Tiny Amish Ponies Cure Cancer

I had forgotten how good it felt to sleep on the ground. I had forgotten how uncomplicated time is when the only thing governing it is the sun. It rises, you rise. It sets, you fall to sleep without strange lights or meddling ringtones to tell you otherwise. A fire is infinitely more interesting to watch than Hardball.

We went camping this weekend in northern Missouri in an area called the Green Hills, a collection of glacial deposits that are uncharacteristically hilly and beautiful for that part of the state. We were also in close proximity to Jamesport, an Amish community established in the 50's if I remember correctly. It had been a small forever since I had left the J-O-B and the city behind for an excursion beyond the state line that didn't require an amplifier. The winter is bound to get complicated and this trip was to be a little vacation before the cold and the medical B.S. hemmed me in to town for a good long while. It could not have been more perfect. I was half prepared to come back to KC having someone in my party gored by the last living Grizzly in Missouri (I've been so lucky lately), but we all returned unscathed.
The most dangerous thing that happened the whole weekend was the continual menagerie of cute and small animals that kept turning up; several kittens, a puppy, a small collection of doe-eyed calves, a precocious Jack Russell, a pack of stray hound dogs, and to top it all off, a pair of miniature Amish ponies pulling a cart. Really, miniature ponies? Does the universe just revel in fucking with me? The fact that I am not harboring the puppy, the kittens, the pack of hounds, the Jack Russell, the miniature ponies and their tiny little cart are testament to my rock-like inner strength. Or it could very well have been my husband, unmoved by my pleas, shaking his head and laying down an unsympathetic "NO". He apparently does not believe that tiny Amish ponies cure cancer.
I lived in a tent for awhile, what seems a hundred years ago, while I was getting ready to go Buddha school in Colorado. It was an incredible and uncomplicated time. There were no high-flung-back-to-nature-Gary-Snyder-on-a-mountaintop reasons for it. I just didn't have any money so I lived in the woods. My telephone was a quarter operated affair at a four way stop in Nederland, a four mile walk. Forget the Internet, TV, a coffee maker. We cooked outside on greasy stones and hung our wood smoked clothes and snacks in trees to keep the real live bears away. There were no walls.
I look back now and remember it being perfect but it was also full of difficulties, and if memory serves me a food poisoning episode without a bathroom finally moved me from the woods into a cabin I could afford. But worries were basic then; will it rain, will it snow, will there be enough wood to keep us warm? I did a lot of walking in the woods alone and the silence of that was an incredible listening tool. Away from the noise and chatter and general electrical hum of the life we know as normal is another life, another way of knowing and thinking that is sharpened only when the layers of all of this "civilized living" are shrugged away. Now that sounds ridiculous coming from a bourbon-swilling expletive-spewing CNN devotee such as myself. Hippie bullshit, right? But we've all lived strange lives to get to where we are now.
So the dog and I left our napping cohorts this weekend for a walk alone in the woods. After about ten minutes of manic snuffling she settled into walking on ahead of me at a measured pace. The woods were not as dense as up in Colorado. They've been cleared, tilled, and reclaimed several times since the Oto Indians were run out west, but the Missouri parks folks are trying to restore them to their native state. Billie and I half ran down a rocky hillside and across a dry creekbed where we poked around in the dirt, turning over rocks to see what was underneath. We moved on to a clearing and out of the right side of my peripheral vision came a white tailed deer bounding across the trail and on up the hillside. The dog and I both stopped and watched it disappear. It was like some sort of Disney movie and I half expected the birds to start talking and dwarfs to start marching out of the shadows. Billie didn't run. She just sort of looked back at me and then back to the hill where the really big and bouncy dog went. We kept walking.
We build walls and put things inside them, build fences around them, and call them our own. We surround ourselves with distractions, levels of technology that can keep us from interacting with people for days at a time, and then we wonder why we're lonely. I don't know why camping this weekend (at a relatively well-appointed campsite mind you) got me thinking about all this stuff. Things just seem more precious now. Laughing with four of my favorite people around a fire seemed surreal, stolen from time. The dog almost getting hit by a deer on a trail in the woods goes completely against my seemingly normal ways of thinking. Not being on a 24-hour-news-cycle schedule punctuated by electric light and important incoming messages for just 48 hours righted me a little bit, snapped the bigger picture into focus and steeled me for the bullshit fixing to rain down soon. I wasn't sick this weekend. I was just some anonymous piece of a bigger thing spinning from sunset to sunset, unencumbered by appointments and second opinions, diagnoses or projected outcomes of treatment. No one stuck me with a needle or measured a damned thing and there were no mirrors to remind me that I don't look the way I feel. There were no walls to hide in.