Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2000 00:06:26 -0500 From: "Rich Limacher" THE UNLIKELY ADVENTURE OF KITSCHME SIOUXME AT THE SUPERIOR TRAIL 100 Part 26 [Voice] "You Don't Know Who This Is, Do You?" [Me, braindead] "Uh, no." [Voice] "It's Your Pacer!!!" [Think: "I am the very model of a modern major-general."] "There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium. And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium, And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium, Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium. And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium, Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium, And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium, And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium. [Repeat: last line] "There's sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium, And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium, And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium, And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium. "These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha'vard, And there may be many others, but they haven't been discavard." --Tom Lehrer Music by Sir Arthur Sullivan (1959) [Author's note: For this episode's audio-visual aid, point your browser to the following web address: http://www.shta.org/Photos/p171.htm This is a picnic table, the caption tells us, up on Oberg Mountain, although in my sodium-delirium I could not tell you how far up. I am very inclined to decline it's up at all, but rather near the bottom, upon which the bottom of NOBODY was sitting the first TWO times I followed the trail completely around the mountain. At the end of my second full loop, there was finally a "bottom" of somebody sitting on this table. And the "top" of this person was saying--I can tell you with with certainium--"Follow the ribbons to the right. If you go straight, you'll only go around the mountain again."] At the Oberg Mountain aid station, Hihowarthya and Chef Hatchetman are wonderful. They're certainly well rested. I guess I haven't really pushed them too hard, have I? I've come, what, 56.6 miles in, let's see, NINE MONTHS??? Actually, if the truth were truthfully known (by somebody else, of course, not me), it's probably closer to ten or eleven o'clock at night. The cutoff is midnight--"The Riching Hour." As I say, my crew is beautiful. They lead me along the correct path, beside the downpouring waters they guide me, to the hospice of a lawn chair. They give me succor and relief (a coupla bananas and some diluted soup). They procureth unto me mine drop bag. The Supe is my shepherd, I shall not haunt. Inside that bag--the one with the fifteen extra strips of duct tape stuck all over it which had given me such pains back at the motel--is a change of shoes. I just know it! And (now that I know even better) I have no idea on earth what is possessing me to change my shoes at this moment in time. Here I have on a perfectly good, relatively new, completely trashed pair of trail running shoes; and inside the bag I have an imperfectly preserved, kinda old, almost totally worn-out pair of street running shoes. But! They're dry!! I change socks too, while I'm at it. But of course they're wetter, seeing as how I never took any pains to waterproof the drop bag (i.e., wrap a garbage bag around it), and the only reason why the shoes are dry is because the rain hadn't soaked through all the extra junk yet. I had the shoes wrapped in socks, among other things, none of which I now want to change into because those clothes are just as soggy as the junk I have on. So, I settle for different shoes, pitch the completely saturated long-sleeve T-shirt into the bag, and put my jacket back on. I get out of the chair and stand back up and I'm ready to rumble. That's when Hihowarthya informs me she's not feeling well enough to run right now. (O O) - OK. Now, we pause. Let's review. I am at this moment at Pacer Central. Wanting to be here running WITH somebody is why I came. "It's (almost) late September and I really should be back at school... oh, Maggie." I am over five hundred miles away from my bed that I'm feelin' kicked out of. I'm here in the first place to run with Hihowarthya or, failing that, have her run with me. It's almost midnight. It's pitch black. It's pouring rain. And now, at the very "mo" in the moment of truth, she tells me, "Ah cain't run no mo." Oh, Maggie indeed. [Anybody NOT paying attention? That was a reference to Rod Stewart.] But, she does the next best thing. She points me the CORRECT way down the path and bids me farewell. I wave, and I'm gone. I go running from, like, a kind of gravel parking lot and then onto a kind of like paved road and then down to some kind of gap in the fence with a bunch of pink ribbons flying, and then I'm thundering downhill, splashing wildly in the mud in the pouring rain, trying very hard not to stumble over the rocks and therefore have to have surgery. I wonder at this point whether I beat Hardrock, Coco, and Jo out of the aid station, or whether they beat me. "Kinda rocky here, huh?" It's a male voice behind me. "Yeah." "Muddy too!" "Yep." "You seem to be doing all right in the mud." "Uh-huh." "You have no idea who this is, do you?" "Nope!" "It's Chef! Chef Hatchetman! I'm pacing you for this next section!" I stop dead in my tracks. "You have got to be kidding me." I turn around and, yep! It's him. He be Da Dude! What a sad sight for an apostle's blinded eyes, eh? This guy's all fresh as tomorrow morning's newspaper, and I'm slogging through Sherwood Forest ducking briars and trying like a--sure IF--not to fall on my ham or Notting. "Keep goin', Kitsch! The quicker you go, the sooner this'll all be over." I turn back around and try to stay in front of him. I can hardly believe my benefit. The Chef doesn't have to do this. It was his girlfriend who set all this up. She's the one I was hoping to run with! And when she backs off, I can't expect HIM to fill in. But he does anyway ('cause he's a class act) and, of course, I'm overjoyed. But... ...still watching out for the rocks. My Petzl isn't THAT powerful, you know. I can't just, you know, aim it and blast a stream that'll liquidate all the stones. (I'm talking about light, now, not whatever it is you think might pour out of a Petzl. :) "How come they call you the Chef?" I ask the Chef. "Shouldn't that be 'chief'?" "Didn't you know? I'm into food processing." "Oh yeah?" "Yep. You know when you go to the store and buy all those vegetables and carrots and stuff already pre-packaged?" "Sure." "Well, I'm the guy who cuts all that stuff up!" "You're kidding." "No. I'm pretty good with a knife, if I do say so myself." "Ha! I coulda used you a coupla hours ago. A guy came up behind me I thought sure was gonna kill me." "In a footrace?" "Well, never mind. It's a long story. Obviously, he didn't." "That's good. You know, I might be into cutting up foods, but really I'm an amateur meteorologist." "Well," I say, "you picked a good night for it." "Oh, you bet. I'm actually lovin' this." "I'll bet." "Did you ever wonder why the weather seems mostly to come out of the west?" "I wonder about this all the time, especially when I'm headed that way and it's, like, pockmarking my face." "You'd think--wouldn't you?--that because the ground, or the surface of the planet, is traveling east at, what, roughly a thousand miles per hour, it would be going against the grain of what's up in the air, or else what's up in the air--like clouds--wouldn't be moving at all, and the ground would either be passing quietly underneath or else forcing a kind of backdraft up into the sky. In other words, it seems like the weather really should be moving from east to west, don't you think?" "Gosh," I say, still following the pink ribbons--this time climbing ever higher and in a prevailing leftwardly fashion. "Maybe you're right. You could be on to something. Maybe this is why the human race is so screwed up. For centuries man has been looking at the clouds ass backwards!" "Well, it may SEEM like it should be that way, but of course it's not. The fact is that gravity and other forces tend to make smaller lighter things--like air and clouds--follow AFTER big, heavy, masses of things--like planets--especially when they're spinning." "Gotcha. The spinning planet is drawing the weather after itself, like maybe in its wake." "Kinda like that," the Chef says. "It helps to explain the old adage," I offer. "What adage is that?" he asks. "THE WHOLE WORLD SUCKS!" "Hah!" OK. Let's review. We are now encircling Oberg Mountain. We are drenched. We are climbing ever higher on great big rocks--boulders even--in a counterclockwise direction. It's like a helix. We go around until we go up, and then we keep going, only down this time, until we come down. But we're still on the mountain. So it's rather more like a Moebius Strip. And, since we're both so heavily involved in scientific inquiry (in turn, we discuss the poles, the equator, longitude, latitude, curvature of the earth, orbits, moon, sun, stars, galaxies, and--far out, man--"the cosmos") NEITHER ONE OF US IS PAYING ATTENTION!!! We're still on the helix. Now we're going up again in a counterclockwise fashion; now we're going down. "Hey, Chef, if you don't mind my askin'..." "No, shoot." "Haven't we passed that bench before? And these red glow sticks?" "Now you're talking about deja vu. You know, there really is some scientific basis for..." "CHEF!!!" "Yes?" "We're on this #!!*@#!*ing mountain AND WE CAN'T GET OFF!!!" Welllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll... How about THIS kettle of thin, diluted soup, sports fans? What could it all possibly mean? Are they hopelessly trapped forever in a kind of bipolar inverted double helix being sucked along in the wake of a much bigger spinning hunk--bigger than the both of them--like, for example, Earth? Is anybody humming that old Kingston Trio tune right about now, called "Charlie and the M.T.A."? Oh, will they ever return? No, they'll never return, And their fate will be unlearned. They may run forever On the path at Oberg-- They're the friends who never returned. Well, stay tuned next time. Same planet. Same mountain. Same path. Same endless circle. Then we'll all be treated to brand-new treats, like, maybe, watching a mis-Moebius strip or some other volunteer sentry--finally--coming off furlough and retaking his commandingly seated position atop his picnic table outpost and declare, dutifully, that: "Hey! You wanna run this stupid trail THREE times? You've already done it twice!!" But we'll save that little revelation for Part 27. Kitsch Limacher TheTroubadour@prodigy.net