unprotected.  Somehow our knots held and the shelter construction held pretty well through the night; I only had to get out and tie down the tarps two or three times throughout the night.  And did I forget to mention I FORGOT MY RAIN GEAR!!!!!!!!!  This was my fourth time taking college students into the wilderness for a week and never before had I ever encountered even a drop of rain.  Last night sucked.

Other than the weather that was more unpredictable than Cher on her wedding night the trip was pretty good.  The students I had were great and rose to almost any occasion  with high spirits.  They worked together and surpassed my expectations.  They were encouraging and supportive of one another.  They never questioned my decisions.  In short they were pretty awesome.  But the weather blew.  While on the trip I had to keep my tongue and watch what I said in order to set the right kind of example.  I needed to keep morale at a high level.  Now I could care less.  I want to vent.  I want to complain.  I think I am done.  Thank you for listening, or would it be reading?

Until last weekend, I had never participated in an organized running event of any length. I wasn’t exactly seeking opportunity either. I have actually avoided several. However, at about 9:00 pm, the night before a race someone called my bluff and I ended up promising to run a charity 5k in Santa Ana, El Salvador.

I awoke race day morning to the roar of pouring rain. This was our 8^th day in Central America and our first sight of precipitation before sunset. Each morning until now, only little puff balls dotted the sky. This wasn’t the ‘dry’ rain of the Pacific Northwest. This kind of rain is what some might call a torrential downpour, but a promise is a promise, so I strapped on the mint-condition, two year old New Balance runners and made my way to the bus with five other volunteers from my Habitat for Humanity crew.

We should have told the driver to take us home when watched the wipers flap wildly in vein across their windshield real-estate. We should have stopped the bus driver from driving off when we reached the registration table as soaked as if we climbed out of a river. Instead, we stuck it out and waited for the race to start for an hour (uncovered). We were the only five Gringos of nearly 400 runners, so naturally, the local news station couldn’t resist asking for interviews. Of course, we agreed.

I took it slowly to “keep pace with the group”, and finished the completely downhill 2.8 mile (not exactly 5k) in 22 minutes. Nothing on my entire body was dry including my super-chaffed nipples. That’s right; my nipples had been rubbed raw by my wet t-shirt. That last sentence reads funny, but it’s totally true. I had no idea this would happen, but looking back it makes sense.

• Wet clothing feels cold even in tropical storms.
• My nipples turn into ¼ karat diamonds below 70 degrees.
• Running makes even the smallest man-boobs bounce.

This combination chaffed my completely useless nipples enough to make me appreciate my wife’s breast-feeding agony.

Tuesday night, I actually asked her if she had any bag balm.

Every year as part of my job I lead a team of 10 college student leaders on a 7 day backpacking trip in the Sisters Wilderness in Oregon.  It is one of the best parts of my job description.  I really love the day to day work that I do with these leaders but to actually get to go into the back country for a week and get paid for it is pretty cool.  Our program has built into it 4 main elements used in the learning/development process: Solo, where they are on their own for about 24 hours, Leader of the Day, where two of the leaders are responsible for all of the decisions made for the day from traveling to setting up camp to meal schedule, Final Expedition, where the guide and I leave during the night and they are responsible for getting safely to the trailhead, and Summit, where, you guessed it, we give summating one of the Sisters a whirl.

All in all it is a pretty sweet deal.  I get to be part of breaking in some students who have never been in the wilderness before and be part of furthering their leadership skills on the whole.  What I don’t like about it is the masochistic training schedule our university’s strength and conditioning coach put together for us.  I swear this cat must be endorsed by the National Association for Lunging Lungers.  Every day has you doing 764 more lunges than the previous day.  I don’t know what’s worse, doing the lunges now or summating a 10,000ft mountain without doing them.  Personally I am leaning toward not doing them since it is only one day of the trip instead of every day leading up to it.  On the bright side though my tush now deserves to be cast in bronze and put in the Louvre. 

I mentioned in the post about my son getting a pebble stuck in his bronchial tube that there was a story to tell about my family and three other families camping and white water rafting/kayaking on the Rogue River in southern Oregon.  This is that story.  It was amazing.  There were parts of the trip that were hard but more that were not.  We went down with our small group from church.  I have been part of small groups before but this is the first one I can honestly say functions like what I think a small group should function like.  We share life together, not just Sundays.  It took a little getting used to, for everyone I’m sure, to know how to camp with so many other people.  I think we figured it out pretty well.

This was the first time any of the families, except one, had been camping with kids.  My wife and I are pretty avid outdoors-men, or outdoors-persons to be more accurate, and have spent a lot of time in the backcountry; our kids are one and three and have not.  The main difference I found between backpacking alone and car camping with kids is that camping, or being for that matter, anywhere with kids is fifteen million times dirtier.  It was dusty, muddy, outdoorsy bliss for anyone under the age of five.  The first thing the kids started doing when we got to the campsite was to start digging a hole.  Seems pretty exciting.  They worked on this hole the entire trip.  It was an obsession for them and they went at it with the fervor of a rabid wolverine fighting a pack of marmots.  I bet when they are all older they will say to one another, “Hey do you remember that time when we were camping and we dug that hole?” …pause for staring off into the distance and ford remembering… “That was a great hole.”

Apart from the hole digging there were other things that happened as well, all of which pale in comparison to the hole though.  We took a trip down the Rogue River in rafts and inflatable kayaks.  This was incredible.  I have not been on any white water since moving to Oregon three years ago and never in a kayak.  I’m sold.  If I have my druthers I will never ride in a raft again; it’s kayaks for me all the way.  We went down with a company called Obrien’s Rogue River Outfitters.  They were amazing.  I don’t normally make plugs but it was probably the best guided trip I have ever taken.  They have some pictures and a little blurb about our trip on their blog, http://www.rogue-river-rafting-trips.com

The only blemishes to the weekend were when my son inhaled the pebble, even though that probably shouldn’t count because we didn’t know about it until 10 days later, and when our friends’ son tripped over one of the guy ropes on my tent and got a spiral fracture of the femur.  That’s right I said a spiral fracture of the femur.  Crazy huh?  It not like he was traveling with any great velocity either.  He was running as fast as a two-year-old can run with only having 10 feet or so to gather momentum and tripped over the ropes and got a, incase I didn’t mention it earlier, spiral fracture of the femur.  He has to wear a cast that goes from his ribcage to his ankles with a dowel between his legs and a chunk taken out of the crotch so he can do his business.  So basically for the next five weeks or so he has to either lay down or stand up, and by stand up I mean be propped up against the wall.  If it were me I think I would name this chapter of my family’s life “Benadryl and Movies All Around.”  But that’s just me.

I am glad for this trip on many different levels.  I am glad that we got out and did something outside with my family.  I am glad that despite two of the children needing to have surgery because of the trip we are still looking forward to the next time we can cam as a group.  I am glad that we shared in so many different levels of experience together.  And I am glad our small group goes beyond superficial groups I have known in the past to being friends in the best sense of the word and when things are hard and some of us need help and support it’s there.

Whoever first said, “You can’t get blood from a stone” was an idiot.  I just got back from the hospital with my one-year-old son where he had to have surgery to remove a stone that was lodged in his right bronchial tube for 10 days!!!  About a week and a half ago my family and I were camping and white water rafting/kayaking with three other families, more to come on that trip in a very near post, when my youngest son put a handful of pea gravel into his mouth.  This is not an uncommon occurrence.  The cat would eat a pile of radioactive scorpion tails tied together with barbed wire and soaked in vermouth if he could get his hands on them.  I walked over to him and did the regular, “No, no, spit it out” routine and he did, for the most part.  He must have missed one in the expectorating because he started to gag and cough pretty vigorously.  I looked in his mouth and saw a little piece of gravel in his throat.  So I did what anyone would have done at that point, I put my finger in his throat to try and get the choking hazard out.  This had roughly the same effect as poking a feeding rhino in the eye with a flaming baton.  He didn’t like it much and showed me by nearly dismembering one of my fingers.  This, as you can see, wouldn’t have made much sense because then he would have had a piece of pea gravel, which was only pushed farther down by my attempts to remove it, as well as a finger blocking his airway.  I am glad he thought better of biting my finger off and just decided to swear at me in baby language instead.  He cried for a couple of mintues and then settled down so my wife and I thought he had swallowed it and would deliver it back to the soil in a couple of days.  

The camping trip regrettably ended and we headed home where we noticed a little bit of a rasp in my son’s breathing but attributed it to the dust and camping.  Over the next couple of days his cough didn’t get any better and it didn’t get any worse and he had an appointment with his doctor in a couple of weeks so we decided to keep an eye on it and just wait and see.  Well a couple of days ago he developed a cough that kind of sounded like you where choking Elmo while kicking him in the giblets repeatedly.  At first it was only an isolated incident but when it kept happening over the course of two days we decided to take him to urgent care.  Here we got an X-ray on his chest and found an almost almond-sized piece of pea gravel lodged just at the top of his lung in the bronchial tube.  We were off to Children’s Hospital and the land of teensy little operating instruments.

We were admitted overnight and the surgery happened at about 10:00am the next morning.  Now I know this was probably a traumatic experience for the little guys but I do not think I have ever seen anything so funny as a one-year-old coming out of anesthesia.  When we walked back to the recovery room we could hear the nurses laughing before we even got there.  Think back to high school parties when you were a senior.  Remember the freshman that would always show up and drink too much trying to impress the seniors but end up naked on the pool table mumbling incoherent song lyrics while others at the party prodded him in the stomach with a yard stick because it would make him giggle?  It was kind of like that but without the hangover and, I’m sure, much more expensive.

The surgery itself lasted a grand total of about 16 minutes and the doctor gave us the piece of gravel in a cup.  The only dilemma  I am currently facing is what to do with the pebble.  I am thinking that I may have it set in a chunk of amber and mounted on the end of a cane.  It would be my pimp stick but I am open to suggestions.