watch me burn

after spending all day with girls. and finding a new hiking partner, who i may be able to handle, i'm not sure. but i've wanted to roam appalachian trails around where i live for quite some time. now i've found a soul who is game. primitive camping too, yum, i love camping. especially when i don't have to remember everything. that's the tough part, too much pressure. i like to just show up.

though i used to camp a lot, at powwows, it's an entirely different thing.

so, i'm at the survival camp and never realized, i'm leading the girls around ALL DAMN DAY!

but it was a great experience and at the end, i got to sit in a cabin for hours alone tending fire, reading a dearly loved book. i wanted, many times, to turn off the lights of the cabin and watch the fire burn. fortunately i remembered, a truckload of girls would be piling in the door and that is what would happen. i'd get to watch the fire through the night.

i was *supposed* to wake up and keep the fire burnin' but...

i sleep very sound when i do sleep. and i'd watched the fire burn for at least an hour. then i fell asleep. woke to red embers and another leader stumbling around in the cold dark trying to load the fireplace. fortunately, my flashlight was handy and i illuminated her way, shall we say.

three times she woke up. i didn't bother to get up the second two times as she had a flashlight ready then.

it's a challenge to get ten girls, mostly if not entirely tweens you don't know handed off to you first thing in the morning (especially when you're not expecting it). so we got to know each other and spent the day together learning ice rescue, hypothermia indicators, simulating an emergency situation, hiking, firebuilding (my all time favorite), and constructing a debris shelter.

it was a good time.

my feet were cold almost immediately upon arriving at camp, so during the hypothermia lecture, i pulled out my vapor barriers and wrapped my feet in plastic. (a weird practice, but i understood it after the lecture) and since my feet couldn't fit another pair of sox in the boots, i had to go that route, i was grateful for it.

so i finally get a moment out of the cabin, after the girls are gone (have to wait for a leader to appear to step out to the loo), and it was snowing. just flurries. but it was lovely.

if it's going to be that cold it may as well snow.

i saw something in the fire, i need to write about it. sometimes it helps to let on in prose, other times, not so much.

it's a mystery how the writing of a great poem (even a good or mediocre poem) goes. i drove past migrant workers today and remembered the manic feeling after i captured a poem having seen their faces.

i was on my way for a day at the beach and went in to my friend's house and wrote on her computer. i emailed it out as i always do, and knew i'd caught it.

that poem is one i read recently at the poetry center in nj. it's an awesome poem. and i was laughing with this horrible sense of accomplishment after penning it because i knew it was something.

it's in my chapbook if you happen to glimpse one of those. i got a whole box of them today. now to sell them.

peace. out.