Flapjack Goes on a Disastrous Trip Back to Nature

On that woe-begotten trip back to nature, sometime back in the summer of 1993, where we paddled to the sacred ground of the Algonquin people and cast ourselves in the long shadow of white settler guilt (groan), there were four of us in two canoes:

Agent Flapjack, AKA Flapjack (that’s me)

Back then …
Wore leopard accessories with cargo shorts
Forty something going on twelve
Poetic loser
Came up with the canoe trip idea

Coconut AKA Coco
Flapjack’s daughter
One of those little kids who hangs around with adults
Abandoned by the short chubby Chileno bastard when she was three
Subject to the cruel yet intelligent tutelage of stepfather (aka biopolar giant)
A Latin fire-cracker and a Flapjack loyalist (mostly)

Grapes
FJ’s best friend
Man-magnet of the first degree
Dazzling green eyes
Silky red hair, worn in a long thick braid
An artist model’s body, often draped in purple
Unlikely candidate, then or ever, for a canoe trip

Intellectus (a completely fictional character)
Grapes’ daughter
Dazzling green eyes like her mother
Shock of red unmanageable hair
Quiet and articulate
About twelve going on forty
Forced to go on trip

Plus you’ll meet a couple of minor characters with more legitimate connections to the land according to John Ralston Saul, self-appointed authority on the true meaning of camping, as stated below:

“You are, in effect, camping here, and you’ll be a camper until you find a way to be part of the place, and the only way to (do that) is through coming to some sort of agreement about life with aboriginals …. If you can’t do that, you’re living a lie – the occupier’s lie.”

So, let’s get started:

Just a little bit of back story …

When Coconut was born, Flapjack was an atheist so she would not have sought out a GODMOTHER for Coconut. It must have been a title foisted on her by someone she cared about (not Coconut’s father, that short ill-tempered Chilean bastard). Since Coconut was a baby then and obviously couldn’t speak for herself and tell her mother, “I might not be a Catholic, but I like old-fashioned religious ideas, and I want a Godmother,” the person who came up with the Godmother idea must have been none other than Grapes.

Grapes was incredibly voluptuousness, a man-magnet of the first degree, and liked to wear the royal colour of purple. When Flapjack knew her best, she was trying to stave off despair as her marriage (not to say anything about Flapjack’s) was dissolving before their very eyes. That’s why her friend, well actually that whole period in her life, brought to mind, at least to a “Flapjackian” mind, the line in the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”  where the whole point of the song soars forth “… mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord / he hath trampled on the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”

So to make a long story short, before we’ve barely begun, it was the idea – really the pursuit — of squishing the grapes of wrath, and having fun adventures instead, that made Flapjack call Grapes “Grapes.”

To get a sense of what they were up against, listen to this!

And, so, as I was saying … Grapes liked the GODMOTHER title (Coconut wasn’t her only GODCHILD). It gave her what theologians (should you know any) call “gravitas” in the lives of others. Flapjack didn’t see this at the time. She saw it as caring for her and Coconut, as Grape’s generosity of spirit, which it also partially was.

“So what exactly does a Godmother do?” Flapjack asked.

“She stays close, that’s all.”

“Ok, that sounds good,” Flapjack said, “So if anything happens on this trip, I can count on you.”

“Absolutely,” Grapes said, scratching the side of her nose and looking down at her shoes. “And I hope it means I can count on you.”

Flapjack’s nose felt itchy when Grapes said that, so she scratched it, like Grapes had, a classic tell of some kind and we all know what that is – or do we?

By the way, if you’ve been in this situation, when someone scratches or taps their nose right in front of you, it could mean a con is in progress, as in “nose = knows.” If you doubt me, just google MetaFilter” for the “knows = nose” discussion.

Escape from the bipolar giant …

Flapjack came up with the canoe trip as a) an escape strategy from the bipolar giant whose mood swings were becoming worse (more about this in another installment) and b) a way to do mother and daughter bonding times two, she and Coconut, then about seven or eight, and Grapes and her daughter, then a sullen pre-teen.

For a small down payment, she booked a couple of canoes, camping gear and enough food, both dry and fresh, to cover three nights and four days in Algonquin Park, a quintessentially Canadian wilderness park dotted with campsites where wolves and bears and moose roam free and motor boats are verboten.

“Welcome to bear country,” the park ranger told them when they arrived at Algonquin Park. “Do not keep any food on your campsite. This is bear country.”

“How do we do that?” somebody asked.

“Do what?” he asked.

“Don’t keep food on the campsite.”

“Hang it in a tree using hitch-knots. There’s rope in in the duffel bag with your tents.

“Have you seen any bears this summer?”, Flapjack asked nonchalantly.

“Yup, like I said, this is bear country. But if you keep your campsite clean you’ll be fine.”

“We’ve got this,” Grapes said, trying to act all Canadian and macho, which Flapjack found totally out of character, since Grapes was neither, but rather a transplanted debutante from the American south.

But whatever.

And then they were off, paddling their clunky metal mass-produced, post-colonial style canoes full of the gear and supplies, which, by the way, they had ordered on the phone since online purchases didn’t exist back then in the 1990s.

Flapjack paddled in a straight line, a j-stroke coming back pretty fast from her days at girls’ camp, while Grapes, having been raised in a more traditional family structure which didn’t send girls off to camp to learn Aboriginal transportation means paddled in a zig zag, switching sides every second stroke to keep the canoe going forward.

Their daughters, boiling hot in the summer sun and boiling mad, because the trip already seemed dull and arduous, sat in the bow like sulky mastheads. Flapjack yelled at Coconut not to be a lily-dipper, while Grapes cajoled her daughter to put some muscle into it. Grape’s daughter smiled sarcastically into the blazing sun, her side-smile reminding Flapjack of Yossarian in “Catch 22,” who like Intellectus had an uncanny sense of Situations Normal All-Fucked Up.

SWAT. BAM. BLAP.

Because they had left the outfitters so late, it was close to dusk when they found an open campsite. It was marked by a fluttering white flag, as if the very land itself was being surrendered to them, which John Ralston Saul would have found metaphorically though disturbingly appropriate, Flapjack and crew being in the category of the white settler class, in case you hadn’t guessed that.

There was a tree close to the water’s edge where Flapjack hung the food, using hitch knots (sort of). The fire pit, up from the shore, had a log seats around it. Grapes said, “How charming” and got to work, going back and forth between the food hanging in the tree, which she laboriously retrieved, and the fire pit, where she magically got a fire going with toilet paper and kerosene and dead branches, somehow assembling a pretty decent dinner of wieners and beans.

Since none of them had ever watched evening fall, they had no idea how long it took to fall and they were caught off guard when it actually fell. It seemed like in one moment they were boiling under a hot sun, then in another cooled down to flannelette weather by the shadows of the giant pines which jutted out from the earth in every which way. And then, in the next moment, they were submerged in total darkness. That meant they only had time to pitch one tiny-weeny, itsby-bitty pup tent for all four of them.

“Damn, it’s dark,” Flapjack said. “And where in hell did all these mosquitoes come from?” SWAT. BAM. BLAP. “Where’s the OFF?”

“You probably put the OFF in the tree,” Grapes said.

Coconut swatted at the mosquitos, clinging to Flapjack, mother of all this nonsense. Then, since there was nothing else to do, and since the mosquitos were large and vicious and unrelenting, they decided to call it a night. They crawled into the tent one by one, mothers on the outside, girls in the middle and because the tent was so small, and they could not sit up, they just lay there, side by side, like facing a lying-down a firing squad, for what seemed like a very long time.

It was Intellectus who broke the silence before their final good-nights.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Flapjack, but so far, I’d give this trip a zero.”

This is the way my world ends …

It was sometime in the middle of the night when all hell broke loose. Flapjack was woken first by snorting and something clawing on the canvas right where her rear end was. She knew enough about nature to know that being on her period was a big strike against her. Damn it, she was a beast magnet. She froze with fear. This is the way my world ends. This is the way my world ends. Not with bang … Then she heard Grapes whispering across the sleeping girls, “Look outside the tent,” Grapes said.

Flapjack peeked out into the darkness and it was the most she could muster to squeak, “Go away.” For they were huge and they were everywhere. Like monster versions of Coconut’s hamster. Like multiplied versions of Coco’s hamster. Like rabid versions of Coco’s hamster. Grasping at the food hung in the tree and probably getting pissed off because they couldn’t get it down, they were grabbing at everything else instead, even the first aid kit, and were carrying on like the crazed beasts which they were, sniffing and snorting their way through the campsite. The final toxic icing on the dreadful cake was what they did to the towels and the swim suits they had laid flat on the rocks earlier in the day. Ugh.

“Bears?,” Flapjack whispered to Grapes.

“I don’t think so,” Grapes whispered back. “But they’re Darwinian.”

“Darwinian what?” Flapjack was actually shaking.

“I’m going to count,” Grapes kept whispering. “I’ll count to three and we’ll jump out.”

“You jump out first,” Flapjack said.

At three, Grapes jumped into the darkness, followed shortly by Flapjack. A thousand shadows scurried back into the woods.  She laughed a little and heard Coconut yelling hysterically, “Mommy, what’s wrong?” “Nothing, Coco, just checking on the fire and having a smoke. Stay put, everything is fine.” Then Flapjack joined Grapes who was standing at the fire pit drinking out of a flask.

Grapes was talking so low that Flapjack had to step right in front of her face and lip-read. Grapes mouthed, “They were Darwinian.”

“What?” Flapjack mouthed back. “Is that a type of bear?|”

“No, I just mean they were so huge, like on top of the food chain. They were, like, Darwinian raccoons or something.”

“Really, raccoons. I’m sure they’re bears. Anyways, whatever they are, we need to get out of here. We’ll sleep in the canoes.” Flapjacks started to make her way back to her tent.

“No, no,” Grapes grabbed her arm. I’ll light a fire. I don’t think they’re bears, I’m pretty sure I saw little bandit eyes. It’s just they were as huge as bears. Anyways, they won’t come back as long as we have a fire going”

Grapes drenched everything in the fire pit with kerosene. She threw some rolled-up Kleenex from her pocket into the pit, lit a match and threw that in too. The fire kept burning itself out so she kept lighting matches and throwing them in. She started working through the toilet paper when there was no more Kleenex, and regardless of whether she used Kleenex or toilet paper, each time the match hit the kerosene, the flames flew up really, really high, then quickly died down.

When Grapes lit the last match, the fire shot up one last time and died down, this time for good. She picked up a saw and handed Flapjack an axe. “Just in case they come back,” she said. “You’re kidding, right?” Flapjack said.

“Kind of,” Grapes said, not very enthusiastically.

Flapjack’s head was aching with alcohol and fear and sleeplessness when she heard the first pitter-patter. She nestled close to Coconut and called it a night.

Twentieth century siren …

Next morning, Grapes, a 20th century siren if there ever was one, was standing naked on a rock under a flawless blue sky. Coconut was seated close by with a soggy deck of cards, practising how to shuffle them like a pro. Now and then, she glanced up at Grapes and giggled, still not that far from toddlerhood to find nakedness hilariously funny. Meanwhile Intellectus was trying as best she could to split her mind from her body and lose herself in a book. She sat on a big rock further up the shore. And then there was Flapjack, hung over and in a bad mood from the night before. “Aren’t you worried,” she asked Grapes, “if someone will see you?”.

“No, not in the slightest,” Grapes told her. “There’s no-one for miles and miles.”

“Well, look out there,” Flapjack pointed at a green canoe about 200 yards away.

“Mooooommmmmmm,” cried Intellectus. “Someone will see you if they haven’t already.” Coconut kept giggling.

Alliances are fickle things. Here’s what was going on:

Flapjack was pissed off at Grapes for a) nearly setting the forest on fire and b) flaunting her luscious body. Grapes was pissed off with Flapjack for being a) a sissy and b) a prude. Really, Intellectus was pissed off at both of them for being who they were, probably through minimum fault of their own. And Coconut, being on the body side of the mind body split, never liked Intellectus all that much anyway. Other than that, she wasn’t really pissed off at anyone until it dawned on her that they couldn’t cook any breakfast (she was looking forward to bacon and eggs) because they didn’t have any matches and they didn’t have any matches because her mom and her godmother had used them up the night before.

“So, what do we now?” Coconut wailed when she was offered trail mix.

Answer 1 came from Intellectus, “We leave immediately”

Answer 2 came from Flapjack, “We leave immediately.”

Answer 3 came from Grapes, “We flag someone down.”

By this time, Coconut was well on the side of her Godmother and agreed mightily with that suggestion, dumb as it was. Flapjack and Intellectus conceded and they all stood at the shoreline yelling, “Help, help. We need matches.”

It didn’t take long for a canoe to find them, in fact the very same colour of canoe (green) that they’d seen just a bit earlier. Inside were two rough-shaven men with long black pony tails. Watching them approach, Coconut whispered to Flapjack, “Those men look like Indians.”

“Shh, Coconut, don’t say that,” Flapjack said. “It could be taken the wrong way.” And as an aside, “Where the hell are the cowboys when you need them?”

The man in the stern had a tattoo of skeleton smoking a cigar on one arm and a rattle snake on the other. His biceps bulged with muscles and his legs were like two giant Colbassas stuffed into a pair of old jeans. But he had a wide easy smile that created a sexy disconnect with his big intimidating body. And his eyes, wow, they were mesmerizing, one being brown and the other blue.

The man in the bow, who was as scrawny as the other man was beefy, settled his gaze on Flapjack. He had a few tattoos of his own, monochromatic prison-blue, of symbolic things like knives and guns, and he had unsmiling black eyes. Flapjack stared back at him, and in a rare moment of straightforwardness she told him, “We ran out of matches last night.” He mumbled, actually shyly, that, that could happen, a person could run out of matches.

The big man in the stern had been staring all along at Grapes, absorbing her womanly beauty. She had been staring back at him, too, an electric energy pulsating between them, and while smiling coquettishly she asked him, BELIEVE IT OR NOT, if they’d like to join her  and the rest of them for breakfast. “If you’ve got matches,” she said, “I’ve got bacon and eggs hanging up in that tree.” She pointed to the scratched-up rucksack hanging precariously in the tree.  His smile got even wider and he said sure in a posh English accent, which led Flapjack to ask if he’d come to Algonquin Park all the way from the U.K.

“I spent a little bit of time there some years back” he said. “But now I’m in the pharmaceutical business.” He looked like he was trying not to laugh.

Then next thing, because Grapes had invited them, they were all standing around the fire pit where she had taken on a leadership role. She told Flapjack and Intellectus, who were being pissy and uncooperative, to get the food from the tree and re-wash the dishes and cutlery scattered across the campsite as a result of last night’s bear, I mean, raccoon attack. She told Coconut she could be her sous-chef. And she assigned manly things to the men to do like building the fire.

At some point, Flapjack excused herself to use the Thunder Box, that stinky hole in the ground which served as their toilet. Returning, with Deep Woods Off in one hand and toilet paper in the other hand, she heard the scrawny man’s soft mumbling voice, “Psst,” the voice said. Then BOOM, he jumped right in front of her.

From Day One of her unpredictable sexuality (whose isn’t?), Flapjack had a weakness for men with ponytails. She must have conveyed that unconsciously, emitting sound kind of animal attraction hormone, because he came closer, with a hopeful smile on his face. Once in even closer proximity, she should have and she possibly could have discouraged him, but her good sense froze and she engaged him conversation, at least she tried to. But he wasn’t like the big man in the stern who was charming and loquacious, full of stories and jokes. He was a Neanderthal, a Missing Link,  not really a Homo Sapiens by any stretch of the imagination, and regardless of the historical circumstances or the flukes of nature which made him thus, the  more Flapjack talked with him, the more alarmed she became.  “Well, we should go back now,” she said.

He picked up instantly on Flapjack’s rejection. “What? “I’m not good enough. Your girl friend likes my cousin. Fuck this.”

He grabbed her wrists and threw her to the ground. He jumped on top of her and called her names, like racial epithets, and such. Flapjack began to yell. The forest stirred in witness.

She hit him on the top of his head with a frying pan …

Carried miraculously on her little empanada feet, screeching a war cry that must have been embedded in her Chilean genes, a gift of the warrior Mapuche who never surrendered, their famous courage and their cruelty a match for the Conquistadores of Spain  who tried to destroy them. Well, that was the force, via the circuitous route of the short chubby Chileno bastard, that came to Flapjack’s rescue.  For just as the scrawny but ridiculously strong man with the pony tail looked up to see what was coming at him, she hit him on the top of his head with a frying pan.

He stopped moving right then and there, a dead-weight on Flapjack’s body. Not far behind Coconut, was the big man with the Colbassa legs. He stammered, “I’m so, so sorry, Flapjack. My cousin has problems. I thought it would do him good to get back to nature.  To get away from the city, you know. I’m so, so sorry.”

He lifted the man’s body off Flapjack, threw him across his giant shoulders and lumbered through the forest towards the shoreline, glancing back at Grapes intermittently. “I’ll call you in Toronto,” he told Grapes and to Coconut he said, “I have a present for you. I’ll bring it to your house, if your mom lets me.” Again, he apologized to Flapjack. And that, God damn it, was it.

“Did I hurt the bad man?” Coconut asked her mother. “Did the bad man hurt you?”

Flapjack stood up and dusted herself off . “And, no, Coconut, you didn’t really hurt that man. You just knocked him out. By the time he wakes up, he’ll be fine and we’ll be gone. And, no, he didn’t hurt me. It’ll take a lot more than that.”

Paddle on …

It was drizzling at first. Then the rain started to pound into the lake. The wind picked up. The waves got higher. Flapjack yelled, “PADDLE. PADDLE. PADDLE.” And through their burning effort, she and Coconut cut a course through the water.

Grapes and Intellectus were not moving forward at all. They were spinning around and around in the middle of the lake, their zig zag style of paddling, creating a complete 360.

Intellectus called to Flapjack for help, “What can we do to stop spinning?”

“It’s too hard to explain,” Flapjack yelled back.

Intellectus screamed at her, “We’re going to die here.”

“No, you won’t,” Flapjack was certain, well, almost certain, but she couldn’t raise her voice above the rain and wind to be heard so far away. Instead she roared at Coconut in the bow of her own boat, “Paddle on.”

How Intellectus and Grapes make it back to the outfitter’s before them was a miracle. “Where were you? What happened? How did we beat you back?” The miracle of that victory took the edge off how mad they were at Flapjack for leaving them stranded in the lake, that righteous rage enabling them to suppress any sympathy they surely must have certainly felt for Flapjack’s rough encounter on the way back from the Thunder Box. They were very huffy and pissed off all the way back to Toronto.

They should all have gone straight into therapy after that trip. Maybe if they had, none of the other really fucked-up things would have happened. Well, maybe some of the fucked up things would not have happened.

And that, my friends, is the story of THE TRIP BACK TO NATURE. Next: EXPLORE STORIES OF DESCENT STARTING WITH “FLAPJACK GETS STUCK IN THE CLOSET OF A DOMINATRIX.”