Friends, Dune Climbing, and Japanese Tourists

[Wrote this up last week but forgot to post it, lol. Unedited and written with sheer hyper-ness so please ignore the typos.]

Wow, it’s amazing how fast the words can build up in me sometimes. What with Mowgli-kitty looking up at me and my husband’s ‘I -heart- My Writer’ mug filled with root beer I suppose it can’t be helped but still, sometimes it feels like I’m going from three to ninety nine in a matter of moments. My brain completely taken over by the thick drug known happily as ‘reverse writer’s block.’

So, what have I been up to this week? Good question. Glad I was taking notes else I don’t think I could have kept track of it all.

If you’re not from Michigan (I’m not originally) then you might not know what I’m talking about when I say we went to see the sand dunes. Yes, dunes. Big mountains of sand that jut out of one or another of the great lakes. I know that doesn’t sound too exciting to some of you but, suffice to say, when tourists spend good money to come and see something I have just a hop, skip, and a shit from my own backyard… well, there tends to be a reason.

Anyways, we went to the Sleeping Bear Dunes; Ree, Ni, Ju, and I. Ree and I visit them all the time with my Hubby but Ni and Ju had never been so it was a whole new experience all over again even if I proved one can get lost close to home with the GPS turned on.

It was great though, when we managed to find our way there. The sun was shining, the trees were as absolutely green as the sky was blue and it was as hot out as it could be without melting my flesh off though it felt like it at times.

So, we get there and when we do one of the nature trooper ladies (her specific title escapes me) warns us about a certain overlook that people have a tendency of climbing down. It looks beautiful but the climb back up is exasperating. I thought she was talking about this one spot I’d seen people to climb down so I didn’t much think about it, keeping it in my mind that I would warn Ni and Ju away from it when the time came…

Obviously from the pictures below I had the wrong overlook in mind because we climbed down a different one… well… I may be a writer but in this case I do have to agree with that old saying- a picture is worth a thousand words.

Or in this case five very important ones: Return climb is extremely exhausting.

I’d like to mention right now that we didn’t even see the sign till long after we came back up.

The short of the long is it took eight minutes to get down… and two and a half hours to get back up. The following picture is what it looked like from the top…

At first, it looks a bit like a drop off. When Ree ran down ahead of us a lady nearby panicked and asked if she was going to be alright. I hate to chuckle at that kind of response but it really doesn’t drop off. You just… sort of get sucked into the sand for awhile…

This next one is from the bottom up. Those people ahead of us are about a third of the dune from us.

I wish I’d taken more photos of behind us though- I did take some video but that’s a little more tedious to upload so I’ll probably take a month or so to get around to it. Knowing me.

Anyways, as I was typing, the bottom was gorgeous and so worth risking to heat to reach us. The lake was fairly shallow for a way and Ni found a Petoskey stone the size of a fist! Once again, that’s another Michigan thing. Let’s just say they’re worth money and it’s hard to find big ones. I personally found some interesting white rocks, a baby Petoskey stone, and a rock with a natural hole straight through it. I can’t even tell you how much that excites me seeing as I’m a fanatic of Faerie lore and rocks with natural holes in them have a lot to do with it.

The only downside was when we had to go back up.

It was hot and while Ree was born to climb the rest of us weren’t so much. I’d hidden my skirt and shoes under a tree up top, running around in just spandex shorts, but our poor friends had to sling their sneakers over their shoulders and bear a good portion of the heat.

Did I mention that climbing down was a spontaneous sort of idea? Meaning there was little thought to anything beyond the moment? Well, I should have. We weren’t dressed for it, it was too hot with the sun beating down right on us, and we had absolutely no water. Oh, and I left my inhaler in the car. Bad move for me.

So, Ree made it up in fairly record time and though I shouldn’t have I kept cutting my breaks rather short- taking what bursts of energy I had and occasionally leaping up the hill before falling back again (sand is heinous to climb, positively heinous!) because I couldn’t risk being out there too long without my asthma medicine. This meant that we had to leave Ni and Ju back a ways…

Ree and I made it up maybe forty minutes before them and so to make it up to them I was going to run back down again (now that I had my inhaler) and bring them some water… but, like with any good story, there was a problem..

No water fountains and no water in the car. I mentioned this was all spontaneous, right?

So, Ree and I fretted around for a bit trying to figure out what to do. We spoke to some very nice tourists who couldn’t believe we’d gone down there and they offered us their cell phone to call Ni and Ju and let them know we were trying to find something for them but we couldn’t get any service.

Now, before I go any further, let it be know that there isn’t much I wouldn’t do for my friends. I hereby acknowledge this occasionally makes me appear a crazy person and can get me into trouble,

Continuing…

There was this group of Japanese tourists flitting around from one scenic viewpoint to another with their cameras flashing and beautiful language floating through the humid air (my Japanese is limited at best but apparently they liked our neon hair). They took a few pictures by us before drifting away at their own pace… leaving a couple of water bottles behind…

I asked the couple who’d allowed us to use their cell if they were theirs so I wouldn’t make an immediate ass of my self and when they said no- well, I nabbed them and ran.

Mind you, my logic was that they probably weren’t coming back for them and I was recycling and I was just running in case I’d made a mistake so I could avoid a rather poorly planned situation. So, I ran to the drop off point and threw the bottles.

They didn’t even make it half way to Ni and Ju who just watched me with heads tilted as if to ask, what the hell are you doing?

So, I ran part way down, grabbed the bottles up and threw them again. I also failed again. The third time around I stood there and stripped of my tye dye skirt, again, and ran down part way, again, and tossed them down, again, and failed, unsurprisingly- again.

I heard the laughter long before I turned around so I imagine they caught quite a bit of it on fild but when I did turn around there stood a very happy Japanese tourist group clicking their cameras as if I hadn’t just ripped their water off.

I’m tempted to go to YouTube Japan and look up ‘White purple haired girl steals water bottles’ but I think I’ll save what’s left of my pride.

In the end I climbed most of the way down and back up again, half praying the second time that I wouldn’t die before I made it up.

All in all though, it was a wonderful trip and when it cooled down… I was tempted to make another climb.

The Power Of Quack

If you don’t understand why I used to say Quack and you just happen to care I recommend reading the post prior to this one.

I’d met her at one of the protests I’d arranged. My little way of showing my peers how little I cared if they thought I was strange, showing the teachers I was smarter than they thought, and showing the principal that at least one of us had read the rule book inside and out and could ‘use’ it just as well as anyone. Not to mention I wasn’t about to let us, even those I didn’t like, be segregated by jock, cheerleader, dork, and delinquent categories. Not for my sake or anyone else’s- simply because it was wrong.

And it was a damn good little protest if I do say so myself. Well organized with a decent turn out if only because the others had been curious. I’d even used the school’s resources and time to set it up. :) That’s all another story though- one I’m too tired to tell tonight. The one I do want to tell tonight is about how I met her.

She’d come only because the poster said to, sitting quietly at a table with a book in her hand, completely drawn into the world of words and art. I’d been preoccupied at the time but something in my radar went off, something in her aura. Something that made me think of how quiet I was before… everything happened.

After spending several hours in the office being told why I was wrong- though I must have been right somewhere along the lines as my method eventually worked, I found myself sitting in biology class right next to her. Still really shy myself I didn’t say anything to her the first or the second day, not even on the third. I’d never take the initiative to make a friend before. The few I had had always found me first but I was damned bound willing to give it a try.

She sat alone at lunch, spent all her time in the library, drew instead of paying attention in class, always had her nose in a book and sucked at math. I think somehow I’ve always known we were supposed to be friends. :)

Back in Biology class later down the week we had this in class thing to do. We each had to stand up when a part of the cell was named and make a sound to help up remember it. Our teacher started with the front row and everyone was making, pardon me, the most stupid sounds. A clap, banging a fist on the table, a stomp. They all sounded the same to me so- when it came to me, in the middle of the class, Miss Too-nervous-to-stand-up I said the first thing that came to my mind.

Quack.

And the girl next to me, the one no one had ever head speak, said:

Roar.

Several notes, a pencil, and a near detention on my part later we were friends and we’ve been that way since. Five years later she was my maid of honor, six years later and she still lives with me.

Here’s to friends! The real ones are never far behind.

Quoping Mechanisms

I was chatting with Xean this morning and there was something she said that made me think about the past. I was telling her about my dorky moment with Ni and Ju and she h ad said something about the wacky moments that bring friends together. It just made me think of how some of the most treasured people in my life came to be in my life.

See, I wasn’t always wacky and strange. I used to be quiet a sullen creature. I cried a lot and spoke to no one, seeing everyone as a potential threat and treating them that way. When I moved in with my adoptive family I learned, in a very slow and painful but rewarding process, that a lot of people have good in them and even the ones who aren’t so great… well, I wouldn’t be here without a lot of bad people.

When I started learning things like this and being forcefully pried from my shell I was… I don’t know how to put it. I felt like an unprotected stick standing upright in the sand while the wind rages all around me. Completely vulnerable, scared, breakable, and as far out of my element as I could possibly be.

But with every way you can fall into a hole you can learn a way to go around, over, or through it. A.k.a. coping mechanism. I don’t know how it really came about but I developed a rather odd one. See, I was still learning how to hold conversations and because I’d hardly spoke I didn’t always know what to say- duh.

So, whenever one of those nerve rupturing silences would pop up… I’d say Quack Quack.

It’s an instantaneous ice breaker. Silence scared me, giggles and ‘what the f’s’ did not. Even if you don’t know what to say I can guarantee you that if you walk up to a random person (be it someone you know or not) and say Quack Quack 8 out of 10 times they will respond with some other animal sound and then everything is rolling again.

Now here’s the real kicker and pardon my shoddy explanation of the events before hand but I’m trying to keep it short. Before I lived with my adoptive family I attended middle school A then I transferred to high school B in another town. I didn’t come back to high school A for nearly my entire freshmen year. My point being that I knew people before but we didn’t have much day to day contact till I came back from being somewhere else.

I hadn’t changed much at first but it was while I was in high school B that I’d met my adoptive family, and shortly after my transfer that I moved in with them. My old friends,… people I’d spent time with because there was no one else and people who spent time with me just because I was there… didn’t quite understand the changes. They couldn’t understand why I was dressing different, blurting out things (first attempts at standing up for myself), and asking them all to call me by a new name. My signature changed, my style changed, my hobbies and goals changed. Everything.

Alas, it wasn’t more than a month after I’d developed my new coping mechanisms that they started to tell me I was annoying. I didn’t do it all the time but I was learning that I loved talking to people so they heard me say a ot more of anything to them than I ever had before. It’s needless to say it but over the months we all drifted away…

And the ones who would quack back at me and be patient with my odd little habits are still my friends today. It really proves that true friends are the ones who accept you for who you are even if that person changes and doesn’t know quite who she is.

My little coping mechanism did more than just this though. :) It also brought me together with one of my best friends, current roommate and constant sister, Ree/Kei but that’s another story that- like this one, deserves a post all it’s own according to me. :)

On a brief side note, some other odd coping things I had was that for awhile (and occasionally today) I’d almost refer to myself in third person. Not in an obnoxious way as I see the habit in general but just as easily as I say I. I think it’s because I’d changed my name and was constantly reassuring myself that I was the person I was becoming and not the one I had been.

Odd