Chapter 13
The Final Days, Oh, Man!
To tell the truth, I probably would have been just as happy to lay face down in that parking lot for a couple hours. The only trouble was that it was wet.
I've never been very fond of coming home from a vacation, and I wasn't in any mood to make it any easier for myself this time.
Well, this is it, right? You think it's all over, don't you? Well, it isn't over. I mean it wasn't over yet, although I'm pretty sure that just about all of us were wishing that it was over. See, there were these not so simple matters of cleaning the boats, packing our stuff, packing the vans, and somehow getting home that still awaited us. For some of us, this would constitute two or more days, which did tend to stretch the notion of "end of vacation" a bit, even if that process also stretched the notion of "vacation" even farther.
For my part, all I could really think about was finding someplace really dry to spend the rest of my life sleeping. What I found was someplace sort of dry where I could spend about four hours sleeping. What I also found was myself, in a state of near delirium.
I do remember having a thought that day that I'd done pretty well by myself, having made it all the way through the trip without doing any serious damage to my body. In contrast, I spent one lousy weekend sailing up in Vermont and in that short time, managed to convert the entire right side of my body into a Technicolor bruise. Here, after a whole week of sailing and being in the sun, and generally making myself available to being outside, my body and soul were entirely intact.
In fact, both were seriously hosed. True, I was completely without sunburn (due to my Terminator 2000 Sunblock), and I was equally without bruises (due to my spectacular lethargy). Other than that, I was a wreck. The only reasons why I didn't realize it at the time were that I felt too shitty to take a serious inventory of my state of body, and my brain was on strike. Hold that thought, because it's one of the many factors that caused the upcoming ride home in the van make the idea of puking my guts out over the side of a boat trapped in a hurricane sound like a walk in the park by comparison. (Not that walking in the park sounded so great, either.)
I had a serious case of diaper rash (from a week's worth of sitting in that mobile puddle that we so euphemistically called a "sailboat"), another rash on my hands and arms (simple allergic reaction to being outside), athlete's foot, athlete's ankle, fleas, muscle cramps, absolutely no remaining sense of balance, and a bad case of abandonment anxiety anytime I was out of sight of a certain indoor plumbing fixture. My clothes were all wet, my hair had all tangled into a snag that was so tight that it was about to collapse under its own weight, most of my electronics were soaked, all the books I'd brought along were soaked and "U" shaped, and I'd just realized that if I didn't get a move on, I'd be late for my first day back at school.
Not wanting to sound too self-absorbed here, I will point out that I probably had it pretty easy compared to everyone else. After all, I did manage to keep my personal energy expenditures to a minimum. Everyone else presumably had a reason to feel so shitty. And, don't forget that the party half of the tour had just spent the previous week creating the Great Mother of All Hangovers, which by all appearances, was just starting to kick in.
This left us feeling pretty awful. It made me feel like I'd just been towed to the top of a roller coaster, had that first look down the other side, and realized that not only was I about to have a really shitty time, but that I actually paid money for it. It felt like that, with the bonus of a head that felt like it was about to explode. And like the roller coaster, we had to smile and pretend everything was just great, and that we were all having a good time. There's just one thing to say at times like this:
Oh, man!
I got four lousy hours of sleep. Then I realized that one of the reasons I couldn't sleep was that I was choking on the smell of my own body odor. The other reason I couldn't sleep was that the house we were staying at was rocking too damned hard.
Oh, man!
I got up and took a shower, which I felt showed an amazing degree of skill on my part, even if no one else really appreciated it. Now, this really did constitute a bit of a dilemma on my part. See, the single most miserable thing about sailing is being on a sailboat all the time, and a sailboat's natural habitat is, unfortunately, on the water, and the single defining feature about water is that it's wet. Meaning that we were wet. Meaning that we were all sick of being wet. But, it wasn't that clean sort of wet that you might get in a nice squeaky acid-rain storm; it was that slimy, sticky sort of wet that you get from frolicking around in puddles of bilge water. Basically, I stunk (we all stunk), and I wanted more than anything else to be clean and dry.
It's just that the trouble was that the preferred way of getting clean, I mean the major, party approved method of de-scumming one's self is bathing, and the major characteristic of bathing is that, well, it's wet.
Oh, man!
At least the shower converted me from being cold, damp and smelly to just cold and damp. You take improvements one at a time, I guess.
I tried to go back to sleep on my allotted spot on the floor, but soon realized that the third reason why I couldn't sleep was that I was choking on everyone else's body odor. So, I lay there in a crypto-narco-stupor, waiting for someone else to be the first to act overtly awake. That came in the form of someone turning the TV on to the Weather Channel, where I heard:
And, if you look at the satellite pictures from yesterday, you can see this massive storm system right off the eastern coast of Florida. If you look real close, you can see a couple of sailboats that were inexplicably heading right into the worst of the system.
We got up. We found another ill-advised Denny's breakfast someplace. We went back to the boat rental place to clean up. Sure, that's what we were all looking forward to -- getting all cleaned up so we could go wade around in the bottom of a boat, collecting all our bilge water soaked belongings.
Oh, man!
I'd tell you about all the work we did to get the boats cleaned up, but you're probably not interested, and to tell the truth, I can't remember. What I do remember was that we spent so much time that I managed to get myself quite a sunburn, being outside for all that time.
Everyone got together for a group pose, and tried to look like they were happy and still liked each other, at least long enough for me to snap the shutter. Then, we all waited around for Roger, who'd disappeared in his quest to find a gift for Georgia and Kathy for their work in organizing the trip. Then, everyone just milled around in the parking lot some more, because no one was in any hurry to sit in a crowded seat on a crowded van (or airliner).
We were supposed to leave at noon. We left at about 3:30 PM. I won't give details of the drive, except to say that everyone just wanted to be home, no one wanted to be in the lousy van, so everyone was in a thoroughly shitty, hostile, tired, selfish, psychotic mood. Or, at least I was, and that's all that counted, because whether or not anyone else was feeling like that, they were as far as I was concerned.
The basic drill was
about the same as driving down, except that everyone was
a whole lot more grumpy about it, and except that this
time, we had Georgia in her "Warp-3 BMW" in the
lead. Georgia's BMW bristles with the largest peacetime
civilian collection of electronic countermeasures known
to the civilized world, which Georgia augmented at
roughly every other rest stop. By the time we got back to
the New England area, she had so many antennae on the car
that you could hear them whistling and buzzing in the
wind like a swarm of angry penny whistles. Rather than
getting stopped by the police, the major threat to her
well being soon became being mistaken by NORAD for a gang
of disoriented cruise missiles headed for Montreal.
Adding to the
tasteful faux-NSA antenna styling cues, Georgia had added
a door-mount ski rack to the passenger's side, with which
she was carrying a spinnaker pole, which looked for all
the world like a sidewinder missile (or it did if you
were in a state of delirium like I was). For her efforts,
Georgia's car earned the nickname
"spearchucker" on the CB radio. Picture
"spearchucker" leading a pair of white Ford
vans up I-95 at transonic speeds. Got that picture in
your mind? Good. Now I won't have to describe it to you.
With all that cop-detection gear, you'd expect that following Georgia's car made us cover ground at relativistic speeds, which indeed it did. The problem was the frequent two hour rest stops that converted a potential 24 hour drive into a real 32 hour wait. Like I said, you probably don't care for the details.
The only two details I remember were smashing my left knee into something while we were still loading the vans, then slipping on a patch of ice at Trevor's place in Hartford, clobbering the hell out of my right knee. The latter act was a pretty impressive feat on my part, as it immediately followed no less than six warnings, directed to me, informing me that if I wasn't careful, I'd slip and wreck my remaining good knee. I took this opportunity as an excuse to spend about fifteen minutes laying face down in an ice covered parking lot, crying and feeling sorry for myself. Needless to say, it was the high point of the drive home.
What we did was leave a place that was hot and damp (Fort Lauderdale), drive through the warm and damp places, to the cool and damp places, right on past the cold and damp places, around the cold and frozen places, right up to the cold, frozen and miserable places that we so affectionately call "home." We got back to Dot and Ron's place around 11:00 PM, where we all participated in tearful good-byes (gesticulated with middle finger, owing to our moods), and swore never to see each other again.
This was truly a vacation that was not to be forgotten. God knows, I've been trying my hardest to forget it, but I still wake up in the middle of the night with those flashbacks.
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