| From: STAR::BANKS "Koyaanisqatsi: Not just a bad idea; it's the law!" 12-SEP-1991 14:39:43.96
To: SUPER::HENDRICKS
Day 1
"And you say that's just TWO cats?"
Well, this was it: The first day out on the vacation. It's
difficult to put into precise terms how I felt about that. No, it
wouldn't be fair to say that I was ambivalent about our upcoming
adventure. And, "apprehensive" is a word of far too little impact to
describe how I anticipated our departure. Apprehension is one of those
feelings that I wouldn't know what to do without under normal
circumstances, so I guess it isn't all that surprising that it'd be with
me for the start of our vacation.
No, the words that best describe my feelings when we set out on
this vacation were boundless fear. After all, I'm a city person, or at
least a suburb person, and our plans were almost custom designed to
threaten my comfort. On top of that, I'm also a gadget freak. The true
measure of a real gadget freak is the symptoms of withdrawal that set in
as soon as the "no service" indicator starts blinking on the cellular
phone, and I have a routine of sniffing, coughing, gasping and whining
that I'd put up against even the grand master of gadget freaks.
I'm not ashamed of this. I've lived in heavily industrialized and
equally polluted areas for most of my life, and I think that I have a
metabolic structure that's finely honed for urban life. You can tell,
because I have a major allergic reaction as soon as we drive out of the
smog clouds. It would seem that living in the city has also killed off
all my immunities to all the natural diseases which themselves cannot
survive the smog and are therefore only found in pristine unpolluted
environs. You remember the little boy in the bubble who had no immune
system? Well, I work sort of the same way, except that it's a series of
city sized bubbles connected by vast habitrails that we call our
nation's interstate highways.
Alright, back to earth. One of my big problems with vacation is
that I never came with an owner's manual, and thus, I have no idea as to
what I need to run my own life. Holly, on the other hand, has no end of
ideas as to what's needed in my life, including several that I'm sure no
one else has ever thought of. That meant that our preparations were a
mixture of Holly trying to convince me to load all of both our lives
belongings into my little car, and my basic desire to go hide someplace.
Actually, the morning started quite slowly for me. I awoke to the
sound of Holly typing furiously away at my terminal, and the sensation
of having had some country's cavalry parked in my mouth overnight. That
was around 7:30 in the morning.
7:30 in the morning. I can't even do that on a work day, and there
she was, wide awake and answering all the electronic mail she'd received
in the last six months, not to mention rearranging all the papers on my
desk, and generally acting like being awake at 7:30 AM was not only
possible, but something she does on a regular basis. I, on the other
hand, was taking a much slower approach, opting to prove to myself that
I was still alive before I went on to something quite so strenuous.
I made breakfast. We took showers and got dressed. We stuffed
everything I own into two duffel bags. Then, we packed it all into my
car. I hate having so much stuff packed into the car. Somehow it makes
me feel like the car's bursting at the seams, and all the groaning
noises it makes with all that stuff in it only reinforces the notion.
I'd told Holly that I didn't want to have too much stuff in the
car. By that, I was hoping we'd just have a couple of bags that fit
neatly into the trunk. By that, Holly thought that I meant that I still
wanted to be able to see out of the car, but everything else was fair
game. Holly's expectations won. Then, we drove over to Holly's place
to pack it with all her stuff we'd forgotten on the previous day.
Including two cats.
I haven't done a whole lot of traveling with cats in the car, but
I've done enough to know that I don't usually want to do that. I know,
for instance, that a cat can find the one spot in your car that's
totally inaccessible to you, your mechanic, someone with a diamond saw,
or anyone else living in only three dimensions. Once in this magic spot
in your car, they'll go on to make noises that trigger a primal fear
that hits you right in the roots of your DNA. Usually, that hiding
place is also near where the car's ventilation system picks up air,
meaning that the human occupants will be showered with cat hair for as
long as they own the car.
In other words, I just couldn't wait. Holly's plan was to put them
in a large pet carrier, put the carrier in the back seat, and then when
safely underway (when there weren't enough other ways for us to get
killed), release the cats into the interior of the car where they could
set about ripping up a thousand dollars worth of leather upholstery. I
tried to put the best light on this, thinking that I'd probably be
happier with suede than leather, anyway, but there was still no masking
my fear.
Nor was there any masking the cats fears, either. They picked
right up on the festivities, making all manner of dying cat noises.
Only in simulated death is a cat more obnoxious than it is when it wants
to be fed.
When making dead cat noises didn't work out, they really got
creative. For instance, one would hide over the door to the cat
carrier, and the other would play dead on the floor of the cage. The
one hiding in the top of the carrier would shout "Hey, guard, my
friend's real sick. You'd better come in here and take a look at him!".
Or, Dale would stick a paw out of the bars at Holly. Holly would pet
his paw, and mysteriously find a five dollar bill in her hand. We had
two desperate cats here.
Holly wasn't too concerned. She kept insisting that the cat
carrier was quite comfortable for them, even though there were two of
them in there, and even though they looked to me like they were stacked
one on top of each other. Holly defended her thesis by pointing out
that the cats clearly had enough room because they could both turn
around at the same time. Of course they can: Cats aren't really
vertebrates: They can turn around inside a toilet paper tube.
We'll all take a moment to remember that the whole point of this
vacation was for me to relax and not have anything to worry about. At
least, I was remembering that, even though it didn't feel too real to me
at the time.
Our destination was a state park in north east Vermont, which was
pretty much due north of wherever it was that we started in New
Hampshire. That just meant driving north on Interstate 93 until things
started looking terminally rustic. If things looked rustic, but French,
we'd know we'd gone too far.
So, it was when we cleared the second toll booth on the F. E.
Everett Turnpike that we agreed that since nothing terrifying had
happened in the last ten minutes it'd be a good time to let the cats
out. Besides, if we did that before we got into Concord, there was a
lot more chance that the cats would be able to find something dangerous
to do to help me negotiate the Concord traffic.
One of the things I like to do while I'm driving is see how high I
can get the gas mileage. It's real easy to watch, what with a trip
computer giving me a continual update on my trip average fuel economy.
On this date, I was doing great. Part of that was because it was so
cool outside, that we didn't need to run the air conditioner, which
would have dragged the mileage down. The other part of it was driving
technique.
They say that the way to get really great gas mileage is to drive
as if you have a raw egg between your right foot and the gas pedal. I
was using a similar technique, but substituting a cat for the egg. And
it wasn't "as if", either. The mileage I was getting was inversely
proportional to the soulful noises being made by the cat underfoot.
Well, my driving technique was great for mileage, but my willpower
was crumbling. All those hurt cat noises somehow made it irresistible
to get lousy mileage.
Actually, they weren't quite that bad. For the most part, the cats
settled for sitting in our laps. It was "our" until Holly fell asleep
and quit petting them. Then, it was "They settled for sitting in my
lap". I had the unenviable task of balancing two cats in my lap,
steering with one hand, holding my Coke with the other hand, and petting
the cats with my two remaining hands.
Well, I don't even know if it was because Holly was asleep. Even
when she was awake, the cats would try her lap for a while, then realize
that they could cause a whole lot more trouble in my lap. Once in my
lap, they'd purr up a storm, while eyeing all the stuff I was doing with
my feet. They did this by sticking their heads through the steering
wheel and daring me to take the next bend in the road.
The other really great feature was that the cats had managed to
position themselves precisely between me and the air vents. This meant
being treated to about a dozen cats worth of hair being blown into my
face, most of which got caught behind the lenses of my glasses. Holly
pretended to sleep through my sneezing fits.
It went like this for a few dozen miles. As a matter of fact, I
even got the hang of driving, drinking my Coke, petting the cats, and
keeping them away from the gas and brake pedals all at the same time.
Because of this, we decided to stop by a McDonald's and pick up lunch.
That gave me the added activity of doing everything above, plus eating a
quarter pounder AND keeping the cats out of my food.
It's nice to be so loved by cats. I hope Holly doesn't mind, but
for the whole trip, they didn't pay much attention to her at all.
Instead, they spent the trip showing me how much they loved me.
Apparently, both had decided to spend the trip comforting me by sitting
in my lap purring at me and letting me pet them.
All told, it was about 160 miles from my apartment to the "camp"
where we were going to spend the week. "Camp" is what easterners say
when they mean "Cabin" or "Summer Place". You put on your dungarees,
and go to the camp where you sit around drinking bottles of tonic. I'll
never get the hang of this dialect.
By the time we got to the camp, the cats were both contentedly
purring away in my lap, only occasionally helping with the driving.
They acted like they were natural born drivers. That's why we stopped
at the camp and dragged them into a strange new place with the scent of
hostile creatures all over it. It'd been all of two hours since I'd
last seen the cats so terrified. They found some space of about three
cubic inches for both of them to cower in.
Once at our destination, here's how we were going to relax: Unload
the car, find the cats, unpack the luggage, drag the cats out from under
the furniture, find some beds without TOO many fleas in them, get the
cats out from underneath them, make the beds, find the cats, bootstrap
the electrical and water systems in the cabin, show the cats where the
litter box was, drive back to town for a half an hour, get groceries,
drive back to the camp for a half an hour, find the cats, cook dinner,
find the cats, eat dinner, try to keep the cats out of our food, wash
the dishes, and find the cats.
Yes, we were indeed roughing it. We were so far out in the sticks,
working with such primitive equipment that we had to resort to old
camping skills for our dinner: We made some Contadina fresh pasta and a
jar of Prego spaghetti sauce. Sure, it probably doesn't sound like much
to you, but after a hard day of honest, good old fashioned work like
that, it always tastes so much better, especially when huddled around a
strange dinner table out in the middle of Vermont, and even more so with
a couple of hair balls lodged between my teeth. It sort of works the
same way with car camping and "Dinty Moore" canned stew. You'd never
eat that garbage in the comfort of your own home, but after a day of
playing make believe ancient settler, it just tastes so great to sit
down to a meal of food from cans that you opened all by yourself.
It was also, I'm ashamed to say, a gorgeous day when we arrived,
and it stayed that way right up until it was a gorgeous night. Needless
to say, this isn't what I was looking for in an ideal vacation. There
was the sun in the sky, the sun reflecting off the lake, the sparkle in
Holly's eyes, and the bright atmosphere around the camp. There was so
much glare that I could barely see anything, other than my arms burning
to a crisp within moments of setting foot outside. I couldn't see a
damned thing for all that glare. The only one of my senses working was
my hearing, and all I could hear was Holly's distant voice saying "Walk
towards the light".
Sometime around here, Holly started going stir crazy, clearly
unable to deal with all this relaxation, so she decided to find
something else to do. That meant inviting the two horse sized dogs next
door over to meet the cats who'd finally decided that there was nothing
around the place to be afraid of.
Of course it is worth noting that we were really roughing it out in
the country. I mean the TV set was so old that it had a mechanical
tuner and NO REMOTE CONTROL! I wouldn't have been surprised if it said
"Atwater-Kent" on it. It acted really strange. When you turned it on,
it didn't come on right away, and when I looked in the back, there were
all these... THINGS glowing inside. And, the VCR and Nintendo games
were models so old as to predate Consumer Reports. The whole TV/VCR
combo could only pull in one channel, which only seemed to carry
Gilligan's Island reruns that were so old that the Minnow was still in
port. That and French Polka marathons.
They say that for the last 50 years, we've been beaming TV shows
out into space, and that far off, alien civilizations will know us
first by our sitcoms that they'll receive. We wonder out loud how silly
we'd look to these races. Personally, I always wanted to know where
those TV signals go and how bad they look. Now I know: North-nowhere
Vermont, and they look pretty silly, indeed.
I can just hear them Green Bug-Eyed Monsters warming up the old
Desoto Astro-Cruisers and stocking up on the A-1 Primate Sauce already.
But in a more immediate sense, this TV programming selection meant
that we had to spend our evenings as the old settlers did back in the
times before there was electricity: We tried to read, but mostly got
bored a lot and fell asleep sometime around 7:00 in the evening. Holly
climbed into bed, happily murmuring things that she wished that she'd
remembered to pack into the car, while the cats happily set about
tearing all the screens out of the windows.
Thus ended our first day of relaxation.
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