Eureka!?

08/22/2005

View from Egg Lake toward our campsite (in the trees)

North Cascades National Park

I backpacked in the Cascades with my father, my brother and Turkey Tetrazzini Pete. Our first campsite area was called Silesia (named after a province in Poland). It rained all night, and, with the weak, grey dawn came an icy wind which whipped our tent flaps and sapped our disposition. We huddled close to the saturated ground and clutched our steaming oatmeal bowls. I was gnawing a Cliff Bar. In the cold it had acquired the consistency of leftover taffy forgotten in the freezer. Chopin, master of melancholy and one of Poland's favorite sons, could have written the perfect composition to describe our sorry campsite and our wavering demeanors. A mist had settled. We wore it like a shroud.

"I would rather sit in sunshine than in the middle of a cloud," Turkey Tetrazzini Pete said. Actually, I don't remember if that's exactly what he said, but that's exactly the type of thing he would have said.

My brother, Jay, who had camped at Silesia previously, pulled his wool hat down over his brow and apologized yet again.

"I'm sorry, I'm really sorry, " he said. "Typically the Cascades declare themselves in all their glory from this vantage. You can usually see Mt. Shuksan, Mt. Challenger and Mt. Redoubt. You can see all the way to Canada! And now," Jay continued, "We're stuck looking at Pete's tent. Who has a tent with an exclamation point on it? Tents should not be covered with any sort of punctuation! With God as my witness, Pete, I'm gonna' rip that exclamation point off your tent and feed it to the bears!" Jay was shaking the tent flap with tenuous self-restraint, thereby scattering the icy rivulets which had settled in the nylon creases.

I watched the entire affair while chewing on frozen M and M's. I asked Turkey Tetrazzini Pete why the makers of his tent had not used a question mark: Eureka? or a semi-colon: Eureka;

"Or an apostrophe?" my dad chimed in. He was sitting innocuously on a weathered tree stump with a pair of wool socks over his hands (he had forgotten his gloves). He was sipping hot coffee. "It is rather odd," he continued, "that anyone would think of putting punctuation on a tent rainfly. I don't get it."

Soon, though, the mist cleared along with our moods. It was a grand day in the Cascades, and all thoughts of irksome punctuation blew away with the clouds. The glorious peaks reached for the heavens and declared themselves as clearly as the period following this sentence.