|
|
|
coyotes at the gate
Tuesday, September 27 2016
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
This morning Gretchen and I went to our real estate attorney's office in Uptown Kingston to close on a mortgage we'd been trying to get for months so as to pay back her parents for the bridge loan necessary to buy the brick mansion. As you may recall, that mortgage was held up by the structurally-suspect nature of the roof deck. But with that now approved by the Town of Hurley, our mortgage was ready for us once we signed the 15 or 20 documents required. Well, technically it wasn't ready for us; there's now a cooling-off period that meant we wouldn't actually have access to that money until October 3rd.
Very little work happened in the remote workplace today as various people caught flights for Los Angeles. The Organization was having its annual retreat, and those of us working remotely were all being flown out to participate. My flight left from Newburgh at a little after 5:00pm, and I drove to the airport in the Subaru to catch it. I was the only person in security besides TSA employees when I went through it, and I was concerned they might have so little to do that they would give me extra-close scrutiny. Happily, they did not.
I had a glass of wine and New-York-style pretzel in the Euro Café, the one snack shop behind security. It was good to read my various sources of web news and see what appeared to be a meltdown underway for Donald Trump post-debate.
The first leg of my flight took me to Detroit. Along the way, I used Google Maps on my phone (not in airplane mode!) to identify features on the ground, especially the various Finger Lakes and the border area between Michigan and Ontario just north of Detroit.
To get from the terminal I'd landed in to the one I'd be flying out of, I had to walk down a long arched tunnel under a wide taxiway. All along the tunnel, multicolor LED lights had been installed behind translucent panels, and they changed color in time to ambient music. It was probably a little weird for most of the midwestern grass-fed travelers, but I thought it was great.
I took an ambien and drank some booze for the flight to Los Angeles, though I neglected to get my neck pillow out of my bag, so my sleep was a series of brief interludes, some more comfortable than others.
After landing in Los Angeles, I went out to the arrival pickup area and tried to call up an Uber, but it didn't let me get an Uber from anywhere but departures. The Uber I eventually got took me all the way to my destination, which was the closed gate to Griffith Park. The Uber driver wasn't sure he should let me out there, but I said it was okay, that I'd been told to call up to the camp and have someone come down to open the gate and let me in. He drove off, telling me that if there was a problem to just call him back. I sat down at the gate and waited. Before long, coyotes started materializing. They were small and thin, no more than 40 pounds at the largest. They walked as silently as ghosts, sometimes tussling and playing with each other. One of them sat down in the street about thirty feet away and watched me. They weren't afraid of me and I wasn't afraid of them. It felt like two dozen or so walked past as I sat there, though the numbers were probably smaller than that.
Eventually a white truck materialized driven by a park employee. She had me climb into her truck, then she opened the gate and drove me up the hill to the Camp Hollywoodland's mess hall. The place was empty aside for two people: Da, my insomniac boss, and Ja, the head of operations (Da's boss). We sat around for awhile chatting about things like coyotoes while I ate some cold, dry food from big aluminum catering trays. It was all vegan: faux meat and vegetables. Eventually Da showed me to the barracks we'd been assigned. Ca had said that he'd heard our accommodations resembled "a concentration camp," and he wasn't far off. The barracks were long, narrow buildings with many bunk beds one after the other. Bathrooms were common buildings shared between barracks out back. I decided to sleep in the top bunk of my bed, which was probably a bad idea because the bolts were loose and the thing creaked loudly as I ascended and nestled into place. I'd arranged to have bed sheets and blankets, but since I was the last to arrive tonight, the stuff allotted to me had all been taken by others who had arrived earlier. So I had to sleep on a barren mattress, the kind covered with some sort of plastic to keep urine from soaking in.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160927 feedback
previous | next |
