first camping trip of 2006

Beneath the fine veneer of late evening spring sunshine slanting through the pine trees, you probably first notice how handsome my camping partner is. You might then imagine to yourself how delicious that beer is tasting after setting up the tent, dragging some firewood over, restacking the stone firepit, and spending a leisurely hour sitting along the banks of a spring peeper filled pond drinking some very fine tequila. And then you can also draw on your own outdoorsy experience to know how the rest of the evening went as it got dark, and more beer and tequila is consumed, getting chillier by the half hour, until by 10pm one is comfortably snuggled next to the perfect camping companion, toasty and toasted, and toasting marshmallows and eating them with glee. After the roasted-red pepper chicken sausage and potato chips that is. And then the best part, waking up in the morning and looking up at the tall pine trees catching early sun, wriggling into layers of clothes, and smelling the fire and the sap, the dirt and the pond. Yes, camping, idyllic.

BUT

You are not me, you can thank your lucky stars. You don't have to imagine the aftermath of the first camping trip of the year. You don't wake up two mornings later realizing that the tiny itchy bug bite on your wrist in fact was not a bug bite, but is tragically, POISON IVY. And the frightening knowledge that poison ivy seems to take over my skin. First, boils develop on the skin at the site of contact - contact not with those shiny, waxy, three leaved vines, but contact with a piece of dried wood that sometime 6 months ago was brushed by a deer who 2 weeks prior grazed a scrap of leaf that was knocked by a squirrel and then fell from that vine and laid buried in the decomposing forest floor. It is six degrees of separation indeed. After the boils, random sites of itchy hell develop first on my waist, then my thighs, then my legs, and four days later, show up on MY ASS. fuck if nature ain't a bitch.

Then the trip to the doctor to get 4mg doses of steroids, which 3 days later aren't doing a thing, which prompts a quick trip to the emergency room to get 40mg doses for the next two weeks. This compiled with a very strong antihistamine that is probably barely legally prescriped, for soon after ingestion I encounter the fog wherein I cannot operate heavy machinery. Combined with the uppers of steroids I found myself riding home in the car a week later with camping partner safely driving while I'm blasted to all hell listening to the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs albumn at ungodly volume, quivering with enormous pupils and thinking, "Ahhh, camping. Can't wait to go again next weekend."