Stepping inside the lodge, I enter a bygone era
I’m not immediately taken by any of the people playing the icebreaker Two Truths and a Lie, until it’s discovered that one guy fooled everyone into thinking that his great-grandfather invented the wheelbarrow. We break to move into our respective cabins and fire up the wood stoves. Out of thirty interns, only six of us are male – all sharing space in what is dubbed “Testosterhome”. I assume starting the fire is some sort of secret test, and frantically gather tinder in the dark among the snow.
After unloading my stuff, I run into a guy named Tim. We immediately bond. At dinner, the man who interviewed me over the phone introduces himself, to which Tim replies “I’m the Devil”. My being from Texas is a hot topic, and when someone says that it’s cool that our motto is “Don’t Mess With Texas”, I don’t correct them. For the record, it’s “Friendship”, after the anglicized version, of the Spanish version, of the Caddo word for the term…which is Texas (the state motto for Texas is Texas).
A couple of girls approach Tim and I, as we check the stars with his constellation app. I recognize one of them from earlier for cracking the most slap-happy grin I’d ever seen before in my life. The other one says she’s still reeling from a bad acid trip that’s been lingering for weeks. We eat trail mix in the dark, before pairing off. I go with the jolly one, who’s from the area and tells me she doesn’t have socks on. She attempts to walk out onto a lake that isn’t completely frozen. “That seemed innocent enough”, I tell myself before bed.
Pretending to read the paper on the couch the next morning, someone suddenly plops down so close to me, that they’re practically sitting in my lap
I look up to see a pair of lovestruck blue eyes. “Whatcha readin’?”, she asks. I can’t say. She reminds me her name is Ashley, and I can’t help but feel flattered, if not intrigued. Tim and I leave to start work on a sweat lodge, and when she asks what we’re doing with a cord of rope, I tell her that we’re going to tie her up. She doesn’t even flinch.
That night, outside of the designated smoking area, another female member lights up, and says to me very bluntly “Are you really interested in Ashley? I mean just look at her…” Her own boyfriend is here visiting, waiting for her back at the lodge. We’re unknowingly right outside the program leader’s cabin, and if he wasn’t currently away, putting out a fire that broke out in my cabin while the youngest crew member screams like a wild fisher cat, he would definitely have a few words to say to us right now.
Ashley and I kiss for the first time, after a night out on the frozen lake
The weekend arrives, and while she’s out skiing with a visitor, a group of us gets disorderly at the lodge. Tim punches me in the stomach for talking to the girl he likes. A little while later, I return the favor right in front of a staff member. I tell our director, Mike (the weasel of a man that he is), that it kills me when he says lanterrrn and winterrr, rolling his R’s like he doesn’t know any better. Ashley comes back flabbergasted. She says that this isn’t going to work, and I put out my hand to shake on it. Instead, she moves in with me into the men’s cabin.
During Monday’s community meeting, Mike solemnly condemns everyone for entertaining an uninvited guest, Mr. Beam. Nobody knows what he’s talking about. He starts over, saying that he is disappointed in the discovery of an empty bottle of Jim Beam. I conclude that the man is an idiot, as he didn’t seem to have a problem with it at the time that it was happening. He was there drinking along with the rest of us. It seems a little like gaslighting, and I resolve to give the strange man a wide berth.
Teaching environmental education in an elementary school and volunteering at the local Salvation Army is profoundly fulfilling. At night, Tim, some of the boys, and I cope with the darkness and isolation by freestyling over hip hop instrumentals. Ashley and I visit her cousin’s cabin in Vermont, and on the way I meet some of her family in their edifyingly wholesome little colonial home.
We go out contra dancing one night, and in the morning I realize that I literally shit the bed. Despite explosive diarrhea, we head back to her folks place so I can meet her mom. We’re forced to make an emergency stop at Lake Sunapee State Beach, where I’m overtaken with the strange sensation that I’ll be back again sometime.
We grab lunch. The server, originally from Colorado, tells me he became localized after serving through the same program as I am now. I don’t know how I feel about that yet. I get a funny impression of my girlfriend’s mom, when she bounces Ashley around fror a while on her knee, singing “ga-LUMPH, ga-LUMPH, ga-LUMPH!”, so hard that she sends her flying headfirst into the fireplace. I’m forced to excuse myself, so that I can go outside and “deflate” without filling the room up with farts.
Then, things start getting pretty weird
Monday’s community meeting is a witch hunt over our freestyle sessions and their content. Later, Mike rips my earbuds out to monitor what I’m listening to. When I ask him what surfing is like, “hard drugs” is his reply.
Peter introduces himself, clearly intoxicated, by asking if we know anything about computers – specifically since he just cooked his in the microwave. I suspect I know whos responsible for the cough syrup splattered all over the outside fridge and in the bathroom. Someone tells me that they once started a forest fire by blowtorching a beehive with hairspray, and then passing off the evidence to a mentally handicapped kid, before fleeing the scene. A creepy doll keeps appearing in our cabin.
Pubescents at the Salvation Army annihilate us at dodgeball, and ask me if I’m gay at the karaoke machine. At another function, I get a text from Ashley saying she needs rescuing, and almost destroy a guy who was just starting up a conversation with her. A complete stranger then comes up to tell me that they were ready to jump me, before they found out that I wasn’t who they thought I was. The scary doll shows up again, so I hang it by a noose from the neighbor’s cabin, just in time to send a girl screaming and running. It would’ve been funny, except that only a few years earlier she had discovered the body of her brother in just the same way…
Drinking is hereby prohibited outside of the lodge, during the next community meeting. Practical jokes are banned as well, since the doll came back in the form of a giant snowman blocking the door to our cabin – a very real fire hazard. Mike casts a wary eye when I head to the cabin during a short break. Upon return, I open the door to the lodge and Mike sends a roundhouse kick to within a centimeter of my face. “Hmph!”, he squeaks , pushing his way past me, on through the doorway.
Then, the strangest event of my entire life occurs
Ashley and I step out onto the frozen lake one night, unsure of whether or not the ice will hold. As we venture further, I comment on seeing a street light up on the hill that I never noticed before. This is a State Park, after all. As if in response to my comment, the light assumes the flickering of a campfire, and I immediately realize that something supernatural is at hand. We both stop, in awe, as the flickering light, slowly and subtly, motions up and down. As one does to the approach of a wild animal, I calmly begin speaking extemporaneously: “Alright…this is ok…everything is fine…we’ve got nothing to worry about…”
Just then, seemingly out of nowhere, a disc-shaped vehicle appears thirty yards to the left of us. Suspended silently in the air, a few stories up, the metallic saucer displays a series of square lights running along the middle of the widest section of the Miata-sized aircraft. From left to right, the lights flash yellow, orange, red, and green, sequentially, like a rainbow jellyfish.
It continues along a slow, gradual pass, pausing directly in front of us for a brief period, before once again proceeding it’s course off to our right, while at the same time veering further back in the direction from which it originally came. I am struck with a conviction that, in the same manner in which the winter reveals to us our breath in visible form, this phenomenon is but a temporary glimpse of a constant, otherwise unobservable presence.
I have no fear. As it gradually floats towards the tops of the trees along the distant lakeshore, Ashley follows. “It’s ok, let it go!”, I protest, worried still that she might break through the ice. My eyes follow it as it tops the trees and, in the next second, becomes hardly a visible speck along the horizon. Abruptly shifting it’s trajectory, it assumes the form of far-off jetliner. We make a pact, then and there, never to tell anyone.
Meanwhile, deep divisions have formed within our tree-hugging community
At the following community meeting, an anonymous (satirical) complaint about the offensive nature of a Gandhi quote on the bulletin board causes the staff member who posted it to burst into a tearful apology for being “insensitive”. Tensions soar over topics like coal mining and genetic engineering. There’s too much fennel in the food. Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain plays constantly in the kitchen. Coffeehouse poetry readings evolve into a full production of The Vagina Monologues. What about a Penis Pity Party? Everyone hates everyone, but I’m the only one who gets woken up for falling asleep on the couch.
Forced to the margins through total female domination, we emerge late at night to play videogames and binge on expired dumpster food. We invent gladiatorial games of war, naming them The Herchenfold. We use guttural sounds as affirmatives, breaking further and further from reality by holding covert rhyme-sessions about an imaginary escapist Color Pencil Nation. Someone vomits violently in their sleep one night. I tornado the entire cabin, and experience the sensation of literally getting sucked into a black hole while reaching out in vain to a staff member named Molly.
I refuse to apologize for ruining everyone’s things in the tornado, and thereby banish myself and my girlfriend to a summer cabin. Feeling slighted by something I overhear Ashley say to another guy, I wait until right before she drives off for the weekend, with a car full of people, to lean in the window, kiss her on the cheek, and whisper gently in her ear, “we’re over”. I then wallow in self-pity and rage. The next evening, Peter and I cover the summer cabin with vulgar pictures, and hold an American Scream Society drum session until dawn.
Molly comes to check up on us, and is not at all happy with what she sees
She comes back around dusk, and at first I give her the sliparoo. Thinking better of it, I catch up with her down the trail, where she tells me to pack up for the night. Apparently, I’m going somewhere else. It’s a long, silent ride back to civilization. She drops me off at a hotel, hands me the keys to my room, and tells me that someone will be back for me sometime in the next few days. I’m overjoyed at knowing that I won’t have to sit through the next community meeting.
I sleep in and write until dinnertime the following day, and notice a squad car following me the short walk to and from a nearby restaurant. The next day, the same thing happens when I go out for lunch. I have no idea where I am, what I did, or why I’m being followed. It’s extremely stressful. Ashley comes and brings me dinner, and we make up. She tells me not to worry, and that this will all get sorted out once it reaches upper management and they see how incompetent Mike and the staff really are.
I become deathly sick that evening. I vomit for hours. On the way to the Emergency room, I throw up out of the open door of the moving vehicle and almost black out. I feel like I’m dying (which isn’t nearly as bad as the Black Hole in comparison)
In the morning, after an IV and some medication, I’m released to go back into hiding in my hotel room. Mike picks me up the next day. Together at a meeting with his supervisor, he tells me he would’ve had me escorted out of the park in handcuffs if he had been in camp over the weekend when I was acting up. I’m accused of a number of dubious things that I have no recollection of, including running in and out of people’s cabins trying to scare everyone. They fire me.
On my way out, someone offers me a cow vertebrate, for good luck
I’m terrified and broke. I spend the night, wide awake, with my girlfriend at her parent’s, considering what a failure it would be to go home now with my tail between my legs, never to see Ashley again. It’s not even April, job prospects are slim, and a thick snow still covers everything. Despite it all, I determine to somehow make it work.
In the morning, before heading back to camp, Ashley gives me her GPS and 50 bucks. I try disappearing from the world that evening, in a Walmart parking lot, bent like a banana in the backseat of my sedan with my legs draped over the back of the reclined driver’s seat, holding on to what little dignity I haven’t already sabotaged. But when morning comes, I wake up feeling more alive and invigorated than ever before in my life! I discover a newfound optimism, and have total faith in my ability to survive against all odds.
I get a call from Tim to meet up in Manchester. He just got fired too, and tells me Peter might be next. We’re treated to lunch by our old coworkers, who give us the number of a local farmer who could possibly use our help. After crashing at a friend’s in town, we make it to Monadnock State Park the next day, where we use the free parks passes we were issued to enter for free. The ranger at the entrance, a cute, real-life Raggedy Ann doll named Annie, is thrilled to let us stay. As a program alumna, she asks us to say hi to Molly for her.
For the next week, we live in a small two-person Eureka tent, keeping the fire fed that we started with magnesium, flint, and a knife. We spend our days throwing knives and freestyling. Several times a day, I hike partway up the nearby mountain to refill our water bottles, at a spring flowing from underneath a great snow pyramid, made by a man who has summitted the mountain every day for the past four years. We live off of peanut butter, grits, and scorn. Peter eventually calls, saying he got fired and that he has food for us if we take him job hunting. We drive out.
We forgo the job search, and take him back with us, driving slowly in case there are wild turkeys to knife. I’m down to $11. We live like the characters from the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, going about our daily business ever wary of being discovered by park staff. We encounter the elusive mountain climber early one morning, and Peter asks him if he is a forest wizard magician. I manage to redirect the conversation while he rambles on about “raincorn uniborns”. We summit the peak (during a storm) for an environmental crisis photo shoot.
We descend to see Tim running circles around a tree, knife drawn, trying to get a shot at a squirrel
Fighting sleep deprivation, I gather more wood. Peter plays George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord on repeat, before casting a Shiva figurine into the flames and then dreading it horribly afterwards. We cram into my small tent. Peter takes his medication and begins to tell a scary story about the man with a shovel. He’s told it a few times before already. It’s really just about a man with a shovel. I peek outside the tent, to see a mummified baby with glowing eyes, and decide it’s time for bed.
Peter wastes most of the next morning repeatedly calling back a temp agency for a phone number that ultimately eludes him. Tim calls the farmer, Tom, and arranges a meeting that afternoon. We pack up our refugee camp, and instruct Peter not to talk around Tom, whom he continually refers to as uncle Tom – a very strange man living at the end of a bumpy backroad guarded by grotesque Halloween decorations, who immediately insults us all upon arrival. We help him pick raspberries, and he says he’ll call us about a potential job in a week or two.
We drop off Peter, who couldn’t resist telling Tom about his chainsaw certificate. Tim and I become Walmart parking lot neighbors, and tune into the paranormal and conspiracy theory radio show, Coast to Coast AM, every evening before bed. Days are spent at the library researching local social services, alongside more long-term homeless people, or at McDonald’s, using the free Wi-Fi and taking bum showers in the restroom sink. Over the weekend, I stay with Ashley at her folk’s place, while Tim manages the same arrangement with her best friend Mary.
We’re gifted provisions to see us through another week back at Monadnock, where the ranger on duty is a lightning strike survivor (and looks it too). We meet up with Annie, the ranger that Tim’s in love with, for drinks one night. The husband that we didn’t know she had, is there too and hands us a bottle of homemade maple syrup from their very own sugar shack. We agree to pass it on to Molly (the woman who fired us). Yeah, right. Tim is so crushed, that as soon as we leave, he chugs half the bottle. Enraged, and all sauced up on maple syrup, he throws his knife out of the car window, at a tree beside an old church, where it breaks in half upon impact.
It’s becoming a tough time, indeed
We abduct Paul again, but unrelenting spring rain drives us back to his parent’s place, where we plan on extending our stay as long as possible by feigning interest in becoming Jehovah’s Witnesses. Tom calls the very next day for us to start work, which is good for me, as I just spent my last dollar, and good for Tim because his parents are planning a brief visit in the morning. He never told them about being fired, and “volunteering” on the farm provides the perfect alibi for not being back in Bear Brook.
Our first task is raking leaves from a forest along a pullout on the side of the highway where there is a wood-fired oven, a table, and a Porta Potty. This is where Tom hosts live music events during the summer, including the likes of Steven Tyler. Along with keeping up on work around the farm, he wants us to join him in constructing a similar oven at a Hare Krishna center in West Virginia, and takes us to look at a trailer that he’ll consider buying for us. Tim takes one look, and turns his nose up at it. We’re invited to camp at the pullout.
After a long day of clearing the field of “New England Potatoes” (stones pushed to the surface at the onset of spring), Tim and I settle into our first night staying at the pullout. We build a small fire and leave to go fishing. Realizing that we left the hooks back at camp, we return to find a note that reads: “You blew it! The Fire Department was called!” He kicks us out on our first day. We retreat back to Walmart for the night.
In the morning, we show up for work and Tim spontaneously announces that we’re taking a few days off to go fishing
We waste most of the next day at Walmart looking at fishing gear, but manage to make it to a park on the Canadian border by dusk. At dawn, we cast twice before realizing that the lake is still frozen. We throw sticks and stones at it, out of anger. On the drive back to Mary’s (Tim’s girlfriend), we see a Moose. At a place called Indian Caves, Tim and Mary wait in the car, while I investigate rumors of pictographs. There, I stumble upon a small grotto. Inside, I see a white, three-foot square double pictograph of enormous-headed humanoids.
On my 23rd birthday, I go alone to the farm to help Tom paint the floors of his 3-story house white. He dumps the excess paint directly into vernal pools of the forest surrounding his certified organic farm, and hints that the mafia funded the construction of his house. He says that most of his business comes from asbestos removal and demo work, and that he canceled the Hare Krishna project. He’s got plans to sell pizzas at upcoming Renaissance fairs, he wants my help and I can start by first stealing a “One Way” road sign for him.
I spend another night at Walmart after waiting until midnight for Ashley to come home from a wedding. I call her via payphone, after a rude awakening from other parking lot regulars, and she drives down to join me. The next night, she helps me steal the road sign, then spazzes out immediately afterwards and threatens to call the cops on herself. A fight ensues. I drop her off back at the house, peeling out of the driveway. She later finds me in the usual place, and apologizes. We fall asleep together again under the bright white lights of the Walmart parking lot.
I take a blowtorch to the sign, first thing in the morning, to strip it down to the metal. This attracts an army of ticks from the woods that slowly try and crawl up my body. I muck out the fish pond before lunch at the local Bradford Junction, where an Abenaki laments the loss of New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain. Tom shamelessly bullies the cook. Back at the farm, he gives two older ladies a tour, later yelling at them to get off his property. He proudly shows off a tortoise, saying he lied when the owner came looking for it one day.
I have very mixed feelings about moving in with the most egregious man I’ve ever met
He says he envisioned the entire farm layout, while laid up in a trailer nearby, after surviving a terrible car accident. He says he wants to buy me a tipi, organize sweat lodge ceremonies, and further develop his astral projection and psychic abilities. He already knows how to summon Red Feather, an “Indian spirit-helper”. He tells me to watch the sunset from the barn loft. When I try and sneak a run in afterwards, I hear him, from a half a mile away, yelling hysterically for me to get back inside. It’s only my first night, but I have a feeling this arrangement will be short-lived.
Watching TV at breakfast, I’m told the news anchor’s body language is a mind control device. In his thick accent, he tells me to feed the chickens and that “if ya lehn ta listen, tha’ll tell ya thens”. I’ve learned as much with him, and that it wasn’t a good idea at all. He looks like an evil leprechaun, with a hideously smashed-in face. His eyes are set, like a catfish, very far apart on the sides of his wrinkly head. Two white tufts of hair stick out from the sides of an otherwise bald head, giving him distinctive Mickey Mouse ears. I pray the chickens, do tell – is he man or is he clown?
On the way to an asbestos job, we pick up the fabricated teeth he ordered for a dragon that adorns his pizza oven trailer – the one I stole the sign for. He berates the artist for poor work, doesn’t pay him, yet takes the teeth anyway. We stop briefly at the jobsite, where he brags about splitting the profit 50/50 with a team of Dominicans doing all the work. We pick up Renaissance festival attire at a costume supply warehouse, where his son, the owner, wishes me the best of luck: “We’ll see how long this lasts. He’s a total asshole!”
“DO YA THINK THEY’W WEDDY FO THA FIYA BWEATHIN’ DWAGON! AAHH!!!” Tom yells next sunup
Feeding the chickens, they tell me some shady business is about to go down. We load up the dragon trailer and leave, stopping briefly to pick up balloons and a helium tank. Tom is asked for his ID, and storms out in a rage. He was already agitated for having to drive a vehicle registered in his own name. We set up our vending station at the fair grounds, before going to a strip club. Tom offers to buy McDonald’s but, angry at how much food I eat, changes his mind. Ashley arrives unexpectedly, and Tom warns: “They’ws to be no P.D.A. whiw sellin’ pizzas!”
Torrential rains cause a horrible turnout. Bear Brook folks arrive. Tom lectures them in leaving no paper trail, chopping up bank cards, discarding cell phones, the evils of recycling, why trees are bad, and benefits of a clean diet (as he sells pizza). Flooding causes the festival to end early. I’m told to eat what pizza is left over, so I eat a lot, and upset the bastard. In a frenzy, he drives into a giant puddle. I help free him again, and he peels out, drenching me. I’m totally bogged down, but he’s already long gone. I’m completely helpless, until a knight in shining armor comes along to rescue me.
It takes me hours to find my way back home alone, and when I do, Tom tells me to pack it up and leave. He says Ashley and I drove away business by being too affectionate. I go back to the relative peace of Walmart parking lots, ignoring 26 missed calls from Tom, and later interviewing unsuccessfully at a couple other farms. With a couple hundred cash in pocket, I settle on fasting for a week or two at Mt. Sunapee State Park until favorable weather returns. The park is closed, but I take up residence in an old lean-to shelter.
I’m startled awake, in a cold sweat, to the nightmare of being abducted by aliens
Peeking around the corner of the shelter, I see a pair of headlights shining on my car. In my underwear, I grab my parang and hunting knife, and sprint through the forest, barefoot, towards my parked vehicle. When I arrive, there is nobody there.
Peter writes me in the morning, and I go visit him in his new apartment in Manchester. He tells me he’s depressed, and asks if I have any weed or alcohol. I tell him that I’m not even eating anymore. He asks me to take him to a nearby sex shop, where he buys whipped cream aerosols, and gets high right up until I drop him off for his first day at a new job. I tell him I won’t be back to pick him up, and he says it’s ok. I ask him if he remembers how to get back home and he says no.
I settle in to the nearest Walmart, before getting a text from Tim to come see him on the Vermont border. There, I find him acting as caretaker for a mentally unstable elderly woman, who treats me to Shepherd’s pie, and keeps me up all night by narrating a constant, never-ending stream of consciousness. I’m startled awake, as Peter insists I drive him to interview for a maintenance position back at Sunapee State Park. The interview is held at Lake Sunapee State Beach, where I remember feeling such a strong force the morning I pooped my pants.
After patiently waiting for his interview to end, we leave for breakfast. Suddenly, Tim convinces me to turn around and fill out an application. Wearing a bandana and the clothes I slept in, I apply for a lifeguard position, which they’re not hiring for, and leave all the contact info blank. The man I interview with, a fellow Texan from El Paso, tells me, on the spot, that he’d like to offer me the position…
…to which I gladly accept.
