The adventure of Me, Lee and Han Son Hiking and running into Carrot Sale

[Brownlie]

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Me and Lee and Han Son were taking a hike, not because I liked hikes, I didn’t, (but I owed them a favor). Before too long my face would start sweating, and the sweat would run down into my eyes and make them burn, and my glasses would keep trying to fall off my face. I carried several bandannas with me to wipe my face, but pretty soon they would all be wet. I hung them from my belt and through the epaulet like things on my shoulders, only they were not real epaulets as they were not fancy, just a piece of cloth sewn to the shoulder and buttoned at the neck, but I didn’t know what to call them, so I called them epaulets. Before long though I was having to use damp bandannas because the ones I had hanging all over me just didn’t dry fast enough, despite the white hot heat of the sun, and the blast furnace of wind that was channeled down the valley we were walking through. You had to watch your feet, not only because of all the poisonous snakes like water moccasin, copperheads and rattlesnakes, but because we were walking down a dry creek bed that was filled with round stones that could twist your ankle just like that. For my two cents the water moccasin was the worst, not only were they ugly as sin, but were very aggressive. I remember watching my dad trying to kill one with a shovel. That snake was jumping a good six feet in the air trying to get to my dad. That snake was pure dee angry, and not just because my dad was trying to chop his head off. Most snakes will run from you if you make enough noise, which is why you hardly ever see copperheads, despite the fact they gleam like, well…copper. The rattlesnake will give you a warning if you are getting close, but a water moccasin will come after you, and no one wants to be bit by one of those things being as nasty looking as they are. Plus it does hurt some, kind of feels like someone put two nails in a baseball bat and then hit you in the leg just as hard as they can. Course there is one other snake around that you hardly ever see, and that’s the coral snake (red and yeller, kill a feller). No one hardly ever gets bit by a coral snake except stupid people. I knew a guy once that was out camping and got so drunk he passed out just laying in a pile of leaves. Well it so happens that coral snakes like piles of leaves, and I guess he just wandered across this big lug that weren’t moving, and so being curious, I suppose, he sort of gnawed on this guys finger and then went on his way. I suspect that he didn’t think the guy tasted so good with all that alcohol in him. Well as it happens coral snakes have a powerful toxic venom, and that guy went and died before he woke up. Anyway, snakes weren’t our concern that day, it was water. We each had taken a bottle of that Ozarka water with the sports top on it, but it weren’t long before we ran out. Lucky for us there was this park called Hyde Park (I guess because it was so well hidden), that was right next to this dried out creek, and it had two water fountains. There was a taller one for adults and a shorter one for not adults. Well, we drank our fill and then filled up our bottles. That was some mighty fine tasting water because it came from a well that went right into the aquifer. None of us knew what an aquifer was, but we knew it had good tasting water. Well about that time along came this bully name of Carrot Sale. He said, “I can’t believe you are drinking that water, it taste like an old woman’s piss.” Then he laughed like he had said something funny. He was always saying things like that to try and make a person look stupid, but mostly he just made himself look like and idiot, what we call in the south all swing and no punch! But what he said got me to thinking so I asked him, how was it that he knew what old lady piss tasted like (I really wasn’t trying to be mean, I was just curious). Well he turned red in the face, and started into sputtering and saying things that sort of sounded like words but we couldn’t make them out, and finally he points his finger at me and says, I’ll get you Ron when your girlfriend isn’t around to protect you. He always called me Ron, although that wasn’t my name. Lee and Han Son and I just looked at each other then started giggling, which progressed into laughing and pretty soon me were rolling on the ground holding our sides because we just couldn’t stop laughing. The minute we would start to get a handle on it, someone would give out with a nose snort, and we would be off again. I’m not rightly sure what it was we were laughing at, maybe because Carrot Sale seemed to think that Lee and Han Son was my girlfriend. I told them maybe Carrot Sale wanted Lee and Han Son to be his girlfriend which of course led to another round of rolling on the ground. Finally we got a hold of ourselves and decided we had, had enough hiking for one day. So we headed up the trail to the parking lot where we could catch a bus back to our car, but that’s a story for another day.
























©2014
–Erthona


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I liked the part about the guy passing out in the pile of leaves.