Prince Caspian

Listen to: “Prince Caspian” by Phish while reading (I hate Phish but I love that song and woke up singing it this morning)

I hurled myself up using the springs of my floor-bound mattress to thrust numbed hands into coat pockets. My coat was hanging absurdly off the edge of my door, and a phone charger linked it’s nearest pocket into the wall. I followed the cord more with my hands than my eyes, which at that early hour weren’t working too well.  The phone blares out a horrible rhythm that I work with dulled dexterity to silence. “Six thirty”. A quick breakfast, and an unexpectedly long wait latter I’m out the door with my long grey military reenactment coat and small back pack with near nothing in it. Out the door I meet the good Doctor Ringsred, my beloved benefactor for the next month or so, and inside her car his old hippy friend Belinda. Regular pleasantries and light conversation in the car, on our way to collect our fourth, an old Finnish horse farmer, Donald.

            We made our way across the northern Wisconsin on back roads with a surprisingly coherent and interesting set of conversation, considering the extreme diversity of the individuals involved. Somewhere near eleven we arrived in Bayfield for the annual Apple fest.

            Now I shouldn’t have gone on this trip for several reasons first of all being the fact that I have no wiggle room in my budget, designed not for the maintenance of a bank account, but as a financially entropy control measurement. However when the opportunity arises to go sailing, the instant biological response is to drop your life and regular set of desires and pack up your meager possessions and leap from gangplank to swaying lake vessel. However it wasn’t till I got there that I realized how brief and unromantic the voyage would be.

            Though I did get a taste of a larger fantasy when I met our captain; Captain Dave, who was wearing heavy-duty rain gear out in the sunny weather. The captain is a large man, heavily bearded, and constantly imbibing a cheap beer.  He pointed out the local hierocracy and the passing islands, while drinking and teaching a young couple to sail. As I listened to him pontificate about local ass wipes, I looked around our group that was as eclectic as it was unlikely, and imagined a shipwreck scenario with these odd people.  The whole first season wrote it’s self in my mind.

            We swung around Madeline Island and headed back, the sail strained and we flew across the water, all I wanted to do was keep going, get lost out on that freshwater ocean. We could do it, we were diverse and quirky, each fulfilling a very different and entertaining function in the micro social strata. How could we fail?

Later: I had split free of my T.V. cast and filled myself with beer and booze. All dreams of adventure dissolved in my drink, and The night felt wild, I was with now the friends who had missed the boat, who stopped to get high and never made it there on time. We were headed out to sleep in the boat. Every several feet was a flimsy “No Parking” sign. We destroyed every one of them.