Chapter 17

Morpheus, the God of dreams, wrapped us in a cocoon of dreams. But when he did, he forgot to include a bathroom. I awoke with a four-alarm “urgent need to go” moment as my bladder trembled in an effort to hold back a flood of biblical proportions. It would be wonderful to wake up gentle and slow like I used to do in my younger days. I used to enjoy the delightful transition from slumber to wakefulness. No such luck. Personal plumbing issues are now at the top of my morning’s To-Do List.

I groaned as I rolled away from Alice and searched under the heap of clothes I used as a makeshift pillow. I breathed a sigh of relief when my fingers found my torch. My sigh turned into a groan. Each LED bulb glowed no brighter than a dying firefly.

Damn it! I’d forgot to turn it off before I fell asleep. In an instinctive reaction, I shook the flashlight as if that would be enough to wake up a few extra sleeping electrons. I examined my light for the traitor it had become. The Chinese manufactured device carried a guaranteed battery life of twenty-five hours. No way the charge should exhaust itself after a few hours of sleep. Friggin’ imports.

My little light was almost useless. A dozen lightning bugs would’ve shed more light.

Hauling myself out of the sleeping bag turned out to be a real chore. My stiff muscles protested every move I made and my back was killing me. Payback for not having an air mattress. The atmosphere in the tent was rather brisk, a polite way of saying, “too damn cold.”

First things first, I crawled naked past our saucepan, AKA: a chamber pot. Screw it! I didn’t want to bother cleaning our makeshift toilet; besides, we would later need to melt snow to replace our drinking water. I crawled to the entrance and climbed to my knees. An upset bride once asked a famous advice columnist, “My husband insists on urinating in our backyard. Why does he do that?”

Her answer became the stuff of legend, “Because he can.”

I shuffled forward and, plumbing in hand, I sprayed the dry, dusty ground of our cave with a monsoon of yellow rain. The first moisture in more than a hundred years.

Lighting a cigarette and holding my prick in my right hand, I glanced at my wristwatch. The time glowed a few minutes after 11:30 in the morning. Huh?

We slept for less than three hours? Then I noticed the date in the tiny square on the dial’s surface. Holy shit! We’d slept around the clock and then some. While I got busy irrigating the powder dry soil, goosebumps were busy marching in lockstep across my naked body.

Once those little bumps at the base of our body hairs served an evolutionary purpose. They helped us fluff up our fur to better insulate us from the cold. When we were threatened, the same fluffing mechanism raised our body hair and turned our ancestors into instant Chia pets, making us appear a bit larger to potential adversaries or hungry predators. That was then, and this is now.

In the eons since, we’ve lost most of our fur, and the bumps no longer keep us warm and fluffy. Instead, the zillions of goose pimples give our skin the appearance of used sandpaper. Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor?

Shaking the last drops into the night, I collected my thoughts. At least I had one thing going for me; things could only improve. There is no place to go except up when you start your day naked and freezing while pissing in a pitch-black rattlesnake den. Right?