Don't Pee on your feet

CANADA

Max’s family’s house on Lake Joseph in Canada is so awesome that you can only really get there by boat. You’d park the car at the Foote’s bay, and then take the boat out to the house. They had the coolest boat ever, with yellow stripes and padded seats up at the front. When the boat zipped along, the prow rose up really high, with you sitting in it. My god that boat could move! It was like a car on the highway, maybe faster, and when you were riding in it the wind really whipped you around. I loved that boat, especially when we took it on long trips to one port or the other.
The whole place was great, especially cuz nobody would wear shoes- we’d just run around barefoot outside and inside and on the boat, etc. When we went to Port Sanfield to get frozen yogurt (really yum canadian smoothie ice creamy stuff), we’d just walk around on the pavement barefoot too. It felt really nice to run up the stone steps from the boathouse to the house without shoes.
Their house was pretty big, but it had that homey cottage-y feeling, maybe cuz it was made of wood. It had a great big screen porch looking over Lake Joe with two hammocks. Later, when Max’s cousins came, we all brought out our iPods and iTrip transmitter thingies and played music on the radio while we were hanging out.
Basically, we just hung out on the dock in our bathing suits, reading and making anklety bracelety things and jumping in the lake and swimming around when we got hot. They had a one person kayak and I just took it out when I felt like it! Then we’d do something like go to a port somewhere or swim out to the point or whatever people felt like doing.
The second day, we hooked up the two tubes to the neighbor’s boat. The lake was super choppy and he drove the boat really fast, so Max and I bounced around, flying off the tube and whiplashing and jerking our necks. I held on for dear life but fell off a lot anyway. We were sore for days after! Later, we got another ride (smooth lake and wimply pace) from Max’s uncle and it was really nice : )
The day or so before I left, I went waterskiing for the first time, and it rocked!! Not to BOAST or anything, but I stood up the first time and only fell off once. I was really proud. It was really freaky cuz it went fast and I’d never done anything like it before.
The next door neighbors were kinda crazy. They invited us to go jump off some rocks with them, and I foolishly agreed. ‘the rocks’ turned out to be a thirty foot cliff that the kids were running and jumping off like it was nothing. So I climbed up and watched a bunch of people jumping off. Eventually, I just thought, what the hell, so after a few false starts I just jumped. I was falling through the air, I was terrified, my eyes were bulging, and I must have looked pretty damn scared. And then I hit the water. It was NOT fun, so I didn’t do it again. I was really proud of Max cuz she was the only one not to do it.
The night before I left, we were about to go to bed when the Northern Lights were spotted so we all trooped down to the dock. The lights looked like foggy greenish rays coming from the horizon. The stars were amazingly clear, so we ended up laying on our backs watching shooting starts until the cold drove us back to bed.
The next morning I went to the airport, and after my flight was cancelled, rescheduled, and cancelled again, I ended up going back to the lakehouse for the evening. The next morning I woke up at 4:45 to get to the airport, and the flight was fine.
Thank you Max I love you!

MONTANA

Damn horse shit: my first impression of Montana. The hike up was pretty miserable, considering I had no sleep, a forty pound pack, and jelly muscles from being lazy in Canada. But hey! Things looked up the next day. We moved our campsite the next morning to a beautiful copse of trees in a meadow near a huge rocky face of a mountain with a lake at the foot of it.

I’d forgotten how good it feels to climb up high and look down from way up there on the mountain. We did quite a bit of hiking for those five days, and it rocked! Great huge hulking mountains with rock cliffs and yum! I did enough bushwhacking mountain climbing to last me a good while. Everytime I say a cliff face or reachable peak I scampered up like a mountain goat. My madcap adventures did get a bit dangerous, especially when I climbed an almost vertical slope that had small, loose rocks covering the surface. Thank god for trees, otherwise I would have slipped all the way down and broken my neck. There were so many ice cold mountain streams, we wouldn’t even bother to filter the water, we’d just fill up our bottles straight from the trickling waterfall. There were so many lakes, and at the end I finally got brave enough to jump in one. As soon as I jumped in it was like a blow to my chest, I could hardly breathe and I half-paniced. That’s how cold it was! But it felt so good when I popped out and put my clothes on, my skin tingled for minutes afterward.

The group we camped and hiked with was my family, my dad’s friends Jim and Fran, two nice college people, and another family, Lisa and Michael with a 16 year old son Josh, who lived in Canada, a few hours from where I stayed with Max. It was really cool to talk to them because they had done the same thing as us two years ago, in Australia. Patsy invites a philosopher/professor every two years and Lisa was invited before us. So she brought her family and lived in the same town as us and taught the same class at the same uni, etc. etc. So they’d been to some of the same places and stuff too. To top it off, Josh was a soccer player, and Jewish. Plus we both hiked fast so we talked a lot and he was really cool.

In the field, there were little ground squirrels that lived in holes and would pop out like prarie dogs, in addition to running around our campsite and pilfering things. But they were so cute! As a group we saw: a ton of ground squirrels, two marmots, three weasel-y things, a group of ten mountain goats, deer that were totally unafraid and wandered around the camp and licked molly’s hand, and some pika. Once, I went out a ways to pee and right after I finished, I noticed a huge deer with antlers ambling about fifteen feet away, who promptly stopped and started to pee, right after me! It was pretty damn hysterical.

At the end of our trip, we hiked down and stayed with a friend. We had a great feast after all those dried foods, weak noodles, mosquitoes and flies, plus we made a bonfire, but then had to say bye to everyone the next day. Me and molly and Fran did basket weaving before we left- I put sage on the rim and hope it smells good. We made a date in January to do lots of basketweaving and natural dyeing and I'm REALLY exited. I wish I could rock climb and hike mountains and write and camp in the awesome hammock tent in the beautiful wilderness much more often! Still, it feels good to shower and get back to civilization and poop in a toilet.

Then weekend soccer camp and then Maddy's and I'm home free! (sort of)