I have returned from the wilderness. Alive and filthy. Let’s begin this tale from the very beginning. (heeheehee) Friday afternoon I took off from work a little early. Little Miss Cotton and I had successfully emptied the kiln, ground all of the pots, assembled the orders, loaded the van, and set up our booth for Art in the Park, so I felt that I had done enough work to allow myself a little extra time to finish packing for this trip.

Nicky the Cook showed up to get me around 6pm and we headed to Fayetteville to get D-Man. We got to the Harp’s where D had decided he was going to leave his car at around 7:15pm. D-Man showed up around 7:45pm. Then we went grocery shopping and loaded the car with D’s gear and the groceries. That took about an hour. Then we headed off to our destination of Kyle’s Landing, which sounds like either a gay bar or a Lifetime movie of the week, on the Buffalo River.

“It’s like 45 minutes from Fayetteville.” We were told. Cut to an hour and 15 minutes later and we find the dirt road leading to the campsite. The road was crazy steep and twisty-turny. We were very fortunate to have awesome weather the entire trip, because going down or coming up this hill in the rain would have been the shit nightmares are made of. So we’re going down this crazy steep dirt road and we all 3 notice something in the road.

“What the hell is that?” (I actually immediately thought “What is that? It that a deer?”)

No, not a deer. It was, in fact, a giant boar. A razorback if you will. Just hanging out in the road. It scrammed pretty quickly, but still scary and awesome. I had never actually seen a boar in the wild before. I got to check that one off the list. We were all very thankful that it took off rather than deciding that it wanted to seriously fuck up Data K’s car, which she had graciously loaned us for this expedition. After a triple sigh of relief that it had departed without incident, we continued down the hill and met up with the 4th member of party, Eagle David. Party completed, we headed off to find a campsite at around 10:30pm. We find the spot and divide into three groups: the tent building group, the wood gathering group, and the fire building group.

I’m the fire building group. At some point after Nicky gets the tent up and I have a small fire going, D-Man and Eagle David return from hunting through the wilderness in the dark to inform us that they’ve located a good source of firewood, a “log”, but they need our help to get it out of its current location and back to the campsite. What they called a log was actually the majority of a tree. I kind of wish that someone had been filming us move this thing. Close your eyes and imagine 4 guys awkwardly carrying a tree in the middle of the night, across a rocky river bed, and up a hill threw the woods. It was a friggin’ miracle that none of us got hurt. Between the ankle breaking walk across the perfectly rounded uneven rocks of the river bed and the shifting dirt of the wooded hill and the 200 pound tree, we ran the gauntlet of potentially weekend-ruining injuries.

So we get this thing back to camp and across the fire where it just smolders for the entirety of the next 18 hours. Jerk. It was no bonfire to say the least. It did produce (with the help of kindling, a firestarter log, charcoal, and lighter fluid) a good bit of heat for which we will now attempt to cook our dinner on. And we only thought we were hungry back at the Harp’s. Our man dinner of 2 meats and red potatoes finally gets done around 1:30am. And like Nicky predicted earlier in the night, it was “the best thing any of us had ever eaten”.

Then it was sit around the fire and relax time. I guess it was about this point in the story where we gained our running jokes for the remainder of the trip. These two drunk and/or stoned guys walked up to our camp. Keep in mind this is 2am and D-Man is drunkenly holding a hatchet. One of the guys keeps his distance but the other guy, Andy, comes up all friendly like and starts inquiring about how we located our wood out in the dark and scary wilderness. He then proceeds to provide us with many nuggets of comedy gold:

a) In order to make our fire really great, someone needs to blow on it for like 20 minutes in increments of 25 seconds blowing, 30 seconds resting.

b) He knows this because he knows his Chemistry (Biochem, in fact)

c) and because he is 1/16th of the lost tribe of the Cherokee (although, he admits, he’s white)

and many, many more…

Those were the 3 that got reused the most for the remainder of the trip. That and D-Man’s theory of friction being needed for fire.

After that, around 3am, it was off to bed.

We got up around 8 or 9 and had waffles for breakfast and lamented that not one of the 4 coffee drinkers in our posse had thought to bring any coffee. We lounged around for a little while to try and wake up and then we headed off on about a 6.5km (about 4 miles) hike through the beautiful Buffalo National Forest.

Told you it was beautiful. After the hike we ate another meat meal and parted ways. It was a good trip. It was a really nice break for all 4 of us. A moment to get away from the hectic stress of our lives and just sit in quiet and look at thousands of stars.

Speaking of hectic stress, I’m home now and have got to start preparing for my upcoming shows. As some of you know, I’ve got two craft shows back to back. The awesome stress of trying to pack, get the house in order, get three restaurants in for three articles, and rearrange my tutoring schedule, is back in my mind and very real again.

That is what I am doing today. Spinning plates and putting out fires. I’m going to get to it. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. More soon. ~SC