My will to survive was dwindling. I had to make a plan. If I could break it all into baby steps I might be able to pull it off. I could feel the cerebral spinal fluid in the base of my skull thicken from dehydration. The toes on my right foot were mysteriously ice cold- like the hand of death was reaching out for me. At that point I had an out of body experience and out popped my SurvivalSelf. SurvivalSelf shook her head at me in disgust and asked if I was just going to lay there and die. I considered it for a moment and then agreed that if she could get me through this, I'd do almost anything.
SurvivalSelf weighed the necessary steps with the ones sure to nudge me from my pitiful state. If I took a hot bath and put my contacts in, I would accomplish several important objectives: (1) I would thaw out my right foot and increase overall moral, (2) my world would be less blurry and therefore provide a more positive outlook on life and, most importantly, (3) I would then be naked which would force me to make a decision at a major crossroad that would dictate my success: I could either get back into my pajamas and wallow in my self pity and starve to death or I could seize the opportunity to put on some clothes and shoes and get out the door to scavenge the world for food.
SurvivalSelf's plan worked perfectly and I'm now well on my way to surviving the day. It was a risky venture to go out into public under my current state but I was starting to fade and needed to act quickly. My challenge would be indeciveness with potential for a total melt-down in the frozen foods aisle. I stayed focused and put myself in my happy place as I perused the aisles. I had two vital tasks to accomplish: I needed to rehydrate (badly) and I needed somewhat tasty, easy and fulfilling calories. I did ok. I came away with 2 bottles of Propel, a jug of V8 juice, a carton of yogurt, 2 bananas, 2 frozen pizzas, 2 cans of corn beef hash and a box of cherry turnovers from the bakery section. My nausea was building to an unbearable degree and I wondered if perhaps the prednisone was worse than just enduring the poison oak.
It being lunch time when I got home, I popped a pizza into the oven and ate a cherry turnover while I waited. While munching on the fabulous pizza a feeling of peace came over me. Yay! With food and a little more fluid in my system I felt slightly more invigorated with life.
SurvivalSelf said "Good, now go mow your lawn". I kicked her in the ribs, put my pajamas back on, took another dose of prednisone and crawled into bed to sleep off the nausea.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
An Epic Tale of Survival
Yesterday we helped out at a prescribed burn in Happy Camp, CA. We were only going to be there for a few hours to help cut some line and fall some hazard trees. After lunch we got dragged into the burn show and had to haul flaming drip torches (they literally drop flaming pools of fuel on the ground) through tangling blackberry bushes and head high poison oak. It's quite a concept to have to walk with a 35 lb pack, 8 lb tool, and 20 lb drip torch through briar patches. I would throw flame onto the ground at my feet only to become ensnared in the thorn infested bushes and tangled up in their vines. At one point I had a near panic moment when flames around my feet flared up in the dry undergrowth while I twisted and turned to no avail to escape the briar patch's evil clutches. I lunged forward desperately, yanking free of the vines but bringing the thorns with me, deeply embedded in my thigh.
I got a little closer to the road for my next strip of fire and was able to overhear one of the guys on my crew joke that this was an "entrapment waiting to happen" (being entrapped by flames). I couldn't entirely disagree. I had a brief image of being tangled up in barbed wire and being gunned down by enemy sniper fire. I told him not to joke about those things.
Having the limp noodle legs that I do, my captain had mercy on me and put me in charge of the holding crew. The holding crew stands on the road or fireline and makes sure that what the lighters are lighting doesn't get lost and run off up the hillside. We had 10 burners and 4 holders, just me with the radio. The fire started to burn up the moss on the trees and the wind started to blow over our line. I got nervous fairly quickly. Thankfully it wasn't long before my squad leader took over my job and I became just another holder.
It was nearing 7pm and I hadn't eaten since noon so my calories and blood sugar were dropping fast. Those of you who know me know this can be a dire situation at best. I took off my gear and rummaged through my pack for what was left of my sandwich. It was only a few bites (a third to quarter of the sandwich) but it would keep me going for a little while longer. Just as I got my hands on that bad boy, a desperate call came over the radio that our fire had slopped over our containment lines. Bah! I threw my sandwich back in, put my pack on and made my way through the thick smoke to help out. Along the way I caught a few hot coals on the other side of our line and put them out by mixing them with the dirt around it. By then the guys seemed to have their side handled so I went scouting for more little spots to put out.
When things finally quieted down again, I got my sandwich back out of my pack and gobbled it up. Four bites maybe. I pulled out my apple while the lighters walked past me and said they were putting more fire on the ground. I demanded they let me eat my apple first. They refused. I scarfed it down quickly and went back to sucking smoke and looking for spot fires through my watering, stinging eyes. They decided they needed more lighters so I was pulled back into the mess. Several long passes with my drip torch later, they called it off and said we could go home. I dug a granola bar out of my bin in the buggy and stuffed it down as fast as I could and drove the crew back to the station.
We got back to the station at midnight and then I had a 40 minute drive home, dodging deer on the river road like a pinball machine. I got gas in Yreka before the last little stretch to Montague and the attendant there said "Good Morning!". In my mental fog I repeated it back and then continued to mull it over while the gas pumped. Who says that at 1230am? How crude.
I got home a starving, exhausted mess but still had to somehow make food happen and shower since I had trudged through massive bushes of poison oak for hours on end. I popped a lean cuisine into the microwave, showered and then ate it sitting on the lid of the toilet due to my lack of enough energy to eat at the breakfast table. I plopped into bed with my hair soaking wet at 2am.
At 5am it was light enough out to rouse me from my slumber and something resembling a bad hangover hit me like a truck. My head hurt, my eyes were swollen and I felt like vomiting. I went in and out of consciousness until 7:30am when I decided the effort was useless and I would need to get up and continue my calorie consumption.
Since my imaginary friend refused to get out of bed and make me breakfast, I staggered to the kitchen and started a cup of coffee. I opened the refrigerator and thought "What the hell!? I've been robbed!" Well, I hadn't though. We've all been expecting to be gone on a fire and so no one has food in their refrigerators because it will just go bad and rot in there for a couple weeks before we can get home to disinfect everything. All my food was frozen or packaged. Great. So I grabbed my coffee and went back to bed.
This is where my panic set it in. I was all alone, starving, tired and aching and the nearest restaurant (1) was probably not open, (2) probably does not deliver. I considered the food in my cupboards and knew I needed something with a much higher calorie content than what was there. I needed corn beef hash and eggs. Things got desperate so I pulled out another lean cuisine. It has all of 300 calories in it. So I was a tenth of the way there. Wimpering, I crawled back into bed to mull over my increasingly desperate situation.
Then it hit me. Why yes folks, I do have survival skills after all. In my collection of extra stuff for my gear, I remembered I had a single serving packet of spam that I used to carry around and never ate. I could make spam and eggs! And I would be ok! With renewed hope, I pulled the packet of spam out of the box in my closet and went about readying the meal. I opened the packet and realized the spam was not the color it should be. Argh! It wasn't expired but apparently while carrying it around in my gear, the package had become slightly damaged and compromised the safety of the spam.
With the pan already hot and me growing more and more desperate by the second, I cut up some sliced turkey, threw it in the pan and threw two eggs on top. I poured coffee number two.
So here I am, still in dire need of calories but smart enough to know that scarfing down a massive jar of jelly belly's would be a really bad idea. I'm still in my pajamas and it's after 10am. I'm not entirely certain how to handle this situation. It reminds me of the show "The Alaska Experiment" and the part where one of the women gets cabin fever and is basically incapable of getting up and saving her own life by going out and getting food and wood for a fire. Thankfully her husband is there and mans up to handle it. I don't quite have that same luxury. I've been sending out mental pleas like a beacon for batman and no one has shown up at my door with a can of corned beef hash...much less fresh corned beef hash from a restaurant. I discovered a couple rotten potatoes in the bottom of my cupboard and I'm starting to eye the frozen steak sitting out on my counter. It's as solid as a rock. I might have to get in my car and drive the 15 minutes to McDonalds but so far the energy required eludes me. I think I'll go back to bed to conserve energy.
I got a little closer to the road for my next strip of fire and was able to overhear one of the guys on my crew joke that this was an "entrapment waiting to happen" (being entrapped by flames). I couldn't entirely disagree. I had a brief image of being tangled up in barbed wire and being gunned down by enemy sniper fire. I told him not to joke about those things.
Having the limp noodle legs that I do, my captain had mercy on me and put me in charge of the holding crew. The holding crew stands on the road or fireline and makes sure that what the lighters are lighting doesn't get lost and run off up the hillside. We had 10 burners and 4 holders, just me with the radio. The fire started to burn up the moss on the trees and the wind started to blow over our line. I got nervous fairly quickly. Thankfully it wasn't long before my squad leader took over my job and I became just another holder.
It was nearing 7pm and I hadn't eaten since noon so my calories and blood sugar were dropping fast. Those of you who know me know this can be a dire situation at best. I took off my gear and rummaged through my pack for what was left of my sandwich. It was only a few bites (a third to quarter of the sandwich) but it would keep me going for a little while longer. Just as I got my hands on that bad boy, a desperate call came over the radio that our fire had slopped over our containment lines. Bah! I threw my sandwich back in, put my pack on and made my way through the thick smoke to help out. Along the way I caught a few hot coals on the other side of our line and put them out by mixing them with the dirt around it. By then the guys seemed to have their side handled so I went scouting for more little spots to put out.
When things finally quieted down again, I got my sandwich back out of my pack and gobbled it up. Four bites maybe. I pulled out my apple while the lighters walked past me and said they were putting more fire on the ground. I demanded they let me eat my apple first. They refused. I scarfed it down quickly and went back to sucking smoke and looking for spot fires through my watering, stinging eyes. They decided they needed more lighters so I was pulled back into the mess. Several long passes with my drip torch later, they called it off and said we could go home. I dug a granola bar out of my bin in the buggy and stuffed it down as fast as I could and drove the crew back to the station.
We got back to the station at midnight and then I had a 40 minute drive home, dodging deer on the river road like a pinball machine. I got gas in Yreka before the last little stretch to Montague and the attendant there said "Good Morning!". In my mental fog I repeated it back and then continued to mull it over while the gas pumped. Who says that at 1230am? How crude.
I got home a starving, exhausted mess but still had to somehow make food happen and shower since I had trudged through massive bushes of poison oak for hours on end. I popped a lean cuisine into the microwave, showered and then ate it sitting on the lid of the toilet due to my lack of enough energy to eat at the breakfast table. I plopped into bed with my hair soaking wet at 2am.
At 5am it was light enough out to rouse me from my slumber and something resembling a bad hangover hit me like a truck. My head hurt, my eyes were swollen and I felt like vomiting. I went in and out of consciousness until 7:30am when I decided the effort was useless and I would need to get up and continue my calorie consumption.
Since my imaginary friend refused to get out of bed and make me breakfast, I staggered to the kitchen and started a cup of coffee. I opened the refrigerator and thought "What the hell!? I've been robbed!" Well, I hadn't though. We've all been expecting to be gone on a fire and so no one has food in their refrigerators because it will just go bad and rot in there for a couple weeks before we can get home to disinfect everything. All my food was frozen or packaged. Great. So I grabbed my coffee and went back to bed.
This is where my panic set it in. I was all alone, starving, tired and aching and the nearest restaurant (1) was probably not open, (2) probably does not deliver. I considered the food in my cupboards and knew I needed something with a much higher calorie content than what was there. I needed corn beef hash and eggs. Things got desperate so I pulled out another lean cuisine. It has all of 300 calories in it. So I was a tenth of the way there. Wimpering, I crawled back into bed to mull over my increasingly desperate situation.
Then it hit me. Why yes folks, I do have survival skills after all. In my collection of extra stuff for my gear, I remembered I had a single serving packet of spam that I used to carry around and never ate. I could make spam and eggs! And I would be ok! With renewed hope, I pulled the packet of spam out of the box in my closet and went about readying the meal. I opened the packet and realized the spam was not the color it should be. Argh! It wasn't expired but apparently while carrying it around in my gear, the package had become slightly damaged and compromised the safety of the spam.
With the pan already hot and me growing more and more desperate by the second, I cut up some sliced turkey, threw it in the pan and threw two eggs on top. I poured coffee number two.
So here I am, still in dire need of calories but smart enough to know that scarfing down a massive jar of jelly belly's would be a really bad idea. I'm still in my pajamas and it's after 10am. I'm not entirely certain how to handle this situation. It reminds me of the show "The Alaska Experiment" and the part where one of the women gets cabin fever and is basically incapable of getting up and saving her own life by going out and getting food and wood for a fire. Thankfully her husband is there and mans up to handle it. I don't quite have that same luxury. I've been sending out mental pleas like a beacon for batman and no one has shown up at my door with a can of corned beef hash...much less fresh corned beef hash from a restaurant. I discovered a couple rotten potatoes in the bottom of my cupboard and I'm starting to eye the frozen steak sitting out on my counter. It's as solid as a rock. I might have to get in my car and drive the 15 minutes to McDonalds but so far the energy required eludes me. I think I'll go back to bed to conserve energy.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Flossing my toes
It's finally Friday and I just finished shoving dental floss up underneath an ingrown toenail. Usually it's my big toes that get the ingrown nails and I can shove tiny bits of cotton up under the nail to encourage it to grow away from the toe. I couldn't fathom getting cotton up under my third toenail so I figured I'd just pick at it everyday. Internet to the rescue- hey, dental floss works too! It took me a minute or two to figure out how exactly to get dental floss under my toenail and to get it to stay, but with a curved fingernail tool and a little bit of guts, I've managed to get it up under there, put neosporin in it and bandaged it up.
Summer has evolved from shorts and sandals to long pants and heavy boots. For some reason my boots don't seem to fit this year. Either the leather got too cold and shrunk (it does that you know) or my feet are starting to collapse and flatten out, thus making them longer. I suppose fire season is not a good time to figure this out. So my toe is red and angry, it's been flossed and bandaged and I'm thinking I'll need to buy a pair of boot stretchers. They're good to have on assignment anyway being as feet swell at night and boots shrink in the cold night air. Makes for a little taste of hell at 5am. I guess it's not so much that feet swell at night, it's more like they try to swell during the day but can't actually do so until you take off the tight leather boots and give them room. Whatever the case is, boots don't fit well in the morning. Ask any wildland firefighter.
Given my current predicament, I've decided to put out an ad for some hired help. Wanted: gardener/maid/ingrown toenail specialist who is also fairly comfortable painting houses, sanding decks and searching a human body for ticks. Fluent in massage a plus. Pay is meager- room and board plus a smidgeon of food. If you can grow enough vegetables for the both of us, you can eat that too. Otherwise I might be able to smuggle home a packet of jalapeno cheese from an MRE.
Summer has evolved from shorts and sandals to long pants and heavy boots. For some reason my boots don't seem to fit this year. Either the leather got too cold and shrunk (it does that you know) or my feet are starting to collapse and flatten out, thus making them longer. I suppose fire season is not a good time to figure this out. So my toe is red and angry, it's been flossed and bandaged and I'm thinking I'll need to buy a pair of boot stretchers. They're good to have on assignment anyway being as feet swell at night and boots shrink in the cold night air. Makes for a little taste of hell at 5am. I guess it's not so much that feet swell at night, it's more like they try to swell during the day but can't actually do so until you take off the tight leather boots and give them room. Whatever the case is, boots don't fit well in the morning. Ask any wildland firefighter.
Given my current predicament, I've decided to put out an ad for some hired help. Wanted: gardener/maid/ingrown toenail specialist who is also fairly comfortable painting houses, sanding decks and searching a human body for ticks. Fluent in massage a plus. Pay is meager- room and board plus a smidgeon of food. If you can grow enough vegetables for the both of us, you can eat that too. Otherwise I might be able to smuggle home a packet of jalapeno cheese from an MRE.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Saddle Sore
The sun was shining on the beautiful town of Montague when I decided to suit up and go for a 15 mile bicycle ride around the stunning green pastures that lay surrounded by towering mountains that were still topped off with snow. I was slightly put off by how large the tight shorts made my muffin top look but comforted myself knowing that bike shorts make most muffin tops larger than life.
Three miles out of town I heard a snap and my butt slid to the left. I looked down to see my saddle disconnected from the seat frame (no, not the post). I had a moment of panic as I realized my saddle was now free and my feet were both locked into the pedals. Nice. I calmed myself and sat back onto the saddle and managed to twist a foot out and actually (miraculously) lean to the side of my loose foot.
I chided myself thinking that my muffin top had actually caused the collapse, but on closer inspection decided that maybe the saddle was just never all that together anyway. It's got a steel frame that the pad sits on and the tongue of it was never quite in the pad, but the back spoke thingies were. That explains a lot. I considered the possibility of riding back without the saddle and then pictured a horrible fate similar to that of Frida Kahlo (I won't explain, look it up if you don't know). I managed to rig it back together but decided I should probably turn around to avoid further trouble 5 miles out of town.
I've put some thought and effort into it and I'm not quite sure it's fixable. I'm sure in theory it is, but I can't see a way to get all three ends into their proper place without maming myself. I've already crushed a finger and I'm covered in bicycle grease. Saddles aren't cheap, at least not the good ones. And any ride over 5 miles deserves a good saddle. I think this is just a sign that I should stay in my pj's for the rest of the day.
Three miles out of town I heard a snap and my butt slid to the left. I looked down to see my saddle disconnected from the seat frame (no, not the post). I had a moment of panic as I realized my saddle was now free and my feet were both locked into the pedals. Nice. I calmed myself and sat back onto the saddle and managed to twist a foot out and actually (miraculously) lean to the side of my loose foot.
I chided myself thinking that my muffin top had actually caused the collapse, but on closer inspection decided that maybe the saddle was just never all that together anyway. It's got a steel frame that the pad sits on and the tongue of it was never quite in the pad, but the back spoke thingies were. That explains a lot. I considered the possibility of riding back without the saddle and then pictured a horrible fate similar to that of Frida Kahlo (I won't explain, look it up if you don't know). I managed to rig it back together but decided I should probably turn around to avoid further trouble 5 miles out of town.
I've put some thought and effort into it and I'm not quite sure it's fixable. I'm sure in theory it is, but I can't see a way to get all three ends into their proper place without maming myself. I've already crushed a finger and I'm covered in bicycle grease. Saddles aren't cheap, at least not the good ones. And any ride over 5 miles deserves a good saddle. I think this is just a sign that I should stay in my pj's for the rest of the day.
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