By Beauty Damned

Rainy Day Tales

Our much media-hyped nor’easter has arrived with gale force. Okay, well maybe it has just arrived and it's not all that dramatic, but it is not pretty either. Gosh, I want to have a picnic so bad I could throw a fit! I must remind myself that it's this way every year in April. New York is ready for spring but spring isn't yet ready for New York. Our pale eyelet dresses and wedged espadrilles will have to wait.

In Oregon, Kathleen and Emily and I would go on picnics and camping trips even if the weather was frigid. We got so antsy about spring arriving that we just started without it. One February day we had a picnic at the edge of a graveyard near Emigrant Lake. It was windy and cold and dark gray, but we had the best time despite the weather. We ate sandwiches and laughed about being the only ones stupid enough to have a picnic on such a crappy day.

That reminds me of another time around then when Kathleen and I went camping in February or maybe it was March. I couldn't have been more than 16 and she 18 at the time. We parked the car alongside part of the Pacific Railroad called Tunnel 13, a straight tunnel that leads from one side of a mountain to the other. In the 40s there was a major train robbery right there in Tunnel 13 and a bunch of people died. A couple of the robbers got away and were never caught. I had a book about the incident. We loved to go there and walk through the mile long tunnel (the train no longer traveled it as far as we knew) and explore the creepy abandoned railroad office that was tucked in the woods, out of sight from I-5. We found all kinds of intriguing treasures in that dusty office; ancient stationary with scratchy old technical notes and thick glass bulbs of various colors, green and blue and red. We could park the car, walk right through that practically endless tunnel and down into the valley on the other side, and eventually find ourselves on my family's property. We did that, wandering the land and stopping to eat lunch. We had some wine that was homemade by a family friend. It wasn't very good, I don't think it was made from grapes, but we drank some anyway.

By the time we got back up to the tunnel it was too dark to walk through it. Way too scary. It was sort of spooky during the day, even though there was a tiny light on either end, so at night it was just not even an option. I gathered wood and rocks for a fire and Kathleen got into her sleeping bag and laid on her back, looking up at the millions of stars. She said, "Thanks for being the husband." That's when we coined that term with each other. Whichever one of us is doing the hard work gets to wear the title of "husband." For example, when we went to Costco recently here in Brooklyn and bought a boatload of stuff and she loaded and unloaded everything into the car and again, right to my door, because my back was all out of sorts. She was being a great husband. Now I feel like we are two old ladies though we're barely at the cusp of thirty! We've done so much together.

So that night we got the fire going good and we ate magic mushrooms and we had the most peaceful, lovely time out there like two little peas on a remote hillside, our own secret place. Not a chance to see another soul. In the morning, we woke in the frost. Outside of our sleeping bags the air was white and bitter. The fire was out and the beautiful midnight sky was gone and it was so, so freezing. Our sleeping bags were covered with a thin layer of icy dew. As soon as we peeled them off we were hopping around to get our feet into our shoes which were ice inside. Our fingers burned cold as we rolled up our sleeping bags, teeth chattering the whole time, literally chattering in a way that I never thought could actually be so literal, clacking together like castanets.

We finally managed to get our stuff together and walk back up to the tunnel's entrance. I can't say exactly how long it takes to walk through it, but I recall it being about 45 minutes that day. Could have been an hour. We were so relieved to get back to Margaret, Kathleen's gold Taurus. We drove down the hill, not far, to the old green mansion on Hwy 99 where we shared a bedroom in a house with 7 or maybe it was 8 other roommates. It felt like the coziest place on earth that morning. We each took a hot shower and then we climbed under the covers of our beds, side by side, and I am almost sure we said in unison, "Boy is it great to have a warm bed."

Posted by Maria at April 15, 2007 02:08 PM | TrackBack