Happy Googles to You!

Who knew that nature sucked?

I sure didn’t.

I mean, I knew that I liked being indoors. I knew that I’d miss air conditioning and the internet, but I thought nature would be all right. It was just for a weekend anyway – actually a four-day weekend, but I survive five days of school each week, so I didn’t think it would be a big deal.

I mean, four days of nature couldn’t be worse than school, right?

Wrong!

If I’d known how wrong I was, I would have told my mom I had a sore throat. I’d have come down with sudden violent constipation. I’d have faked seizures. I’d have done something – anything! – to have gotten out of this stupid field trip!

Trust me, national parks suck. I know that now. It’s too late for me, but if you find yourself with the choice of hiking to a waterfall or spending the day at school, pick school everytime.

Don’t go on the trip.

Trust me.

See, I didn’t know. No one told me. I fell for the hype: “Think of it, class! Two days out of school! A four-day weekend! You’ll get to share a tent with a friend and go canoeing! We’ll see the highest waterfall in the state! We’ll explore a cave with three species of endangered bats! You’ll reconnect with nature!”

Blah blah blah.

Mrs. K. might as well have added that we were going to dress like 1920’s flappers, smoke dried banana peels, and discover our animal spirit guides. I wouldn’t have cared. She had me hooked with the two days out of school.

Big mistake. School is so much better. Even right now – I’d be in Keyboarding, but I don’t care. That’d beat this by a long shot. I need some technology right now, even if it’s with Mrs. Crowell. That’s how much nature sucks.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against waterfalls or against nature in general. I’m not a tree hater. I don’t abuse animals. I always throw my trash in the trash can. I recycle when I remember to. I don’t start forest fires. I’m taking environmental science as an elective. I think nature’s cool.

In theory. From a distance.

But up close, in person, for an extended period of time? Trees all are looking alike. Kids are getting excited about chipmunks and caterpillars. Lungs are hurting from all the fresh air. Sinuses are itching from pollen and God knows what else I’m breathing. Brain is shutting down from inactivity. I probably going to slip into sleep mode and roll back down to the trailhead.

And the packed parking lot, let me add. That’s right – packed. And not with motorcycles or little cars either. We’re talking other school busses, tour busses, church busses, busses from old folks’ homes, SUV’s the size of busses, enormous hummers seating ten or twenty probably, ancient station wagons, minivans with campers – not a two-seater in the bunch. Some major car pooling was going on to protect the ozone, I guess.

It’s got to be all the stuff on the news about the greenhouse effect. Everybody’s rushing out to blow their CO2 on the trees and suck up all the oxygen while it’s still free. My sister’s really into all that conservation-ecological crap. She’s always bookmarking environmental sites and downloading signs to hang in her bedroom or on her locker. I have to fight to get time to level my Warcraft toons or download new music for my iPod.

Oh yeah, this is great trip, Mrs. K!

I’m really reconnecting with nature here! Yeah, me and about a million other people.

We’re all pitching tents and singing “This Land is Your Land”, snapping digital photos of anthills, and looking up the types of bark in our free field guides from the welcome center. What a fantastic wonderful time we’re having standing in line watching moss grow! We’re making memories that we can treasure forever!

I’m being sarcastic, of course. I can reconnect with nature way better in my bedroom. Link to the park’s virtual tour. Watch a Photobucket slide show. Eat some trail mix. Even read a book. All way better than standing for an hour on a nature trail just to see a freaking waterfall!

Stand in line for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? Probably.

Stand in line for Guitar Hero III? Definitely.

Stand in line to ride the Kingda Ka? Of course!

Stand in line for Bloodhoung Gang tickets? Absolutely!

Stand in line for a waterfall? No way! We’re talking cruel and unusual punishment there! And probably against the Geneva Convention, now that I think about. Prisoners have rights, too, you know. I’ve read blogs about Guantanamo Bay.

But not Mrs. K, I guess. She’s oblivious, and here I am.

Me and just about a billion other people all here on the same day, all doing the same thing. All lined up down a nature trail just to watch what basically goes on in our bathroom showers. And back home, I only have to wait on my sister to get finished.

Not here though. Mrs. K woke us at seven, just so we could come here and wait. It’s been an hour. I can’t see the top of the trail. I can’t even hear the falls yet. My ankles hurt. I’m bored. But I’m stuck.

What other choice do I have? Run off the trail into the wilderness in search of civilization? No way – I’ve seen Deliverance. Email mom and dad? No luck – too many trees, no Wifi, and they were too glad I was getting out of the house. Fake heart trouble because of the rigorous climb? No chance – I wouldn’t get sent home. Mrs. K showed us the emergency first aid station at the campground, and I thought the ranger there looked like a serial killer. No one else agreed, but my luck’s not running so good. He’d say he was driving me to a hospital, but I’d probably end up down a well in his basement having to rub lotion on my skin so he can do his little kooky dance.

Nothing to do but stick it out.

And record everything. So in a few hours when I go Donner Party and start eating the kid in front of me, the police’ll find my Blackberry and know the reason why.

I was just reconnecting with nature, officers. Survival of the fittest. Circle of life. Nature of the beast.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

A Penny Saved is a Penny Googled

The first time Professor Wilson ended class early, we all thought it was a joke.

It was spring semester, not long after midterm in our Literary Criticism class. Every other time our class had met, he’d kept us right up until the last minute, so we weren’t prepared for him to break tradition the way he did.

On that particular day, he had embroiled us in a debate about Walt Whitman’s poetry for about twenty minutes when someone quoted a line from “When I Heard the Learned Astronomer.” I don’t recall who quoted it or what point it was supposed to prove, but I remember a strange look come across Professor Wilson’s face. The next thing we all knew he was packing up his leather book bag and telling us that we’d continue the discussion at the next class. He went to the door, stopped to tell us to continue the assigned readings on the syllabus, and then left.

We all laughed quietly but stayed in our seats. You have to understand something about our class. Most of us were seniors, and all of us were English majors. We’d been trained by all of our teachers, Professor Wilson included, to look for meaning everywhere. So we sat and waited for him to return to class and make his point. I fully expected him to stroll back in and somehow connect what he said and did to Whitman’s work. In fact, I remember racking my brain, trying to figure it out myself. After five minutes, I was still trying to remember the rest of that Whitman poem when someone got up to see if he were waiting out in the hall.

He wasn’t in the hall. Someone checked outside. He wasn’t on the stoop or on the benches. Someone got up the nerve to call his office. He wasn’t there either. We didn’t know what to do. Someone suggested calling the dean – I don’t remember who – but the idea was shot down. Finally, after about fifteen minutes, even the most studious and suspicious of us decided that he actually wasn’t coming back. He had actually meant for us to leave when he did, but we had stuck around. We’d been conditioned, someone said, comparing us to a bunch of dogs needing a bell to tell us what to do. We left, laughing at ourselves and trying to guess why he had stopped class over an hour early. You see, we still were seeking meaning, looking for symbolism – we just couldn’t help it. I told everybody that he would probably explain it all to us at the next class and probably assign us an essay about it. Everybody laughed. Then, I headed over to the library to get a head start on the reading.

Professor Wilson didn’t explain it though. I expected someone to ask, but no one did. Maybe they believed me about the essay and were afraid to. Or maybe they didn’t want him to know that they couldn’t figure it out. I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t want to look stupid in front of everybody. So we all just let it drop.

Then, a week later it happened again. This time, we were talking about Emerson and the transcendentalists. We’d reached the halfway point of class, when he usually had us get up and stretch to get blood flowing up to our brains. Instead, he looked at us strangely and started packing up. He told us the same thing he had before and left just as quickly. A few of us went to the window this time. We saw him leave the building and walk across the Drill Field, in the opposite direction of the cafeteria and the faculty offices. Where he was going, we had no idea, but he walked briskly and didn’t look back even once.

We still waited. For about ten minutes, we laughed and talked about class ending early again. We made up reasons, most of them silly and many of them pretty scandalous, so I’m glad that Professor Wilson didn’t walk back in that day. Then, we all left, calling out a few late corny jokes – I didn’t want to waste the time, so I went to the library again to read.

The third time he left early was the very next class. We had barely started analyzing a Dickinson poem when he packed up, said goodbye, and was gone. We did the same as the last time. We watched him walk away, we waited ten minutes, and then we left. But we didn’t laugh or joke around though. Most of us used the time to read. A few whispered to each other, but that was it. It was really weird. And when the first of us got up to leave, the rest of us followed out quietly. I went to the library again, but I didn’t stay long. I just couldn’t concentrate on nineteenth century poetry.

I mean, the whole thing was just odd. At least, that’s how I felt. I had no idea why he was doing this, stopping class early all of a sudden. I remember instructors and grad students doing it all the time in the core classes I had back in my freshman and sophomore years. But upper level lit courses didn’t work that way – at least none of my other ones had, and I’d even had Professor Wilson for Modern English Prose and Poetry last semester. He’d worked us to death and had been entirely predictable and efficient.

So why the change? I had to admit that I had no clue.

I dreaded the next class. I didn’t know what to expect. I read the assigned poems and stories on the syllabus but really couldn’t remember much. I hoped that he wouldn’t call on me, and part of me was kind of expecting him to not even show up. He did show up though, and he did call on me. I embarrassed myself, but I didn’t care because as it turned out, he stayed for the entire class. I was relieved. I could tell everyone felt like me– we all seemed to hold our breath whenever he got near his book bag, but he didn’t pack it up until the very last minute of class. I felt mentally exhausted by then, so I decided to break routine and go back to the dorm to take a nap instead of studying at the student union.

The next class went well, too. And the next. He kept us debating and criticizing, wearing us out. Everything had returned to normal. I just chalked up his eccentric behavior to the professorial equivalent of spring fever and figured that it had run its course. We were approaching the last month of the semester after all, so it was buckle down time for everyone.

Then, it happened again. This time during an essay exam.

He’d given us all these quotes and asked us to incorporate them into an essay about one of the themes we’d discussed in class over the past week. I was barely halfway into it when I noticed him fidgeting at his table in the front of the room. When he started pacing, I really had a hard time focusing on my exam. I noticed a few other people frowning, too, and I wondered if anyone would be brave enough to say something. When he went to the window and began drumming his fingers on the sill, a hand – not mine – did go up to get his attention. He didn’t see it – he was looking outside – so I faked a cough to get him to look around. He didn’t. He kept drumming his fingers and looking outside.

Another hand raised, this one closer to him. Someone else coughed. I scuffled my feet. The girl next to me sneezed. A pencil tapped on a desk. He was oblivious. Then, someone behind set off a cell phone – a risky move since Professor Wilson had named them as his number one pet peeve, but effective because he spun around instantly before it had more played than half a second of “Sexyback” by Justin Timberlake. Whoever had played the ringtone shut if off, but I expected the professor to be mad. A few more hands went up, but he ignored everything.

Instead, he went right for his book bag and told us he needed to leave. He made it to the door before someone asked about the exam. He gave us a strange look and told us to slide it under his office door or bring it to the next class. Then, he was gone.

Stunned, I acted on impulse and stood up, shoving my exam into my own book bag. “I’m following him,” I announced as though that were the only logical thing to do. “Anyone with me?”

It was a small class, only fifteen of us, but I’m still surprised that they all came with me. I imagine that we looked pretty silly, too, our whole class trying to follow our professor and make it look entirely natural. We spread out a little so that we weren’t all bunched up and noisy, but I know we looked weird. I led the way. I had no idea what I was going to say if he turned and confronted me, but I felt compelled to know where he was going.

We trailed him all the way across campus, past the book store, past the dorms, past the faculty parking garage (which was a relief), past the courtyard and fountain that some prankster always filled with laundry soap. Finally, he stopped at the edge of campus, near the Agricultural Fields. A Civil War memorial stood there, a low stone wall and pillar built from the debris of a hospital that had been a precursor of our campus. I’d been there a few times, had read the plaque, had even researched it once for a freshman orientation paper. I hung back now and watched Professor Wilson. The rest of the class did the same.

He put his book bag down and took out a few notebooks. My first thought was he was going to do some writing or maybe catch up on some grading, but he surprised me again. He set the notebooks on the low wall and then climbed up onto it himself. Then, he lay down in the sun on top of the wall with his legs outstretched and his hands clasped behind his head. The notebooks were his pillow, I saw.

And I saw that he knew we were there. He craned his neck to the side and winked at us. The closer elbow beckoned, so I walked up to the wall with the class not far behind me.

He had a huge welcoming kind of smile on his face. His eyes squinted because of the bright April sun.

“I wondered if you all would ever show up. Now find a spot. I’d like to hear someone recite that Whitman poem. Anyone up for it?” he said cheerfully.

Someone was. Me, surprisingly. And we all managed to find a spot, some perched on the wall, some on the ground, one brave person even scaled the pillar while I spoke Whitman’s words and we finally picked up where we’d left off.

With Liberty and Google For All

No one believed me until I brought back the antlers.

Then, it was question after question. I just smiled and nodded and said what I’d been saying all along: “My tool shed is a doorway to another world.”

It all started when I bought an old mower at an estate sale down in Humphries. When I brought it home, I dropped the tailgate and backed my truck up to unload it at the tool shed back of my house. I didn’t gauge the distance right and put my tail gate right in themiddle of the shed door. It split right open. Well, after I got the mower situated, I did a quick fix with some scrap wood I had in the junk pile. It didn’t look pretty, but it would do to keep out the elements. Satisfied, I went on and did a few more things that needed doing around the property, so it wasn’t until the next day that I came back to the shed to try out the mower.

Now, I don’t know exactly why or how, but when I opened up that patched shed door, my tool shed was gone. The insides anyway. The roof and walls were still there. I remember stepping back to check. The work bench, the shelving, the mowers, the tools – everything I had squirreled away in that 8 x 10 shed was gone. And in their place? A forest. An actual forest with all the noises and smells and everything that told my senses that I wasn’t having a stroke or falling for some buddy’s practical joke. This was the real deal.

Well, I’d read all those books when I was a kid. You know the ones about magical doors to other worlds? I didn’t remember anything about toolsheds, but I remembered something about wolves and witches, so I ran up to the house to grab my hunting rifle and some supplies. My wife thought I had gone crazy and called 9-1-1 on the phone. She followed me down to shed, the whole way calling our kids and everyone on the cell phone. I kept laughing and telling her to wait and see, but wouldn’t you know it though, when I got back to the shed and opened it up, everything was back to normal. There sat my new mower, right next to my old one. Work bench, tool racks, weed eater – everything was back. I was so upset that I had a hard time convincing the paramedics that I was okay. They actually made me go in to the hospital and get hooked up to all kinds of machines for some “observation.”

I wasn’t too happy about all of that, especially when the observation turned into a few days. Turns out my blood pressure was too high and I had some blockage. The doctors fixed it all though, and once I stopped talking about the forest in my tool shed, everything started to quieten down. I checked the shed first thing when I got home, even though my wife fussed about me pushing myself too hard. To my disappointment, the inside was just a shed.

Nothing magical happened for several weeks. First chance I got, I hid my rifle and some hunting supplies in a storage bin down by the shed without my wife knowing. I was going to be ready the next time. But the shed stayed what it was supposed to be, and things slowly got back to normal. I kept busy with the yard and the garden. My wife started canning and putting up vegetables. Then, one day, right after I’d finished weedeating along the fence row, I slid that patched shed door open and saw that forest again. I could smell the pine and the musky moss smell of the deep woods just as thick as though I were up on a trail in the Smokies.

I didn’t waste any time. I snatched my gear, popped in the shed fast as I could, and slid the door closed behind me. When I got back, I was filthy and dog-tired, but my wife wasn’t none the wiser. I knew that next time, I needed more gear, maybe even a tent, so I snuck some more stuff down to the shed and waited for chance.

It came again in a few days, and this time I stayed in my forest for over a week. I came back, scared a little of who my wife might have called, but everything was fine. It was still the evening that I’d left. Time just didn’t act the same once I was through the shed, just like in those stories I remembered as a kid.

I moved more stuff down by the shed. I even built a little garage of sorts next to it, so I could keep my four-wheeler handy. My wife and even my kids came down to see what I was doing but didn’t see any harm in it, I guess. They just shook their heads and asked why I hadn’t bothered to fix that shed door yet. I told them it was on my list but I had bigger fish to fry just yet. They laughed and left me alone then.

They didn’t laugh though when I showed up one evening a few minutes late to family dinner with three of the biggest rabbits they’d ever seen, four giant wild turkeys, and a whole mess of trout. I’d been gone for over a month and smelled to high heaven, but they said that they’d just seen me in the garden not half an hour earlier. They dialed 9-1-1, of course, once I started in on the forest, but they couldn’t explain where all the game came from. They even called the police – guess they thought some hunter was poaching on our land, and I found his secret cache.

The doctors gave me a good bill of health. They even praised me, they said, because I must have exercising and eating healthy to get my pressure and cholesterol so much better. My wife and kids just couldn’t understand what was going on. All their watching meant that I couldn’t get all the gear together the next time the shed opened up, but I still came back with a huge raccoon, the biggest, according to the taxidermist, ever found in these parts. I just laughed and put it in a place of honor in our living room.

Well, I finally got my four-wheeler gassed up and plenty of supplies squirreled away in its trailer, so the next chance I got, I popped into the shed and was gone. From what I’ve heard, my wife and kids scoured the whole property and even had the neighbors out looking for me. After I’d been missing for a day, the police showed up, and then I popped out of the shed, right in the middle of all this hoopla, with a load of skins, fresh game, and a full beard to boot. To say they were floored would be an understatement!

They could explain away the meat and fish, even though they were bigger than anything ever found around here, but the beard almost cinched it. I just kept laughing and hooking my thumb back at the shed. The police called the gamewarden and walked all inside the shed, shaking their heads and taking pictures of everything. They opened and closed that shed door probably a million times. What really got them was the giant antlers. The police swore that it couldn’t be from any deer native to this state. They called in an expert, and he came all the way from the university once he saw the picture they sent him, said something about Ireland and Megalosasomething. If I could have bagged that big white stag that shed them, they would have passed out, I’m sure. I hit it once in the shoulder with my rifle, but it had just cussed at me and bounded away. I chased it all over the forest till my four-wheeler got low on fuel and made me head back. I found the antlers though and thought they’d make a nice trophy till I got the ones the stag was wearing.

I needed a bigger gun though, and more gasoline for the four-wheeler, and some powerful ammo. That’s why I came back so soon. Might be nice to get some building material, too – make something a little more permanent than the lean-to I’d put together over there. If only these policemen and wildlife agents would stop asking me questions. And the paramedics going on and on about how fit I was and my wife crying and looking at me all strange. It was all just too much of a distraction. I had to get back to the woods and get that stag. I’d seen some wolf tracks, too, on the other side of that river from where I caught the trout, and heard what I thought had to be some bears singing off in the distance one night. Their voices were much deeper than the raccoons and they were singing about berries and trout, so it had to be bears. What I wouldn’t give for a nice bearskin rug!

Now, if only these people would stop with their foolish questions and let me get my stuff together! Lord knows I don’t want to take too long and show up in the wood in the dead of winter. Maybe I could even talk one of my sons into going . . . but then again, they’ve got jobs and responsibilities. They wouldn’t be much fun…