Chapter 20: There and Back Again

 

Chapter 20: There and Back Again

As we stood above, at the mouth of a cave, admiring the secret dell of Paradise Canyon, three people of indeterminate gender, wearing something like gowns made out of patterned clouds fashioned into a puffy garment (they looked comfortable!) climbed up undulating stone stairs towards us. We climbed down to meet them.

"Welcoom." One of them said with a strong, twisty accent I did not recognize, and handed Oliver a lightly steaming, comically oversized goblet. He took a sip. Then he handed it over to me with two hands. I took a sip too. It tasted like carrots and mushrooms, and then butterscotch and something more vanilla than vanilla and then

It was gone.

We were standing on a rough, Paradise Canyon mesa overlooking the great unpopulated wilderness vista and, down below, the Bluestone River. My hands were empty. Oliver and I were alone. The secret valley was gone. All the magic was gone.

"Shoot." Oliver said.

"What happened?" I asked.

Oliver put a finger to his lips, thinking. "It was a hallucination?" He ventured halfheartedly.

I cocked my head at him and side-eyed him.

"No." He said. "And there was someone I wanted you to talk to there." He considered it again. "I know! Take out the meteor."

I took it out. It was in my pocket. I tried to hand it to him.

"No. Don't." He said sharply. "Hold it in this hand and put your palm face up." Oliver said lifting my free hand up. "Now place the meteor over your palm."

I did that.

"Close your eyes, and put the meteorite on your palm."

I did that.

"Slowly curl your fingers over it while carefully picturing the village in the dell. Remember the smell of carrots and thyme?"

"No." I answered. "It smelled like lemon and vanilla."

"Yes, good! Though odd." Oliver added. "What color was the smoke in the chimneys?"

I had a strange, momentary feeling just under my ribs, almost like my stomach rumbling or a hand passing through. "Uh." I answered, distracted. "Color? Orange. And pink, piglet pink. Blue. A burnt yellow, like ochre, honey?"

"Can you see the three people we met?"

"Yes? Those long, cute, fuzzy coats?"

"Good." Oliver said. "Open your hand back up, then your eyes."

I opened my eyes. 

I was in a beautiful wood on a windy summer day. Winnie the Pooh and Piglet were standing in front of me. Pooh said "Hello." and Piglet kind of ducked back behind him shyly. Eeyore circled round himself about 15 feet back of them and then toppled over.

"Close your eyes!" Oliver called out with so much urgency that I did. He put his hand over my eyes. "Okay." He said. "So, open your hand first, then your eyes, but picture the valley from before."

I did. I pictured the valley and the chimneys and the little river as well as I could. I thought I could smell the lemon candy again.

"Oh, so good!" Cried Oliver. "Open your eyes now."

And we were back!

Chapter 19: The... Dell

 

Chapter 19: The... Dell

Yes. We disappeared into the back wall of a cave in Paradise Canyon.

"You can see how it's just a trick of the light Gov'nor." Said Oliver as we passed through a dark wall of solid stone.

"I have found that when people perform fake magic they lie and say it is real magic, but when people do real magic they say it is fake magic." I replied.  I slapped the polished stone behind us that we had just walked through for emphasis and proof. It made a noise (and hurt my hand).

"Er, it's a one way trick of the light?" Oliver suggested.

"Admit you're some sort of rabbit god." I demanded.

"Just enjoy the moment." Oliver said, grinning toothily.

So I did. I looked around. "We're in a cave?" I suggested.

"Yes." Oliver replied. "But it's facing the other way." He said this like it was important.

"It looks a lot like the cave we were just in." I said.

"Yes. But it's facing the other way." Clearly I wasn't getting the pertinent point.

So we walked out of the cave and then I got it.

Looking out the mouth of the cave there was a dell. It was still part of the Paradise Canyon, but also apart from it. It had trees in it for one thing, graceful, beautiful trees, and it was riven deeply into the landscape, completely sealed from the rest of the canyon by towering walls of stone on all sides. A small, open river, a brilliant aquamarine, ran through the whole of the valley, lined by the swooping trees, currently full of purple flowers. And then, built up, in rising steps away from the river toward one of the looming stone walls, was something like a village. It didn't seem carved of stone so much as poured from it, a little like the work of Gaudi, with everything curved and naturalistic. Eccentric towers rose from among the widely varying levels of the buildings, sometimes ornamental, sometimes emerging into chimneys with colored smokes pouring out of them, and occasionally defying the heights with a high room looking out over the riven dell. 

I smelled candied lemon and vanilla. A bulbous room on top of one of the towers was wrapped round in unequal circular holes and a great flow of something like firework sparks poured out of them at random.

"Don't eat anything while you're here, but you can drink whatever." Oliver said.

"Oh." I said.

Wait, water pictures?

 

One might think that my tithe of one water a picture a day in my Agua Fria story would satisfy me. But no. I can't write those fast enough for all the water pictures I have! And those are all old pictures. Right now it keeps snowing and raining and melting and everyday, in every stream, in the run off and glory of early Spring, there is something new.

So I have a lot of water pictures.

I am neither fishing for compliments nor insults here when I say that my water pictures are rarely commented upon by anyone who sees them, but they are always so engaging to me that I never feel bad about it. Yes, I get super excited about a coyote picture, or a turkey picture turning out especially well, and someone saying "You took that?", but water pictures are like getting to work with my own personal, private alchemy. They're like throwing leaves into a rainbow and seeing what comes out.

It's not hard to find water around here, and I take hundreds of photographs, yet somehow every picture is a new invention I didn't exactly come up with, but that I, by all the weird rules, get the credit for.

Down at the creeks I photograph wild guesses, delighted at the excuse to join the world of the stream on its own, intimate level.  I gather them all up in their hundreds. Then I take the pictures back to my laboratory. Often they are faded and muddy, random, greyish, and unfocused. But it doesn't matter. I pick one, small, hopeful lump out of the bunch and I cook it down until I can smell the freshness of the stream again, maple wood, rotting leaves, cold ice, and the smell of wild birds.

I slowly heat the photo until it thins and clarifies, until it breaks apart a little. I add a thick pinch of darkness and stir. I throw in dried, powdered algae- brilliant green, crushed daffodil pedals of darkened yellows, autumn leaves preserved by winter snow to hold their rust and umber. I stir and stir and sometimes nothing happens. But sometimes, keeping at it, it thickens! If it does I choose my moment where it comes together, and I pour it onto the acetate and spread it as thin as I can with a silicone spatula on my kitchen counter. 

I cool it. 

I cut it square.

I peel it carefully up, hoping it doesn't tear.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I hold it to the window and...

Only then do I know.

Chapter 18: Porcupine Creek

 

Chapter 18: Porcupine Creek

We had worked our way around into Porcupine Creek. The trail was relatively friendly down to it. First it climbed along up the broken cliffsides, moving straight away from the river, and then it wound down in careful switchbacks to a wide open section of the creek- a quiet valley where the stream meandered unfettered for awhile.  Below this point the creek tumbled over a 50 foot fall and disappeared into a narrow crevasse we could now happily avoid. 

We decided to camp here because it was one of the most friendly spots we had seen in a week of hiking. Paradise Canyon's vistas were astonishing all along, the scenery breathtaking, and the landscape barren, wild, oversized and astonishing. But it gave everything a sense of awed formality, like we were endlessly in a Cathedral, and no matter our religion it would still be appropriate to be ever respectful.

Porcupine Creek, spread out as it was where we were, gave protection and oasis to a richer plant life than we had been seeing, from actual grasses to thin stands of cottonwood trees. It was a pretty place, lovely really, open enough for some sun and sky, but contained to a modest size by low, broken blue cliffs, so that we were not overwhelmed and enthralled by miraculous vistas. We were so taken with the spot that it was the earliest we had made camp in ages- with the sun still high in the sky, and with the energy for once to do more than just put up the tent and eat food out of bags.

Oliver went to his beloved foraging, and we had a tasty stew that night- something I didn't know I missed so much. There were tiny kernels of corn in it! I used obsessive care in picking out my one stream photo for the day, and my journal entry was a long one, covering many things I could not be bothered to discuss from the past week. Like the evening when a fox wandered into our camp, so closely and with such presence that I thought it would speak to us. It did not. It merely sniffed around cautiously. I marked that it seemed to show a special interest in Oliver, but if there was any ancient enmity there I sure couldn't tell it from Oliver, who grinned with delight at our visitor.

We had also seen, over the past week, regular large flocks of dark birds flying overhead. Oliver always had us stop and rest for a bit when we spotted them. I had just been noting these in my journal entry, sitting on a stone over Porcupine Creek, when the biggest flock of all, low enough now that I could hear the roaring of their hard beating wings, began to fly over. At first I didn't realize just how enormous this particular flock was, but as it passed overhead it thickened until it seemed to darken the sky, a cloud of gray birds briefly covering our valley completely, from one canyon wall to the other.

And then they were gone.

"Did you see that?" I asked Oliver when he came back a while later with a wet cloth bag stuffed with weird and mysterious weeds and roots.

Oliver nodded.

"Do you know what they were?"

"Passenger Pigeons." He said. "It's not great, but probably inevitable. At least I know where we are now Guv', and," He raised his eyebrows over a twinkle in his eyes. "What we can do about it."

I sighed. It was going to be one of these inscrutable conversations. Okay. "So." I said. "Where are we?"

"The mid 1800's?" Oliver replied.

I looked around and shrugged. "I guess it looks as much like the mid 1800's as anything else." I said.

"That's the spirit!" Oliver replied happily.

The next morning we found our way out of the canyon almost as easily as the way in, though there was a short, nerve-wracking section we had to climb. At one point, up on the mesas again, Oliver was unusually keen to leave the main trail for something more like an animal track that led up to the base of the next set of cliffs of the Canyon. "I'd really like to get up there." He said pointing some vague, shadowy area out ahead.

"Have you been here before?" I asked with a sudden intuition, even though he had said before he hadn't.

He scrunched his face like there wasn't a clear answer. "Sort of?" He said.

The animal track disappeared into nothing, as they so often do, and now we were wayfinding across rocky, open country. But now I was equally interested because the cliffs we were angling up towards appeared to be riddled with caves. "Maybe we should leave our packs and explore up there." I suggested. I have always been fascinated by caves.

"Let's get closer." Oliver said. "There might be a way through and we'll wish we didn't have to go back for them.

So we struggled up to a worn ledge below the caves keeping our packs on. Most of these caves were really just shallow indents in the cliff. There were no exciting pictograph or ruins here. At best it might be a good place to get out of the worst of a rain, but it wasn't raining.

Then we found something deeper. Oliver was leading as if he was looking for something. "C'mon." He said, and I followed him in.

It wasn't that much deeper. It was a great, scooped out hollow in the cliff, with dark, smooth walls, and full of crumbled stone and boulders at the bottom. The back of the cave was maybe 75 feet in, and we climbed the boulders up to reach the back wall of the cave. The view out of the frame of the cave to the canyon below was especially inspiring, but Oliver was completely absorbed in some private search of his own.  "I'm almost sure this is it." He muttered, feeling along the rock face of the back of the cave.

"Can we take off our packs?" I asked. This lark didn't seem to be going anywhere and the boulder hopping was tricky with 50 pounds on my back.

"Hang with me there just a titch m.... Ahh!" He cried. And I looked up as he was feeling along the back wall of the cave.

His hand disappeared into the stone.

Goodbye to ice

As the custodian for Saint Minneapolis Weather Entertainment for the Internet, I am leery of jumping the gun and announcing:

WE ARE DONE WITH THE ICE FOR THIS YEAR! 

But oops. I think I just did. 

And I'm not saying that we are beyond a bit of wet snow, or freezing rain, or a cold night that crusts the edges of the local streams, but as for me taking grand pictures of frozen waterfalls, or great jagged hanging icicles, or mottled, multi-colored frozen walls of water, yeah. I think it's safe to call it a season.

And so here are my last ice pictures for Winter 21/22. I hope they will tide you over.

Chapter 17: Everyday Miracles

 

Chapter 17: Everyday Miracles

At some point the Agua Fria Trail joined up with the mighty Bluestone River. Miserably the river and trail here ran right next to a road for several miles. But when they finally departed from the highway into their wilderness of stone it was a special relief and celebration. We had some gorp! And salami! Our fancy food was fast disappearing but I think we had a half-crushed package of Kit Kats too. We might then have played some gin, or we might have been over it. The gin obsession tended to reemerge in fits. 

And then, of course we walked. After camping on the river the first night we hiked possibly our longest day- surely far more than 20 miles, but as we've discussed I was not a good judge of distances covered. On some level we were eager to get into Paradise Canyon, one of the 11 Wonders of the World, but to be fair I just used any excuse I could to motivate us to keep moving along. Moving along was never easy, but sometimes it was way easier than others, and I was learning to grab those opportunities when I could.

The truth was that we only gradually, step by step, entered Paradise Canyon. It sort of grew up around us as we marched on, and there was no single point where we could say "Here we are!". A short wall of  that dense, pale blue stone would rise on the side of our narrow trail, and then recede. Or a grand vista of increasingly imposing buttresses would briefly and dramatically appear before disappearing behind (slightly) more mundane local scenery. Officially there was a specific point at which we crossed the border into Paradise Canyon National Park, but it did not appear to be marked anywhere where we ever saw it.

Eventually, the Canyon was not a question and was unmistakable. Imposing stone cliffs of the most dense and colorful blue rock I had ever seen rose up all about us. The trail, unable to follow the river in its deepening chasm, climbed out to work along various mesas that broke up the great descending depth of the wilderness in the much photographed "Steps of the gods". And so now we ever climbed and descended again, the path winding its way through rock strewn rubble, along lush cave fronts, and through shattered landscapes that felt too big for our planet. The great challenges in our hiking became the deeply slotted streams running down to join the Bluestone river. Some of these required complicated winding and climbing and navigating to find a way down to, only to leave us immediately looking for the way out the other side. These amazing slot canyons would have been astonishing to explore, but we rarely dared to take time for that, usually only doing so when forced to travel miles up them (or down them) (or up them and then down them) to find a path or a likely route out again.

One of these slot canyons, surely more than a hundred feet deep, was so astonishingly narrow that we could, at a carefully chosen spot, leap over it! It was, unfortunately, too great a distance to do this lightly. We first tested how far we could safely jump. Then I jumped over and we roped our packs across before Oliver came across. It should surprise no one reading this account that Oliver was an excellent jumper, and if not for me probably could have just hopped over with his pack on. Although even he was queasy about the great heights here. Jumping over was terrifying, but it was still far better than what it usually took to cross one of these slot canyons normally, so it was a shame we only ever found one of these narrow enough (for me).

One dusk, camped out on a mesa up over a commanding view of the river, I came into the tent and Oliver had his hands cupped over something he appeared to be talking to. "Don't worry, Guv'nor" He said, looking up over his shoulder. "I know you don't like spiders so I'm just taking her outside."

I'm extremely arachnophobic, so I backed far away while he carried the spider, IN HIS BARE HANDS, to a fairly distant spot to release it. When he came back he was in a sober frame of mind. "I need to ask you a favor." He said.

"What's that?"

"Well." He said, uncharacteristically hesitant. "You know I'm going to have to bow out of the hike a bit after the next town?"

The thought of it made me sick with anxiousness. But I said "Of course. Whenever you want. Is this going to be about how I have to promise to go the whole way?"

"No, no. I know you already swore to that." (Did I? I wondered). "It's that I realize you're pretty scared of spiders and, could you make sure you don't kill any for awhile?"

I sort of frowned.

"I mean, if there's one in the tent or something I'll make sure to get it out, no questions asked."

I don't enjoy killing spiders. I'm just not going to be able to sleep with one somewhere in the tent with me. 

So I negotiate with Oliver. "No matter what?" I ask. "Even if it's two in the morning and we can't find it? Even if I just think I saw one or felt one?"

"Yes." He said emphatically. "You kill no spiders and I will be your utterly faithful spider bodyguard."

"And after you're gone?" I asked. My voice might have wavered slightly.

"Just keep it going as long as you can. That's all I ask."

"Okay. Deal." We shook hands.

For the first split second his hand felt like a small, furry paw, but before I could barely register it, it was simply a hand.

Oliver looked at me and grinned.

The telling question

 

I am, alas, unable to attend my library's half day, spring version of In Service Day. It's not that I refuse outright to attend In Service Days, merely that everything has to happen just perfectly for me to be there. A twinge in my back or the back of my throat, too many misshelved books in non fiction, or a proposed breakout session topic that offends my delicate sensibilities are each on their own enough for me to be unable to attend. But the eliminating trigger this time is the more mundane fact that it is not my normal day to work and I see no advantage in altering my schedule.

As I write about this it is the day before In Service Day. The main discussion among my colleagues in preparation is about how our new library director will be fielding anonymous questions from the audience. One co-worker asked me for a suggestion, and though terrible things occurred to me, I knew they would bear no fruit. Despite knowing just about nothing regarding this person, anyone able to have a meteoric professional rise to the director at such a young age (our new director is not yet 40!) is surely able to provide a non informative, politic answer to any challenging question that we could think of.

And yet as discussions continued towards the end of the day, I was asked again, by others, if I had any questions for our new director. Clearly something telling was wanted. And then, finally, at the last minute, inspiration hit!

"Yes," I said. "Ask him: 

"What do you have against the Jews?""

Chapter 16: With Loot, Back to Wilderness

 

Chapter 16: With Loot, Back to Wilderness

Oliver and I fled the town of Picog like fugitives. This was a reflection of the wary attention the town held towards us; two profoundly scruffy kids with large, battered backpacks. I felt suspicious eyes on us the whole time we were in town. And I felt homeless and vulnerable there, a feeling that gloriously faded with each step we took away from the village.

If they could only have seen our pool toy and root vegetables they would have known how pure our hearts were.

I don't think Oliver shared my feelings, or noticed any of the wary stares of Picog, as his reflective comments all tended to be like "Did you see how many flavors of Doritos they had?!!"

"Um. Let's see." I answered, and began ostentatiously reading off the bags tied to his pack, "Taco, Nacho Cheese, Ranch, Radish. Holy shit! There's a Radish Doritos?" I asked. "This can't be!"

"I know. So cool." Oliver chuckled. "Check out the carrot flavor under it. I can't wait to try it."

I literally rubbed my eyes to try to get them to work properly. They were stuck.

We went as far as we could bear and yet feel like we were safely lost in the rangeland beyond civilization, and there we made camp. We ate ourselves nearly ill on assorted junk food, eating an entire box of Lucky Charms to use up our quart of milk that would only be good that day. For dessert we ate Kit Kats and, of course, Doritos. The radish ones were disgusting, but the carrot ones were strangely delicious. I might have liked them even more than Oliver did. He felt they could have been more carroty.

The next section of the Agua Fria Trail was possibly its most famous. It was also, due to its wildness, the longest distance between resupply points. In my planning I had allowed for 26 days to travel the distance between Picog and Kohlrabi. Kohlrabi was a proper tourist town, the gateway to three National Parks, and absolutely certain to have pizza. So we had something to aim for. But first we had to pass through some of the most spectacular canyon wilderness on the planet.

Unfortunately to get to the most spectacular canyon wilderness we had at least another three days of skirting civilization. We even had two more stretches along County roads. On the plus side this kind of hiking was pretty straight forward and a good way to get a lot of miles under our shoelaces. And much of it was still pretty. We went through an old ghost town with lonesome washed out store fronts. We met several cows and once even a very nice farmer who we talked with for awhile. He was very interested in our long hike, and as I told him about it I didn't feel entirely like a liar when I spoke confidently of sticking with it. Maybe I would do the whole thing after all. My feelings about that seemed to change every day.

My journals from these days show a curious plenitude of animals we saw in this half wild country. We saw hawks, vultures, snakes, deer, a skunk, rabbits (of course), three coyotes all at once, and a huge, fantastic tortoise. Oliver was weird about the tortoise. "Don't talk to the tortoise." He said, pulling me away from it.

Okay.

Often when I think of Oliver I think of this time, and how, having supper in the evening one of us would usually manage to pull out some secreted surprise delicacy we got on the sly in town. It was usually like a candy bar, or a pop tart, or something, but once Oliver pulled out a handful of beautiful looking plump mushrooms.

"Where on earth did you get those?" I asked.

"Remember that farmer we talked to? He passed them onto me." Oliver said grinning, borrowing a scene from The Lord of the Rings again.

"Okay Sam." I said. 

But mushrooms are mushrooms, and we even still had some butter from town. When we fried them in it, with wild sage and wild garlic, those mushrooms, wherever they came from, were incredible.

Random samples

 

In my effort to occasionally keep you appraised of my photographic shenanigans, and to occasionally poke holes in my long "Agua Fria" episodic story box, so it can breathe, I have fallen into the pattern of showing you pictures a couple of times a week. But as I set down to show you pictures today I don't actually know what I have in my pile. So let's just stick our hand in and see what we pull out, okay?

Okay.

So, first we have a picture from the back room of my library, taken near the end of the giant MACHINE. It's probably the best picture I have for today, as I got the trickery right, so it has a lot of verisimilitude. 

I'm just crazy about verisimilitude, but didn't know until just now about that first "i" in it! Of course, there wasn't really a bat flying around in the back room, but it has happened, and one of my co-workers was once in the elevator with a bat!

Next we have some... girders. This is from the underside of a railroad bridge over the Mississippi and I suppose I fancy it because it feels like some kind of Life Magazine picture from the thirties or forties.

Here is a creek picture from the height of Spring runoff, run through one of my favorite photo filters. This creek is already barely a trickle again. The Spring runoff goes by fast!

I'm sorry. I can't really explain why I spent ages putting a cat calendar cat into a Van Gogh painting. But I thought I should keep you up to date.

I'm not sure I have any better explanation why I put a yawning Calvin here, but at least it doesn't leave me puzzled.

And finally these figures are from a book about Partisans in WWII, put into something from Versailles, maybe? Perhaps it all has something to do with Ukraine on my mind?

Chapter 15: Resupply

Chapter 15: Resupply

Our extra mileage wasn't totally lost. The junction that told us we'd come miles too far was a spur trail that turned into a dirt road leading to a final two miles back along the highway to the town we were heading to all along. So yes, we went six miles too far but were fortunately able to loop back around instead of doubling back- maybe traveling eight miles altogether extra instead of 12. And so by noon we were in the very small, long-awaited, country town of Picog (pronounced "pie, cog").

If I were alone I would have been stressed out for days about going into town and having to interact with people. I would have felt self-conscious and uncomfortable. I would have been nervous about everything I had to do, and eager to do it as quickly as possible. But with a partner, with Oliver, it was an occasion.

The town of Picog had a post office, some kind of stone, city building that was maybe not open in any way anymore, a small antique store, a hardware/outdoor store, a ranger outpost, and a small grocery store that was more like a full-featured convenience store. There was no pizza.

There was no pizza!

We sat on a curb in front of a tiny, defunct gas station, stunned and heartbroken, and said absolutely nothing for 20 minutes.

"C'mon." I said. "Let's go get my package at the post office."

My box was there, which, admittedly, was a relief to me. We took it outside and opened it up. There were batteries, candles, The Sirens of Titan paperback, a Surely you're Joking Mr. Feynman paperback, a pair of socks, a nauseating amount of salami, a thick package of toasted seaweed, and bag after bag of more gorp. In complete, pure, and unequivocal misery I was staring at it thinking that the most foolish mistake I had ever made in my life was planning a 2,700 mile hike based on the same miserable food over and over: Seaweed, dry salami, and, albeit with some variations in construction, bag after bag after bag after bag after bag after bag of gorp. I felt sick at the sight of it.

And then an equally depressed Oliver leaned in to see what was in my box, and...

Absolutely lit the hell up!

"YOU GOT MORE GORP!" He cried out like this was a million times better than any pizza could have ever been. "Oh my god!" He pulled out just one of the several heavy Ziploc bags. "This one has M and M's!" There were tears in his eyes. Rifling through the bags he gasped, "They're all different!" Then his voice became hushed with amazement. "Guv'nor. Cor. This one has." Then his voice became almost inaudible in its awe "Cashews."

And then he burst into tears.

So after that I didn't feel quite as bad about the whole thing.

"Let's go see what they've got at that grocery store." I said after a bit.

The grocery store was not terrible. In fact, after the shock of no pizza I was starting to adjust to having all that extra pizza money to blow in the grocery store, and then some. First, we bought two cokes out of the cooler and took them outside to guzzle. As I write this now I haven't had a coke in years probably, and I don't miss it, but my god, back then, that blast of cold, and the sharp sugar when I was half-starved and dehydrated was probably one of the great culinary events of my life.

Sitting outside we carefully planned our grocery store trip like an assault on Smaug's treasure. I gave us each $30 and we agreed on the instructions that both basically came from me:

1. Nothing too heavy.

2. Nothing that reproduced the contents in the gorp in any way.

When we walked out of town with our newly bulging packs Oliver's looked particularly ridiculous. He had tied numerous bags of Doritos onto the exterior of his pack so that it looked like a great, puffed-up carapace of junk food. He had, I would later learn, violated rule number two with a series of root vegetables from the store's small produce section secreted deep in his pack. But I was not one to criticize, having done the same with four bottles of Coca-Cola.