Current mood:

accomplished

I have so many cuts and scrapes and mosquito bites but it was worth it:

45°N by 75°W

When looking at the map of our trip to Ottawa, Jeff and I were struck by just how closely we would be passing to a HUGE confluence (intersection of lat. and long. lines). Not some piddly thing like 41°N by 76°W or whatever - this was fourty-five by seventy five! Exactly half way to the north pole and exactly 75° off the meridian. We couldn't NOT go, really.

We drove as close as we could to the confluence, about a kilometer away and parked in an abandoned motel parking lot. The girls had a baffling lack of interest in confluences and preferred to stay around and crochet or something, so Jeff and I set out on foot with minimal provisions and an erstwhile flaky GPS.

I'd like to think, in retrospect, that this picture has Jeff hanging his head in a display of foreshadowed forebearance at the ordeal we were about to undertake, but I'm guessing he was actually just trying to get the GPS to turn on. The road ended at this woodlot and our trek began relatively well -- climbing over logs, ogling big machinery, spirits were high.

The woodlot ended at the forest's edge. In retrospect, we probably should have listened to that headless ghost wailing that to go further was madness, but at the time we shrugged it off and in we went.

This was basically the last time we saw the sun. If this looks dense to you, understand that it was WIDE OPEN SPACE. I took this picture to document the fact that we had reached a sort of oasis amongst the mountainous pain of the rest of the forest -- if this doesn't look like an oasis to you, then you are a person who has not been attacked by The Thorn Swamp for half an hour. Allow me to digress...

The universe, in its attempt at Karmic balance, tends to make great things difficult, so that you will understand and appreciate their value and rarity once you attain them. Being that this confluence is so thoroughly fantastic, a certain amount of balance vis a vis pain is to be expected. What this forest represented, however, would have been more appropriate to a confluence populated with nubile virgins that use gold leaf as fucking toilet paper. I'm talking mud of the kind that devours lesser men and the thorns, oh, the thorns. At one point we passed a full grown dragon carcass, impaled on a single thorn so large that enough point was exposed through its magical breast to slay us if we strayed to close. I believe even the universe, upon creating this chasm of horror, felt remorse at the evil it had wrought, and by way of apology endowed us with superhuman strength. Every tree we leaned on collapsed, in fact for a while I was using a tree as a hiking stick, until the log I was traversing (to avoid the mud of lost souls) splintered, rotten beneath my feet, at which point I shifted my weight to my Bunyanesque staff, only to have it collapse in a crumpled mess as well. My shoes may never recover.

Note: we have logged the location of the mushrooms.

Approximately 2 pints of blood later we arrived. We took about 400 pictures of the GPS mostly because we were giddy with malaria thanks to the mosquitoes which approached a density of approximately 500,000 per everywhere. Thanks to the mystical beings which had now infested the GPS, the same precise location entertained slightly varying notions of its position in the world, but clearly we are, to within an appropriate margin of error, Gods among men.

If you look very closely (the original, bigger picture helps for this) you can *just* make out that I need a shave.

If you look very closely (the original, bigger picture helps for this) you can *just* make out ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the GPS. In fact Jeff is actually holding a frog.

The GPS tracked our route and looking at it showed us that we had made a sort of demi-circle despite following its directions faithfully, so we decided to take the straight line back to the car, whose occupants had probably decided to just go home anyhow. The thorns were much much denser this direction, but if we were the type to let certain death frighten us, we would have stayed back with the knitting circle, wouldn't we? After a while, we saw a heavenly vision...

Power lines mean the ground has been cleared, right? We can just walk betwixt the power lines until we hit the road, right? If you think this, you are a giant idiot. Because apparently, seconds after the land was cleared for power lines, the ThornSwamp began regrouping. The ground was covered, to a height of a few feet, with vines of... wait for it...

...thorns. Naturally. And because of their viny nature, these ones were ever so much more inescapable than the trees. It was about then that we heard a young child shout "What are you doing back there? You know there are bears back there?" The notion is laughable, of course, no bear could survive that shit, and if it COULD, wouldn't it have been hanging around the confluence too? Anyhow, after some negotiation, the child summoned a parent who confirmed that we could indeed cut through their backyard to get to the road (Yes, their yard backed on to the thorn swamp. I can only assume they are demons). He asked us what we were doing back there, which became more and more difficult to explain as we continued, but eventually he just allowed us passage and his darling wifedemon told us to avoid the doggie landmines left by Poopsie.

We returned to the car to find the women slightly annoyed that our trek had lasted long enough to prevent the visiting of a cheese place in Belleville on the way back. One can only assume that this is how Moses felt when he led the Israelites out of the desert to find his wife talking about how supper was probably cold by now. Still, we felt bad for it and the cheese outing will happen at a later date. Now all that is left is to grow new skin. We RULE!