My brother sent an email last night asking that I send him Pimsleur’s Spanish lessons. I got the software several months ago to give my dad. Chris has recently become interested in learning the language after moving to Southern California and finding himself surrounded by thousands of stinkin’ Mexicans.
So, I packaged up a disk to send him before leaving the apartment at 11:40 for work. I stopped at an ATM to take out $150 to spend on this weekend’s trip and bought a gallon of water from Save-a-Lot to drink on this weekend’s trip. Walking into the Bookstore, Carl asked, “Don’t we have enough water around here for you?”, so I said, “Yeah, I’ve just been smoking a lot of pot”.
I’d expected Lee to arrive at 5 o’clock for our trip, but he didn’t come till right before 6. We almost got into an accident a couple blocks from the bookstore, at the Main St. stoplight next to ABC Liquor and the gay coffee house. Lee blew right through a red light and nearly t-boned a beat-up mini-van. It took screeching tires to keep his Explorer from the accident.
Our first stop was on the Stip at Sam’s Café for dinner. I ordered a Gyro Burger which turned out to be almost too big to get my mouth around. We bought a pack of cigars from Old Town Liquor.
We were on the road towards Southern Missouri after picking up my bags from the apartment. My original expectation was to arrive at our location around dark, but that didn’t actually happen till after 11 o’clock. We made a couple short stops after the initial late start, but time didn’t really matter much at all this weekend. The two stops were to look at food at a gas station and grocery store near small towns. I had all the food I needed but Lee didn’t really have any.
Around 10:30, we pulled over at an old abandoned gas station in the town of Bunker to look at the maps and debate our route. The population of Bunker is 200 and the town seemed dead, so we were really surprised when a car of 3 young girls passed honking as a girl in the backseat flashed her breasts. The girls passed by twice then pulled in and asked if we were lost. Their next questions were, “Do you want to drink? Do you have any orange juice? Do you have anything to drink?”. I asked what they did for fun around here and got the response, “Show our titties. Come follow us and we’ll show you the Bunker cruising route”. They took off expecting us to follow, but we didn’t think that hanging out with some hillbillies’ young daughters would be such a good idea, for a lot of reasons. The girls could have been 18-20, but there was probably a really good chance they weren’t.
One other memorable thing from the drive was seeing a building that looked like something out of a horror movie. Passing over a small hill on the narrow highway, we came up three connected silver sheds with a smokestack on either side that was shooting blue fire out the top. The area was surrounded by dense trees and the only light was provided by the fires and our headlights.
We stayed at a place called Barton Lodging, a few miles south of the town of Salem. Lee’s uncle was there, along with about 10 other family members and their friends. Barton Lodging is actually just a wooded trailer court where the 6 or so trailers are rented as “cabins”. The group was all sitting around drinking in front of one of the trailers when we arrived. They had apparently rented all of Barton Lodging’s trailers for the weekend because there would be about 30 more people arriving tomorrow for the float trip down Current River. For some reason, the ten people staying there tonight were using only two of the trailers, so Lee and I got one of our own. I’d expected to pitch a tent, so the clean over-air-conditioned little trailer was quite a nice alternative. We went there at about two o’clock, after hanging out with the group for a couple hours.

***disclaimer*** I do not actually believe that the average Mexican is truthfully any stinkier than his or her American counterpart. The Mexican’s I’ve known have actually smelled quite nice. Ha ha.

Friday: July 28th, 2006

I got up in the trailer at 8 o’clock this morning. It was lightly raining and Lee said he’d already been up for an hour getting all his gear ready for our two-day float trip down the river.

After some last minute packing, we walked over to another trailer to talk to some of the people in our group, who were sitting on a porch drinking coffee and slowly waking up from the late night. After a few minutes there, we walked to a small store a few hundred feet down the road, thinking it was the place that rented canoes. It wasn’t the right place, but we did take notice of the fact that hot breakfasts could be ordered from a tiny kitchen in the back.

After a couple orders of biscuits and gravy we walked down a bit further to rent the canoes. The business was quite an operation, utilizing about a dozen converted full-sized school buses and hundreds of canoes. We next said goodbye to Lee’s family/friends at the trailer and drove his truck with our supplies down to the canoe rental store. We sat in the back of it there a few minutes until a short-bus arrived to pick us up with a trailer and canoe attached to the back. An older man and some kids thought it was also their bus, but the driver made them get back off. So, we had a short-bus all to ourselves for the 20 minute drive to the river. The driver was a young family guy who talked bow hunting with Lee for most of the ride.

The light rain was still falling when we arrived at our starting point on the river. The air was perfectly cool and a fog was rising off the water. It was really a cool beginning to our trip, as the rain never fell hard enough to get us wet. Lee had a fishing pole and spent quite a bit of time casting it whenever an area looked deep enough. I walked into the woods a bit on our first stop and discovered itch weed, which I now like to call bitch weed. Lee informed me about the existence of itch weed when I mentioned the itch. It seems strange that I’d never encountered it before, but I guess it’s just not common in Southern Illinois.

The weather really cooperated on this first day of floating, with a mostly cloudy sky keeping temperatures within the upper 80’s. We made often stops and traveled slowly because we had the whole day to go just 8 miles, the point that we would meet Lee’s group of 40 people tomorrow morning.

There’s not much to do while floating on a river all day, so Lee and I spent most of it talking about “beefofilia” and other unusual (possibly)funny ideas of our own invention. Maybe it was appropriate that we were on the short-bus today. He first mentioned the concept of beefofilia to me yesterday afternoon shortly after leaving Carbondale. You may or may not get the idea and you probably really think its weird if you do. Well, Lee invents such concepts then mentions them so many times that its like brainwashing, and I like to try and do the same thing back at him.

So, after a couple hours of hearing the word beefofilia used in random ways about a hundred times yesterday, I began to throw it back at him whenever I could. The word was in his first sentence this morning and its use progressed rapidly throughout the day. We were in full beefophilia mode by the time of finding a campsite in the late afternoon, throwing out such concepts as “The Encyclopedia of Beefofilia” and “Necrobeefophilia”.

We camped at a good-sized sand/rock bar with a large tree that protected us against the day’s remaining sunlight. Wood collection turned out to be harder than expected, as the bar and surrounding area had been picked mostly clean by previous campers. We crossed the river at a shallow point after finding nearly nothing on our side. Options were still limited, but we did manage to push down a decent dead tree, which also inadvertently helped out by knocking down a second living tree with a rotten center.
We had a rock-skipping and throwing competition after collecting enough wood. It’s amazing how far a perfectly flat and round rock will travel if thrown perfectly right. Instead of just skipping, that perfect throw can look like person skiing. After getting bored with simply skipping rocks, we decided to skip rocks at each other, taking up a far distance in case one decided to take a big jump. I put a big one right between Lee’s legs and a couple of his zoomed by within a foot of me. A hit to the knee would have surely ended the game.

Our other sport of the evening was building little structures and trying to knock them down with rocks from a distance. We took turns at building the structures with several small pieces of lumber that happened to be lying by an old fire pit. Rocks were separated by size into categories 1, 2 and 3. A tall skinny structure was weakest but hardest to hit.

For dinner, I had brought two baked potatoes, two bowls of instant noodles, a can of chili and a can of stew. We didn’t have a can opener. I forgot mine and Lee didn’t bring his because he didn’t know I had any canned goods. We solved this problem by slowly opening the cans with rocks, a small knife/bottle opener and the handle end of a stainless steel fork. This was nearly impossible and the openings we created were just large enough to fit the fork in and pull out one bite at a time. We heated the open cans by sitting them next to the fire. I made the noodles with river water and heated it in a small pan Lee brought. The first pan of hot water ended up spilled before ever getting to the noodles. I had pre-wrapped the potatoes in foil so they could be placed directly into the hot coals for 45 minutes. They at first seemed to be completely destroyed, but their rock-hard outer shells surprisingly contained perfectly cooked centers. Every part of the meal ended up turning out great, except for some sand in the chili and stew.

As the sky became totally dark, we realized that there were more stars than we had ever seen. We weren’t just imagining that was true, there really were more than I can ever remember anywhere. The concentration of them was just amazing and shooting stars appeared every few minutes, two of which had long fiery trails. To maximize the star-watching experience we had inflatable pads and cigars. There was also a vodka/Kool Aid mix in two small canteens of mine, but Lee didn’t care for that so I drank it all myself.

Sitting here, our odd humor went off on a new tangent; Brutus the frog. Brutus lived in a small stagnant pond on the sand bar, which Lee referred to as his amphitheatre. Brutus had begun singing deep tones from his amphitheatre soon after the sun went down and was now in full swing. We came up with some mock advertisements for Brutus’s show, including song titles like, “I Ain’t No Prince, Bitch”, and “Who the F*** Ate My Legs?”. Camping….I love it.

Oh yeah, and a couple things I forgot to mention…..I caught a crawdad with my hands and Lee rammed me into a log on purpose. He was in the back trying to steer me into bushes when I was sitting up in front. The bushes had a decent sized rotten limb in them that I thought I could break off by putting my foot up. The limb turned out to be not as rotten as I thought and it pushed me off the nylon coated pad I was sitting on, sending me hard to the bottom of the boat flat on my back. It hurt but was still hilarious.

Saturday: July 29, 2006

I had dreams that things were crawling on me while sleeping in the tent last night, then I realized that I had accidentally left a large screen window open next to my head, so it maybe wasn’t a dream. The tent is Lee’s and we call it Hillary because that’s the brand name printed on its side.

A good thunderstorm came through very late, which was totally unexpected after the perfectly clear starry sky last night. I’d heard the thunder once an hour before it hit, and realized the rain hood wasn’t on the tent, but just went back to sleep hoping it would go away. The second awakening was much more urgent, with wind blowing, thunder cracking and sprinkles beginning to fall. Lee and I quickly got the hood on, but rain began falling quite hard by then.

Early this morning, I educated Lee on the concept of “Arachnaphiliaphobia”, which is the fear of spiders committing beefophilia. He was very accepting of the idea, suggesting it should be mentioned in the Encyclopedia of Beefophilia.

The inside of the tent had thankfully stayed dry during the storms, but some things left outside were not, including a package of sugar wafers that were supposed to be part of breakfast. We ended up only having six devil squares to eat. I threw two of the squares away because they were so smashed, but ended up getting them out of the trash later when more intense hunger hit.

We didn’t spend much time hanging out at the camp site in the morning because Lee’s 40-person group was meeting us two miles down the river. The sun was already beating down when we launched our canoe, but some thin clouds and trees occasionally provided shade. Since mine and Lee’s first float trip a couple years ago, we refer to sun areas of the river as “hell”, and shady areas as “pre-hell”. Hell and pre-hell were joked about all day, along with many continued references to beefophilia and Brutus the frog. Anybody listening in on our conversations wouldn’t have a clue as to their meaning.
The group we met included the original group from Thursday night plus about 30 more, all of which were either Lee’s family or their friends. The meeting point was a small bridge/dam with dozens of buses dropping off hundreds of canoes and tourists to float in them. It was truly a sight, with a level of anarchy that sometimes seemed extreme. The few bus-drivers and canoe-company employees often were overwhelmed and confused at the tangle of people, buses and canoes that was constantly expanding in front of them.

With amazing timing, our group showed up just 15 minutes after we did. Since they were all expected to stay up drinking last night, we didn’t really expect to see them till a bit later. The group filled 20 canoes and launch-time led to even more anarchy. Jams quickly developed as all the boats left at the same time and some became wedged on rocks. At least one was flipped before ever leaving the launch area.

These people were ready to party hard and provided a great day of entertainment. I hadn’t brought any drinks for the day, so mostly just observed their antics. We would sometimes travel only a few hundred feet at a time between drinking break stops. While they called these stops “drinking breaks”, they were of coarse drinking the whole time whether they were stopped or not. One man in particular was the life of the party, who’d been in the part of the group I’d met on Thursday night. He was a tall heavyset man probably in his late 30’s who had no problem water-gunning any random female he found attractive. During drinking breaks, he would stand at the waters edge with his gun and spray any good looking women down who happened to be innocently floating by. Several other people in the group also had these guns and would usually follow his spraying lead. They each hold about a gallon of water and could spray at least 15-20 feet, so every sprayed girl usually ended up soaked. I was waiting for a fight to erupt at any moment, but as Lee put it, “Who’s gonna mess with a group of 40?”. Since all the people on the river were stopping often, our group passed and sprayed many of the same pretty girls multiple times. A couple got mad, but most didn’t and a few even liked the attention so much they joined our group, including one of the better looking girls we saw all day, who was simply referred to as “the girl in white”.

Alcohol intakes increased all day as the sun kept beating down harder and harder, resulting in many more and more interesting antics. In addition to beer, some of the women in our group had made hundreds of Jello-shots. Those shots were freely distributed to strangers and were sometimes being used by the water gun army to attract the attention of cute girls who were probably not old enough to guy their own.
One canoe passed earlier in the day with an older man passed out in the front. We later saw him at a cliff-diving spot further down the river, being carried out by a group of rangers. Someone mentioned that he had barely been able to get in his canoe this morning because he had been drinking all night. Also at the cliff-diving spot, two young guys got in a fight next to me. There was no more room for canoes at the spot and one of the men had pulled his canoe overtop another one, breaking off an American flag attached to the front.

A couple miles from the end of the route, Lee and I decided to go on ahead from the rest of the group. The landing spot was another situation of what seemed like anarchy, with masses of buses, canoes and people trying to organize. It was about an hour before the rest of the group got there. I was taking advantage of a secluded tree as a bathroom when two rangers suddenly appeared from behind, saying, “Hey buddy, we appreciate you tryin’ to hide but there’s a bathroom over there”. They went on to inspect people’s coolers for fishing violations, questioning the occupants of a boat that had filled theirs with a large number of crawdads.

Lee’s aunt and her husband were the first to arrive at the landing spot. We were standing talking with them when the rangers pulled a young man out of the water to scold him for loud cussing. A man and drunk woman pulled up in a canoe next to us. The drunk suddenly screamed the word “CUBS” and kicked water all over me for no apparent reason, but it was OK because she then gave us three beers.

The rest of the group was running so late that we decided to go ahead and leave on a bus before them. The full-sized school bus was completely full of screaming partiers and I had the only seat that wasn’t occupied by a second person. An ambulance was loading up a drunk at the entrance to the highway and the bus driver waited for a few minutes so it wouldn’t have to pass the bus on a hill. The passengers became restless during the wait, screaming things at him like, “What does he need, CPR? Just kick him in the chest a few times, he’ll be fine”. Once on the highway, we passed the intersection of the roads “K” and “KK”, with the three K’s being displayed on a sign right next to each other. Lee mentioned it to the person sitting next to him, who said, “yeah, we take that shit seriously down here”. I think that county governments in most areas of the country would avoid putting up a sign that said “KKK”, but apparently in Southern Missouri, they take that shit seriously.

Once back at the canoe rental business where Lee’s truck was parked, we loaded it up and drove back to the trailer court/cabin rental place where his group was staying. Our plan for tonight was to eat at a steakhouse in the town of Salem with his aunt, uncle, cousin, two of his cousin’s friends and her boyfriend, then all stay at a Holiday Inn there. We were going to wait at the cabins and say goodbye to everyone, but they were running so late that we decided to go ahead and leave in order to get to the steak house before closing time.

A cop followed Lee and I for most of the 20 mile drive to Salem, probably because we looked like “river rats”, as he put it. That was probably true, as I still had a bandana around my head and he had no shirt on; typical of a couple guys who’d been out on the river drinking all day. He left us alone about 10 minutes later when an oncoming car swerved briefly into our lane.

At our hotel, a Holiday Inn Express, the bill for the room Lee and I shared was $90; a lot more than I would have liked to pay. Our group of 8 met at the steak house after all taking very quick showers. It was nearly closing time and the manager tried to quickly lock the door as we walked up. Lee’s cousin’s boyfriend yelled through the door at the guy, saying something like, “Fine, lock the door in our faces”. The manager either had a bad conscious or was worried about getting in trouble, because he unlocked the door and let us all in. A sirloin steak meal was wonderful after two days on the river.

A similar thing happened at back at the hotel. Someone had told Lee’s cousin yesterday that that the pool closed at 11 o’clock, but it was already closed at 10:30. Her boyfriend again stepped in to help and ended up convincing the clerk to open it back up for us, even though the 10 o’clock closing time was clearly stated by the door.
So, minus Lee’s aunt and uncle, everyone else sat down by the hot tub and had a drink. Lee’s cousin and her two friends were all teachers at the same school. They both had their drinks in glass bottles and a man came in saying the bottles would “have to leave immediately because the whole pool has to be sucked dry if the glass gets in”.

Sunday: July 30, 2006

Lee and I left our hotel room at 8 o’clock this morning to explore the free breakfast downstairs, which included biscuits and gravy, hardboiled eggs and bacon. Holiday Inn Express’s world famous cinnamon rolls are all hype.
Back in the hotel room we slept until leaving at about 10:30. The temperature was expected to hit 98 in the afternoon and it felt to be getting close to that even before noon. We were back on the long narrow highway towards Illinois after a short hot stop for gas in Salem.
Our next stop didn’t come till after crossing the bridge at Cape Girardeau, when we had lunch at a café called Fox Hollow. Fox Hollow is weekend-only and attached to the rear of a flea market that’s designed to look like an old western town. I had a pork roast meal with mashed potatoes and okra with tomatoes….very good.
Back in Carbondale, Lee came to my apartment and hung out for an hour, where we came up with a new restaurant idea; “Homo Burger”. Homo stands for homosapian, but customers will have to read the fine print to learn that. The employees will wear nametags like “Homo-John”, “Homo-Sara”, etc., and you can choose from menu items like the “Homo Supreme”. Initial advertising will be almost free because of all the controversy caused.

Monday:July 31, 2006

Got up at 9:30 this morning. My shared bathroom is a big lack of privacy, but the small inconvenience seems worth the money. They Indian neighbor accidentally walked in on me today when I was brushing my teeth in underwear. My back was turned so I didn’t see him. He so far hasn’t been the type to just walk in when I’m in there, which I’m sure some potential neighbors would be. He stays out when he hears me in there and vice-versa. It does feel kind of strange that there’s this foreign creature who inhabits my bathroom that I’ve never seen before.
I talked to Johanna for a while this morning, then also talked to Ricky J., whom I went to high school with. He had left a message with his phone number several days ago. He’s been a salesman for Lexus of Nashville for several years and we’d completely lost touch since that move. He was departing a golf scramble in Pennsylvania when I called and sounded kind of down-and-out. I felt kind of bad for him because that’s the complete opposite of how I remember his personality. He’s put in his two week notice with Lexus and plans on hanging out at a condo in Florida for a while thinking about things. He had no idea about the class reunion and said he’d try to come. I’d love to take him up on the invitation to stay at his house in Nashville for a couple days, but will have to check on the price of that bus ticket.
Cleaning out my camping bags from the weekend, I discovered about a dozen little beetles living in my air mattress. They scurried every direction and I tied to quickly spray them with with OFF because I had no idea what they were and if they’d multiply. The OFF fumes were terrible but I still don’t have any regular bug killer.
I fell asleep again after listening to a Chinese lesson, then finished up my China trip documentary. It’s an hour long and I’ve put at least a dozen hours into it. You should be able to see it later in the day after my computer has finished tackling all the processing that’s required.
At nine o’clock I decided it was time to get out of this little room for a while, so I walked up to the strip for a sandwich at Jimmy John’s, then walked into Old Town for a pack of smokes and a soda. I had the meal outside on the curb while sitting between Tanner and Earl. Earl is a blind guy that used to live in my old apartment building before getting evicted. I continued talking to Tanner at a picnic table in front of Old National bank, where he puked all over the lawn, which he blamed on a combination of hot weather, ice cream and beer. A few minutes later, two guys joined us; Larome and Paul. Larome was a 40-something year old black guy with an oxygen tank strapped to his back and tubes going into his nose. Paul was a tall skinny older man of at least 60 years. Larome was a bit hard to understand and sometimes chatted to himself, but Paul was very lucid and articulate. Paul and I talked for the next hour about his homeless life in Carbondale, which was quite a great discussion. He’d apparently been married in Paducah a year ago then decided to become homeless in Carbondale after his separation. He takes bicycle loads of cans to Karco at $12-15 dollars a piece once or twice per week, and begs for another $15-$20 each day. His vivid descriptions of the homeless life made me really interested in an idea he proposed; a shelter in Carbondale where the homeless could stay for a very small price each night. They would be allowed to enter late in the evening, then have to leave early in the morning. An existing mission gives them three meals per day and showers, but no place to sleep at night. The business would be nearly or completely self sufficient based on the fee charged, resident volunteers, outside volunteers, government aid and community donations. Ideally, the small fee charged would alone generate enough. I never considered getting involved in such a thing, but really think it would take on a life of its own after the initial start. So, tonight I’m looking into registering a non-profit organization, getting an account set up for it at a local bank and creating the domain name carbondaleshelter.org. I totally have time for something like this with my upcoming year of school, which only involves a few more Chinese classes. My business classes are all completed, so that allows for some extra time. My only initial expense would be $10 for the domain name unless there is a charge for registering a non-profit, which I doubt would be the case. This really sounds fun and drawing local media attention would surely be an asset to fueling the idea.
Additionally, recording the birth of such a project on a website may be able to help people to launch similar operations in other small towns with homeless populations. This could also be the video idea I’ve been looking for to enter into a local film festival. Probably pretty great on a resume, too.

So, alright, lets see what happens.