Serendipity Worship

“OK, you keep an eye out for psychopaths, I’ll see if I can figure out why the engine light is on,” I said without humor. “Right!” Ryan said and turned around so he could see out the back windows of the van. Outside, the gravel road we were on had abruptly ended in a wide rutted muddy circle with the trashed remnants of a campsite, a large dead bear and two other sizable but unidentifiable carcasses being picked clean by crows. We had been traveling some backroads In Georgia when the engine light had come on and I had taken the first side road to find a place to stop and see if I could read the engine codes with my laptop. Fortunately the engine code was trivial, the automotive equivalent of “Maybe I should skip jogging today because my knees might hurt later” kinda thing. This meant that our time in this carcass-laden post apocalyptic death camp for inbreds was brief but memorable.

“Providence” is defined as “a manifestation of divine care or direction” and is a word that I need to use more often. One of my chief complaints with Christianity is its fixation on old miracles when there are new ones everywhere that you look. These providences, or tangible examples of the divine, are best found by walking far away from the tangible examples of humanity, as far as I can tell. The spontaneous and unrequested beauty of natural environments is half of a miracle. The other half is the brief and fragile combination of health and awareness that allows us to perceive it. When beauty and beholder are both present, some very rare harmonies of experience are possible.

Providence Canyon, Georgia, is halfway between Asheville and the freshwater springs of Florida that we were headed to. It is officially one of the seven wonders of the state and known as the little grand canyon of Georgia . It was formed by a natural watershed eroding through a layer cake of variously colored soils and deepened by poor farming practices of settlers after the forced removal of indigenous people in the 1800s. As a state park it offers 10-15 miles of hiking through a canyon along trails that are mostly wet sand or shallow clear streams. It seems that not too many people choose to camp there in the winter and the park ranger had to call a guy named Gary to unlock the campground for us.

The hiking is unusual in that the trail is a series of 9 out and backs up the various drainages that create the watershed which makes for a lot of trail miles in a relatively small space. There are a lot of nice places to sit around, eat snacks, and enjoy the light playing on the multicolored canyon walls as the sandy water flows by. Geologically, this place is a fast mover and several fences and structures have been moved as the canyon erodes its way into the surrounding plain at a quicker pace than administrative planning. The campground is pleasant enough with the exception of a homemade plywood outhouse that lacked either windows or a light. Based on a limited study of two people, we concluded that not all humans are capable of pooping in total darkness.

As the the sun set and created a pink misty hue through the pine forest, we heard the mad ecstatic howls of coyotes nearby. Their primal chorus would crescendo and fall only to restart after a few solitary yips urged the pack into a new refrain. The experimental songs of younger coyotes were plainly audible at times, or perhaps the pack had some exceptional avant garde soloists, but it was a serenade that made me feel like I had fully escaped the inescapable muzak of human habitations.

*Providence Canyon has some abandoned settlements that make for novel raccoon habitats*

The next day, while traveling, we pulled off when it was time to get gas and realized that we had ended up at the same god-forsaken garbage disposal of a gas station that we had ended up at 3 years ago while traveling. At the time we were recovering from some well earned hangovers and the smell of the gas station bathrooms was so overwhelmingly awful that we peed behind the dumpster. Needles to say, we just slow rolled through that gas station with fleeting nostalgia for past excesses and drove to the next exit, but this began a theme for the trip where each day was marked by one brief interval of disgusting foulness - the odd carcasses the day before as a example. Perhaps if you are on a largely unplanned trip through Florida, this should not be an unexpected thing. Serendipity is a toll road, apparently.

Having a half day to kill in Florida before making it to the Rainbow River, we decided to stop in Crystal River to look for manatees. Crystal River has a large calm bay that is popular for manatees, although the coastline is completely developed, making for a somewhat paradoxical nature experience. Looking into the water we were awed by families of manatees. On shore, we saw Jimmy’s Crab Shack and a lot of boats named things like “Alimony” and “Patty’s Caribbean Sunset Dolphin Barnacle”. We, thanks to being fantastically lazy paddlers, were passed by a man kayaking while towing two diminutive and well-coifed dogs on a small raft. Other tourists in clear kayaks paddled about looking like they were flying wonder woman’s plane. We trailed a tour group close enough to get some free trivia about the area and its manatees when the wind was blowing right. There were lots of pontoons idling about. They seem to be the golf carts of aquatic life.

We saw cormorants snaking though the water and drying their wings in trees and delicate stepping white ibises hunting in the grasses. I also saw a missing business opportunity. I had just assumed that somewhere there would be a manatee-shirt shop where I could buy souvenirs but apparently no one likes that pun enough to paint it on a sign.

*“Fearful of the past, he took a moment to visualize flight before attempting to take to the skies once more.”*

We finished our lazy sunset drift with a radiant shimmering ring circling the sun and were famished. Ryan said “I smell some good seafood over that way.” Using my pocket computer and the miracle of wireless data I was able to quickly extract information from the internet and confirm that Ryan did indeed smell some good seafood over there, proving how useful technology can be in matters of survival. We also once again proved that the best food often comes in concrete-floored cash-only restaurants attached to fishing piers. Leathery raspy waitresses are generally a good sign as well.

For me, the ideal vacation is one that is unplanned and unstructured. The rest of my life is an exercise in compulsive organization so that the future is well managed long before it arrives. Yawn. Nothing is more boring than knowing what to expect. Ryan and I both had looked at some places we might like to visit and we’d packed enough food and gear for a lot of different things. But it wasn’t until we were pulling out of the driveway in Asheville that we began to look at weather forecasts and travel times and make some version of a plan for the week. Most everyone else I know finds this approach untenable and will argue that you need reservations here and tickets there. That really depends on how committed to your expectations you are. If you are only happy if plan A succeeds, then you need months of planning. The benefit of serendipity worship is that you know that plan A is just a distraction. You make a good faith effort at it and then you arrive at plan B which is likely something that you never expected. And I’d rather improv than read from a script any day.

Not that there aren’t downsides to this approach. First, of course, is the amount of bourbon required to weather the slings and arrow of unexpected fate. Second is the type of places you end up sleeping. Nature is always open. People put up gates and whatnot, but ultimately the forests and rivers are always available; nice bathrooms not as much.

We were looking for a place to park the van so that we could do some snorkeling on the rainbow river but the state park campground was full of people who had planned their trips months ago in an effort to scrape unwanted spontaneity off of their shoes. So we ended up near the bottom of the list of nearby Hipcamp sites and found ourselves driving in the dark along some broken single lane backroads to a driveway and a confusing set of instructions from our Hipcamp “host”. “Do not enter at the driveway with the address number, enter at the driveway with the camping sign,” said the reservation. In our headlights was a single driveway with a locked gate and both an address sign and a camping sign. We drove up and down the road and finally settled on driving through the yard a bit into what was, in theory, a campsite. This consisted of a flat place to park near a run down home with a smattering of u-haul trailers, abandoned lawn mowers, and strange mutant chickens. Other than a couple of solar lights sticking out of the ground haphazardly, there was not a light or sign anywhere. The “outdoor shower and bathroom” consisted of some hastily stacked pallets forming a three walled fence around a home depot bucket with a toilet seat attached to it. Nearby sat a bucket of kitty litter. A garden hose was draped over the back wall and jury rigged to a shower head like some kind of overhead bidet.

*“outdoor shower”. just try not to get the kitty litter wet.*

We had arranged shuttle service for the Rainbow River with a local company which involved several phone calls to a guy named “Skip” since their website didn’t really work. Ryan seemed to enjoy hearing me repeatedly explain to Skip that I was indeed “clicking on the otter” but that it failed to let me book a shuttle. I got to meet Skip in person the next day and I had definitely not anticipated the facial tattoos or shirtless denim vest. It takes a few days to get used to Florida, I think. The shuttle van was clean, the tip jar was well marked, and I appreciated listening to Skid Row’s “18 and Life” for the first time since high school.

Archaeological evidence suggests that Rainbow River has supported human habitation for over 10,000 years. Discharging 600 million gallons of clear 72 degree water daily from its spring head, the Rainbow River flows for about 6 miles before joining the Withlacoochee River and making its way to the Gulf of Mexico. The ultra clear water makes for excellent snorkeling provided that you are comfortable being frisked by the occasional 3 foot long giant Gar, an armored relic of the Triassic age. Gar possess an unusual swim bladder that can function as a lung, giving them the ability to surface and gulp air in deoxygenated waters. This makes them adapted to aquatic neighborhoods unfrequented by most fish. With my mask and snorkel I enjoyed watching them curiously stalk unsuspecting swimmers at the clear waters of the spring head.

We drifted along with the spring fed current and watched the mesmerizing sway of river grasses and reflected sunbeams shattered by ripples on the surface. Turtles with bright orange markings slid off of logs and hid in the grasses. We even saw one soft shell turtle swimming along like an aquatic whoopee cushion. We explored up tiny spring fed creeks that joined the Rainbow River, ducking under the prolific vegetation and using our paddles to push the tandem SUP we had borrowed through shallow waters. We ultimately lazily drifted a little too long and had to paddle straight into the setting sun and its reflected twin to get back to the take out.

From the Rainbow river it was back to the mutant chicken pit toilet and Uhaul lot for dinner and drinks. Ryan and I have been friends for almost 25 years now. We knew each other before marriage, children, or baldness. One of the things that I enjoy most about an old friendship is the ease with which conversation moves between silly and deep. In my journal, I often make shorthand style notes to prompt my memory for later and from this trip and some of its bourbon fueled camping, I found both “surrender and curiosity are skills to cultivate” and “never dry hump the seaweed off of a manatee in front of a park ranger” tucked in between notes about fish and cypress trees.

*The famed “King of Trees” as he is know to the newspapers in KY*

The Withlaccochee river is as black as the Rainbow river is clear. Suffused with the tannins released from decomposing organic matter, its dark surface forms a misty mirror of upside down cypress knees and palmetto trees in the still morning. Well, until the power boat and pit bull crowd wake up anyhow. We enjoyed the strange long beaked birds prowling along the banks and early signs of spring that made us realize how far south we were. Drifting along on a giant paddle board that we could lay on and drink wine in the sun was exactly the sort of vacation I had hoped for.

It was a long day of paddling and sweating through sunscreen after two nights of avoiding the garden hose shower trap at our Shitcamp site and after we got the boat packed into the van, I said to Ryan, “I’m just gonna go ahead and ask the universe for a free bath house.” The briefest googling revealed a fitness and spa center on our route that offered a free day pass for people interested in membership. So we took the tour with a newly hired and eager sales rep who politely ignored his obvious questions about me and Ryan’s relationship and why we were looking at spa memberships 500 miles from our wives. We tried to ask some good questions and compliment the facility. Then our tour guide finally let us cut loose and we enjoyed a blissful couple of hours in a moroccan tiled steam room, salt cave sauna, hot tub, and cold plunge. Also the spa’s proximity to the University of Florida (benchpressing and bikini capital of the universe) meant that the rest of the crowd looked like they were cleaning up on their way back to Olympus. I did get to experience the middle aged joy of casually sliding neck deep into the cold plunge while 4 muscle bound greek-heroes-in-training dipped their toes in and dared each other to get in. They were immediately and conveniently distracted by their phones and wandered back to the hot tub to talk loudly or make mating calls; it’s always hard to tell with that age.

We ended up in Gainesville around dinner time and decided to see if the universe was fond of us enough to grant both a bathhouse and the perfect taco but the town was full of Friday night hubbub and lines spilled out of restaurant doors everywhere we wandered. As a last ditch effort, I asked about wait times at an upscale Mexican place and the hostess said, “Nobody is at the outside bar in the back for some reason if you want to eat there.” It’s a shame that Ryan and I aren’t as romantically intertwined as our spa tour guide assumed, because it turned out to be a lovely little brick courtyard with warm lights stung across it and we had the place to ourselves.

It was getting late and we still had no firm plans on camping once again, so Ryan drove while I searched for possible places and found a state park in the middle of nowhere about an hour away. On arrival the gates were closed and locked and there was no after hour entry process. We got back in the van feeling like we had worn out serendipity’s welcome until Ryan spotted a locked gate a couple hundred yards down the road marked “equestrian parking only”. Ryan works on one of the largest horse farms in Kentucky and said, “Let me see if they lock their gates like we do.” And sure enough the lock was only pretend-locked so we drove way back out of sight of the road and hunkered down in a sandy field with a nice view of the stars.

One of the best things about about a long friendship that has spanned so many phases of life is that being stuck in a van for a week together makes time for retelling old stories. There are few gifts that I enjoy more than being reminded of an adventure or misadventure that I’d forgotten. We have so many ways of recording and sharing our lives these days that the volume of information can prevent us from seeing anything in particular. Sharing a memory and recreating it with someone, for me, will always bring more joy than posting, liking, or following some pixels somewhere. There’s a quote I remember from a book that I’ve forgotten that goes, “When you love everyone and everyone loves you, what is love worth?” Sometimes a story or memory is more valuable when it is treasured enough to be kept. I’m not sure this is true for the time that Ryan peed in the corner of my basement bedroom by “accident” or the time that I overindulged in a few things and became argumentatively convinced that I could only walk backwards. But we certainly have a big box of rich experiences that’s fun to open up and rummage through when time and space allows.

This trip itself was a sequel to a similar trip we’d taken 3 years ago when a freakish winter storm brought Texas to a halt and kept us from getting to a river trip that we had planned in Big Bend. That trip had been a lesson in adapting to change and making the best of things. Instead of driving to the Mexican border we redirected our van full of boating gear and snacks to the warmest places we could find day by day. We decided to wind up this trip by ending at Hunting Island, SC where we had ended the last one with a goal of seeing how the lessons we had learned on the last trip had affected us over the intervening years. I had written a short book about our last trip and in the rush of packing forgot to bring it with us which lead us to the embarrassing conclusion that we weren’t totally sure what lessons we had learned on the last trip. Well, we both remembered that a wise man looks for raccoons before throwing a trash bag into a dumpster and that psychedelics and wild boars are a bad combination, but we knew that there were some more broadly applicable life lessons in there somewhere too.

Our path to Hunting Island led us through Savannah at the exact 2 hours that it was forecasted to stop raining for a while, so we took a spiraling walking loop through the city to see if we could see all of its 22 plazas that were laid out in the 1730s by John Oglethorpe. Each of these squares is home to well tended oaks, myrtles, and azaleas and these miniature manicured forests are delightfully and regularly interposed between urban areas with some of America’s oldest architecture. Most of the plazas have monuments to questionable individuals or colonial perspectives but the realized dream of tending natural areas amidst the city is easy to appreciate and enjoy (especially when traveling with a professional horticulturist and oak tree expert.) It was also Ground Hog day, which Ryan and I have inexplicably celebrated together enough times that it’s a holiday that I have a random fascination with. It is decidedly more straightforward than Christmas. There’s a groundhog in Pennsylvania; it’s his day. You can kind of do what you want with it from there and no one expects a gift or a casserole.

Winter on the east coast is always a gamble. The risk is the possibility of bitter, unforgiving, inhospitable weather. But the potential payoff is having vast beautiful coastlines to yourself. The forecast for this trip told us that we were probably going to lose the bet this time, but you can’t win if you don’t play. There is a weird joy to being stuck in the worst weather and still managing to wring out a few drop of joy, sweeter for their scarcity.

We spent a few minutes in the park service gift shop to look for souvenirs and also because it was a place that was neither the van or a howling maelstrom. This gave Ryan a chance to use his inexhaustible reserves of charm on the embittered raspy clerk who appeared to have been left outside with only cigarettes for nourishment for a long period of her life. His ability to find connection with people is unique and has saved me from having my dog taken by the park service thanks to his ability to quickly discover a shared love of beavers with a nasty and contemptuous park ranger. Ryan is, in all honesty, a licensed beaver trapper, which is something I enjoy asking him about from the crowd whenever he speaks publicly.

We did indeed have the place to ourselves. There were plenty of RV “lifers”holed up at the campground and we could see their silhouettes in front of their TVs from outside as we walked into the buffeting winds and rain. The forecast kept teasing us with a window of sun that was always about 3 hours from now and despite our overall willingness to embrace adversity, we decided we were also fairly willing to embrace some bourbon in the van.

Somewhere along a wandering conversation, Ryan and both recalled seeing a movie when we were kids that involved Clint Eastwood and an orangutan named Clyde that he had trained to punch people whenever he said “Left turn, Clyde”. Thanks to the inescapable availability of information these days we found it online and decided that we could wait out a storm by seeing what, exactly, our parents had subjected us to under the guise of entertainment as impressionable youths. We watched the entire spectacle, a tribute to the seventy’s views on masculinity and animal rights and tried to see what lessons we could take from it. “Real men bond over beating the living daylights out of one another” seemed to be the central lesson. Also we learned that if your orangutan seems a little frisky, you may need to break into a zoo with a drugged banana and load an unsuspecting primate into a pickup truck on the way to a cheap motel. I hope that if I am ever confronted with the dilemma of satisfying a randy ape, I will have a better solution, so I was thankful for this opportunity to think ahead in case of that eventuality. I imagine that Tiffany has already confronted this conundrum in her own ways but she has yet to leave me at the zoo with sedatives and a fruit basket.

The rest of our trip consisted of taking short walks on the beach for as long as we could stand it, cooking food, and trying to synthesize our thoughts about how this trip could give us insights into being better at parenting, husbanding, and being present in our lives. Middle aged family life has its hard-earned treasures and watching it unfold in each other’s lives adds to the joys and knocks the edges off the struggles. Ryan is a little older than me, and when we were in our twenties it seemed like a big difference. I remember lying in a horse pasture watching the sun go down and asking him if he felt older thanks to a recent birthday. He said “I think I’m just getting better at being me.” It has always stuck with me and it’s good to have a friend you can share the desire for self improvement with.

On this trip, the themes we felt were most important were “surrender” and “curiosity”. These were in stark contrast to Clint Eastwood’s teaching about the unquestionable value of a good uppercut, but we both aspired to greater things than fixing pickup trucks in tight t-shirts and mismanaging primate nookie. I felt good about discovering that the themes of surrender and curiosity were my focus, and I appreciated that we could have both adventure and self-growth on the same trip. Or, at least I did, until I got home and got out the book from our last trip, the last line of which was “Acceptance and curiosity might work when determination and planning fail.” I guess every good life lesson has to be learned a few times. Maybe this time it will stick.

Serendipity Worship

Riparian

Preachin’