We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post to inform you that due to medical testing at Stanford Medical Center, the next installment of our crazy 16-week adventure will be postponed until next week. I sincerely apologize for the delay, and hope you enjoy a rather cute and amusing but totally true side tangent about raccoons.
Yes, I said raccoons. You know, those totally cute but supposedly dangerous creatures everyone warns you about: The ones with the black spots over their eyes that kind of look like little masks, and the striped tails. The creatures who are known for their thievery and mischief. So at this point, you’re probably expecting some huge horror story about how this adorable little critter broke into our tent and held us knifepoint while making scary high-pitched skittering noises and demanding we hand over all of our shiny stuff. However, first off, raccoons don’t carry knives; second, this is not that kind of story.
Our story takes places at the ass end of midnight at the campground at Lake Casitas, somewhere between and off to the side of Ventura and Ojai. I should warn you that this, my friend, was finals week, and somehow we have so far managed to neither die nor kill ourselves trying. We had just survived a crazy night of redneck fireworks, or perhaps it was a late-night war reenactment? To this day we still have no clue. All we know is that the night previous, we had checked in much later in the evening than usual and were thus forced to set our tent up at midnight while off in the distance we could hear what can only be described as loud booms like the kind you hear in those action-packed movies where everything is going to hell in a hand basket as multiple explosions are happening onscreen while our main characters are being chased by guys with machine guns; only, for us it was an eerily still and pitch-black night and we are surrounded by darkness and creepy trees right up until we were suddenly surrounded by the sounds of a battlefield and we-didn’t-even-want-to-know-what-else. It was epic, and yes, I totally thought we were going to die. Brendan was strangely calm after we had gotten the tent set up and we were so-not-safely in bed, and kept mumbling at me to “just go to sleep already!” I suspect he’s not human; at least not when he’s tired.
This was thankfully not that night but the next, and somehow we had survived. I think, if my memory is correct, that the next morning we overheard someone in a different campsite complain about people throwing shotgun shells into the fire? Or was it an accident? Seriously though, who throws shotgun shells into a fire? Like, is this a real thing? Do people really do this? Maybe they thought there were doves in the area. (Read our previous exciting post for more about doves!)
Anyways, back to the Raccoons! On this particular night, having survived a night of war and a day of working on epic finals-week projects and endless mind-numbing editing sessions, I found myself continuing to work far into the night with two fast approaching deadlines, so tired I thought I would cry. So there I am, this half-awake half-alive husk of human being trying to write my final term papers by the faint light of a dying camp lantern while all around me the night has settled into to a shade of murky bluish-black save for the glow of my laptop, which I had plugged into my Vagabond (for those of who you don’t know what this is: a Vagabond is a small portable power pack which is used to power photo strobes in field, which is not really designed for continuous power drains like the modeling lights on said strobes) which I am totally abusing since we had literally no power. At some point I had lost all track of time and where I was in my assignment. As I struggled to see anything at all around me to help me concentrate enough to finish my paper, I turned up the dying lantern in the vain hope of shedding just an ounce more light. In the somewhat brighter light, I watch as out from under the table I’d been working at climbs this half-awake, half-alive raccoon, looking every bit as exhausted as I felt. The raccoon saunters on up to me from under the table, and there he sat; just staring at me with this look on his face that said, “Dude, What the Fuck? I was sleeping!”
There he was, literally not even two feet away, staring at me with That Look. For anyone who has accidentally woken a younger sibling or maybe a roommate, you know this look. It’s a mixture of hurt, and “Dude, I thought we were cool” with a dash of “you, sir, are an asshole. I was perfectly happy and asleep, and now I am awake. You suck. May your entire family catch rabies.” Okay, maybe not so much with the rabies if it’s a roommate hopefully, but you get the idea.
And, just like that, he wandered sluggishly off into the woods, shaking his head as he went, leaving me with the dawning realization that I have just spent the last several hours with a sleeping raccoon curled up at my feet like some strange wild housecat.
Well, that just happened.
Until next time! See you Tuesday with the next installment of our 16-week crazy camping adventure (for real this time!) with more car shenanigans and the moment we met the two most amazing people in the history of ever. I promise you, this will be awesome.