Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Sleeping with the Dead

It's been a long week.

I think it all started last Thursday night, when I camped out on a little cemetery at Patterson, LA.



The night went by with little problem, but it started to rain the next morning, I joked with myself: "this is what you get for disturbing the dead, Lawrence". Despite the occational showers that day, I was able to put in some good miles that day. By the nights end I camped out in the woods like I had been doing for the last month near Jeanerette, but this time I think I may have stepped on some poison ivy, and with the rain, the poison seeped through the wet shoes, and before it started to itch I wiped myself down(a mini bath) with my wet towl, which pass the poison on to the rest of my body. It started to itched that night, which expended much of my remaining tubes of anti itch cream. It itched on to the next morning, and by Saturday night I am all red and itchy, but luckily, another red-neck couples took me in for food and bed, where I got to a chance for a long shower and do laundry.

Unfortunately I have left those shoes untouched. How on earth do I suppose to know where the itch had came from... ticks, fleas, spiders(caught one in the tent that night), could be a lot of things. And not having useing my brain for a while, it was having a hard time working out the poison transfer mechanism.

By Sunday, most of the itching subsided, except my feet, which I apply plenty of anti-itching cream(which BTW, I am on my second tube). By this time I began to realized that there are more and more spots on the side of the road that is nothing but poison ivy vines, and most of these vines hugs closely to the ground, some have these small leaves which made them hard to spot on lawns(which is where I usually camped). So, slowly my brain began to piece together these little pieces, and came into the realization that I am having a case of poison ivy, because I walked on them. With poison ivy, and fleas in my mind, I stated what i called "poison isolation" control to my clothing. I started to put my used clothing in a plastic bag, isolating them from the fresh ones.

By Monday morning, it rained. Only for a few hours, but nothing really got through the rain covers. Everything is reasonably dry. Just enough rain for that false sense of security.

The next day i biked in the rain for six hours, and by night fall when I checked, All my clothing are wet except the ones that I have put into the "poison isolation" bag the previous night. The tent was still dry, the sleeping bag was only 70% dry or so.

With the 5 piece of dry clothing on me, I thought I still can rough out the night, so I camped behind this library. But as luck would have it, it rained and rained(with thunder and lightning), until the ground is so saturated, the water gotten just a little bit higher than the ground cloth, and water started to seep into my old tent. No amount of wiping can stop the water from coming in, a small puddle started to form in the corner of the tent...

By now, it is either spending a night sleeping on a puddle or admit defeat and go to a motel, The problem is, I passed by that motel 10 miles back, and it is now pitch black out there and raining cats and dogs. So with the tails between my legs, I packed up everything, took down my tent, and biked to the village across the freeway, and hope to find someone with a little sympathy. This unfortunately, is no big village, with only 40 beach house/shack in it, and being in the middle of the winter, only 3 or 4 of them are occupied. it was pretty eerie to bike in this "abandon" town in the middle of the night.

Luckily, the guy at the second house that I came to knock on, was brave enough to open up his door....To make the long story short: he and his wife put my bike on the back of the pick-up and the wet Chinese in the front and drove him to that motel, where he stayed for the night, and the next.

So the moral of the story, don't go disturbing the dead, unless you really have to.