Traveling Light:
The Theme Park
Janet I. Buck
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The Theme Park
A great publisher asks a dumb writer to do a column for a great journal, and the themes are: warm, wood, and soul. I'm thinkin' to myself, piece of cake. All I have to do is plan a head trip into the wilds of nature and drum up images of Thoreau shaving sticks for a cozy fire and burning up the first 600 drafts of Transcendental Algae on Walden Pond.
Then I do the daring thing, which involves putting my money where my mouth is and packing a suitcase for a venture to a secluded hideaway in the Rogue River National Forest. My husband says, "Honey, only pack necessities, because the goal is to live off the land." As a student of 19th Century American Lit, I admire his respect for verisimilitude, but I can't help aching at the thought of no microwaved snacks and crushed ice in my water glass when he gets in the grip of a video and drops a salt mine on my side of the popcorn bowl.
When male poets go on a camping trip, they take a flashlight, a few scraps of jerky and paper, a sleeping bag, and a change of Hanes in case they run into some bear in the dead center of her menstrual cycle.
Women writers, on the other hand, like to be better prepared. Thinking we'll split the load between two ancient but fairly able bodies, I start my packing list: shampoo, deodorant, toilet paper, a case of Diet Coke, my laptop, Print Shop Deluxe, printer (hey, I picked the travel one), perfume, Roget's Thesaurus, day AND evening attire with matching hats, my flannel bathrobe (that goes in his pack), the expresso machine, my blow dryer, and the digital camera. If we make it back without killing each other, I want pictures to show to my friends.
Now our goal here was fidelity to the spirit of the expedition, but I define roughing it as driving to the mail box with my sweats on. Our purpose was, however, to show the world that a writer isn't a refugee of reality.
First things first: warm. In my family, warm means an electric blanket, so in it went. The issue of where to plug it in I'd leave up to my genius of a husband who keeps 180 computers at work happily hurling email and obscenities through cyber-space. If he can make all those gigabytes of hard drive behave like choir boys, he can certainly find a hole for one three-pronged plug.
My idea of a one-on-one with nature is thumbing through the National Geographic while I'm having my car washed, so this trip was going to have to get its chutzpah from somewhere else than the confines of my sheltered memory. When I tried to recall my childhood experiences of camping in the wilderness, the closest I could come was a video tape of my mother stranded six blocks from Saks 5th Avenue doing a tribal dance around a passing shuttle bus.
Second things second. At 321 Honeysuckle Lane, wood means something you have to dust or pay someone to move when the carpet steamers arrive, so it was time to draw straws in the packing department: he wanted take the legs off a few antique tables that would double as tent pegs, and I was hoping to have the piano out there in the moonlight in case the pickings of a clever composition fell from the sky in lieu of the hailstones promised by our accurate but pessimistic local weather man. As I've told my husband more than once, great art is worth certain compromises. This probably wasn't the politically correct thing to say while he had a baby grand on his hind legs, but my aspirations don't die over a little backache, especially when it's not mine.
As theme parks go, the soul part was going to be the challenge. I'm sure we have it; I've just never seen it, so it was time to go lookin'. I started the pilgrimage with the best of intentions, combing through old birthday cards till I found something worth publishing besides Far Side cartoons and a Newsweek article on Clinton's calendar of promiscuous affairs. When I couldn't dig up a scrap of the noble stuff and discovered time was running short, I leaned on a little poetic license and went for the homonym: the bottoms off a pair of dirty tennis shoes in the laundry room. (Adaptation is one of my fortes.)
My husband Mark is one of the most flexible people I know when it comes to traveling, but his idea of a romantic quest does not involve hiking twenty miles to an Office Max in the middle of the night to replace a dead ink cartridge -- so sue me -- I turned uncharacteristically thoughtful and tossed a few extras in the pile. When Mark came home from work to load the car, he said, "Damn woman! We're takin' everything but the kitchen sink!"
My humble reply? "Honey, I tried to pull it out, Scout's honor, but the stupid thing wouldn't budge. You'll have to do the dishes in the lake."
~Janet I. Buck
An award-winning author, published in hundreds of literary magazines, Janet has also written several books. For more information on her public readings, and latest publications, including Before the Rose, her new CD with musician David Jackson, visit her website, listen to a sample or email.
© 2001 by Janet I. Buck. All Rights Reserved.
© 2000-2004 by Cayuse Press. All Rights Reserved.