There’s something about going home. 

On the one hand, it’s a beautiful thing.  The environment is the same.  The same number of pine trees.  The same, slightly moved, clearcuts of recently harvested trees.  The same planted forests.  The same log trucks. The same stores with the same people working in them.  My youngest niece is “growing like a weed” as they say there.

On the other hand, it’s sad.  Some of the stores have closed.  The roads are worse, are newly paved or in the process of being paved for the first time.  The paint on dads house is a little more faded.  A place along one eve is beginning to rot a little.  The old man is noticeably older.  My youngest niece is growing up in pictures.

While I’m there I try to focus on the good things but the sad things creep in and nag at me like an annoying mosquito buzzing near your ear on a dark night.  It’ll slowly creep in getting louder and louder and louder until you slap yourself in the head like an idiot and it goes away… for a while.   My step-sisters boyfriend is working on pops’ house and he’s a painter who’s planning to spruce the place up so that’s something that I don’t have to worry with.  The old man just had a massive surgery which should put him back on his feet for a good while.  There are counters for most of the bad things so… focus.

As soon as I could meet the familial obligations  (or, at least, cover enough bases to prove that I’d been there. Sorry Aunt Jessica!) I snuck off into the woods.

My brother and I drove his truck out to the camp to check up on things before I committed to living there for a week.  The camp is on a property behind several other properties.  Many of them leased for hunting so there is an iron gate across the road.  The gate is a two piece affair made out of pipe that meets in the middle of the road and is joined by a chain with six or seven locks on it.  Each person with access rights to any property behind the gate has a key to one of the locks.

We discovered that someone had changed one of the locks and that the key that we had no longer worked.  Which sounds like a minor setback until you realize that we’re an hour from anyone that we know and 15 minutes from the nearest paved road.  It’s another three miles of dirt trails to get to the camp and we have brought a lawnmower and a trailer full of gear so walking the rest of the way in isn’t going to happen.     We are figuratively and literally in the boondocks and our progress has been halted by a single master lock.  But no matter, we’re rednecks and rednecks solve problems like this regularly.  There’s no question about whether we’ll get in eventually, we’ll get in.  The only question is how long it’ll take us to figure it out and how much it’ll cost us in the end.

As he looked for a way around the gate through the woods (he has an F250 4×4 too) I search through his toolbox for bolt cutters to cut the offending lock.  Failing both of these quests we stand on the road staring at the gate.  One of us calculating how much trouble we’ll get into with Dad for jerking the gate down and the other… well, I don’t know what HE was thinking but I’m sure it was along the same lines because at about the same time we realized that the gate was attached to 6X6 Creosote posts with lag bolts. 

Most of the hinges had six bolts and various nails and spikes driven into them to secure them but that top right one only hand two lag bolts holding it.  so 5 minutes with a 3/4 inch socket and a ratchet left us with nothing more to do than lift the gate off of the bottom hinge and open both  sides of the gate as a unit.  For the next few days that’s how I’ll get in and out.

We drive the last few miles into the camp and check things over.  He’s missing his keys to the camp itself so we spend another 10 minutes locating a ladder (under the pump shed), finding a window that’s unlocked (the one with the tiny window unit A/C) and breaking into our own camp (we put it back). Another disaster averted.

We get the lights going and the water pump and discover that every water pipe in the place is busted.  The camp is about six foot above the ground on posts so all of that water spewing from about 70 feet of busted pipe was actually pretty spectacular to watch. 

Someone closed things down improperly last fall and left water in the pipes over the winter.  This is going to hurt.  We take a quick inventory of the damage and head back home. 

My brother is headed back offshore to work the next day so later that day I say goodbye to him and then drive to the local Stines to buy everything (mostly) that I will need to fix the pipes before trundling off into the wilderness on my own. 

That night.  Sitting on the porch of a camp on a swamp in central Louisiana 10 miles from the nearest house, with no working toilet and a thousand miles from home I found a peace that we all seek.  I tend to find it more regularly than most, even at home, but it’s always nice to find when you do.   Sitting there, in the darkness listening to the birds and frogs sing the sun to sleep. 

I’ll be herding people into the camp from various places the next day and working on the pipes to get the camp in shape but…  that’s another story.

 

 

 

Peace

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