(I hope you enjoy this excerpt from ONE WRONG TURN AT A TIME, my humor book-in-progress that chronicles adventures I’ve shared with my other half as we’ve trekked all 50 states as a couple. This piece is in memory of Chris Alligood, a friend from our early days, who passed into the light this past year.)
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Rice and I lived outside Boulder, Colorado in the 1980s. Newlyweds, carefree and childless, we scraped together some funds for backpack camping gear. Fun times awaited, right?
Wrong. Our marriage barely survived our first solo overnight trip together. (Another story, another time.)
Suffice it to say, I hesitated when another couple invited us camping a few weeks later.
“C’mon,” Carla urged. “We’ll drive up past Ward and break camp near where we park. No lugging gear along the switchbacks. Just some day hikes into the canyons.”
I softened, happy to hear a plan that allowed for coolers of real food, not freeze-dried astronaut packets. The luxury of cold beer by the fire. An outhouse nearby with a small sink and light. And toilet paper.
As Rice steered the Citation up the road past Ward, the terrain grew rocky.
My breathing quickened. “Let’s turn back,” I said.
“We’ll be fine,” he assured me.
Fine schmine. We’d just spent a chunk of change on new tires, after buying our first house, a cute yellow ranch in a subdivision called Gunbarrel Estates. We weren’t dirt poor, but we weren’t flush. I hated to fret about money, but I did. Mature as I was, I climbed into the back seat, grabbed a beer from the cooler, and rode the rest of the way, sulking on the floor.
Rice was right, though. We made it to our destination just fine, met up with Chris and Carla, pitched our tents and had a relaxing evening.
The real fun began the next morning.
Rice didn’t smile as he greeted me on his return from his morning constitutional. “I hate to tell you this, honey, but your contact case fell down the hole in the john.”
This confused me. I’d tucked my contacts lens case into his Dopp kit.
“Why would you take your Dopp kit into the outhouse?” I tried to keep a steady tone.
“To brush my teeth.”
Ewww. I shivered, trying not to think about it.
He continued. “I went to set the kit on the ledge over the latrine. But apparently, you never zipped the kit closed.” He paused. “And somehow your case fell out of it.”
I inhaled sharply, no longer fixated on the gross factor. My mind’s eye saw dollar bills floating about me like dust in the wind. My gosh-darned hard contact lenses, the ones that made me feel like a nail was gouging my eyeball when a speck of dust got in them…. I purchased those babies once a year, a single pair costing several hundred dollars. They were gone?
Yes, because Rice just dropped them down the crapper. And I’d now have to wear my ugly Coke-bottle lensed glasses for the unforeseeable future.
“Don’t cry, honey.” Rice looked like he might want to cry, too. Or maybe what I saw in his eyes was fear. Fear that I might start to cuss or stomp my feet or call him names, right there in front of Carla and Chris.
For a moment, the crisp mountain air cocooned us in silence.
Then God bless Chris. He punched Rice’s arm in a good-buddy gesture.
“I’ll bet we can get that case back,” he wagered.
Carla and I watched—from a slight distance—as they rigged a fishing line, gobbed it with chewing gum on the end, and cast it down the hole, trying to get my case to stick to it. No dice. Oh, the fishing line worked, but the guys needed something else at the end to grasp the case.
Chris grabbed an empty soda can and cut it open, making a scoop.
And I kid you not. It worked! They retrieved my case and tucked it into a used sandwich bag for safe transport.
Trust me. I boiled the hell out of that case after we got back home. I threw out the pan I boiled it in, too. But darned if those lenses didn’t work just fine until next year’s budget allowed me to buy new ones.
To those who might judge me for wearing those contact lenses again, let me say this. My dignity had already left the building. If I had any left, I wouldn’t be sharing this story.
Then again, as Rice has been known to say on occasion when asked to review my work: “How could you not share such an awesome sh*t show?”
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