The Accidental Linguist

Of all my favorite things to bring back from the woods, I now have a new one which I’ll have to rank above ticks and lice and that is poison oak.  After almost twenty years without a serious run-in with the plant, I now have a great rash on the ventral side of my body, which has also migrated to the back of one ear.  Particularly afflicted is my belly-button, which has almost swollen shut.  This has made it necessary for me to periodically reopen it and pack it with wadded-up toilet paper to absorb all the puss– which probably sounds gross, but just remember, I’m the one who HAS the rash.

So now each time I clean and dress my orange, disintegrating belly button I am invited to think fondly of the moment when I low-crawled backwards through a big patch of poison oak in the swamp– midst the clatter of gunfire and all those imaginary bullets flying through the air.  At least all that racket we made and the smoke scared the mosquitos off.  Last week I spent five fun-filled days as a terrorist, hiding in the woods and ambushing the new soldiers, then docking the weapon and rioting in front of their base.  What the week was really about, though, was getting back in touch with nature, which is what we did waiting hours at every point because the privates always got lost.

Or if not lost, then they were off the road in the trees, inching forward with wide eyes, expecting an ambush every second.  Even if their mission was just to talk to some unarmed farmers.  I remember those days in training, with leaders-for-the-day afraid to make a call because they expect it (correctly) to be the wrong one.

One animal we got an up-close look at was the Carolina Banana Spider, a giant yellow and black thing that spins a web.  After some fiddling, we managed to make it wrap and attempt to eat a short twig and a piece of mushroom.  It was necessary to take a stick and continually shake the scrap in the web, because if it was still the spider wouldn’t move a muscle.  I guess if I had to wait that long for my meals I’d be pretty set on chilling, too.

The only thing that was more fun than that was when we saw some privates taking trash to a dumpster, and decided to kidnap them.  This wan’t really our mission, but we were already done with the spider and were starting to get pretty bored.  So we sprinted up behind them before they could react, left the trash can in the middle of the road, and sent them back into the woods with a guard where they couldn’t interfere with our ambush.  We gave them some M and M’s, and even got a little info on the guard shifts in their camp.  Then our ambush didn’t come, and didn’t come, and still didn’t come, until a big sergeant on a gator comes crashing through the woods looking wild-eyed and asks where the hell his soldiers are.  So it turns out that they shut down all the training scenarios to look for those two, and all the instructors were pretty pissed.  But we had a good laugh about it.

On my long weekend after the woods, I started and finished The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, just because its one of those books that I’ve had forever and hadn’t touched.  The first seventy pages are the stream of conciousness of a retarded man, and if you want to know what that’s like, you’ll have to read my review, which I’ve posted here.