Thrilling Moose Adventures of the Third Kind

When my parents and I got to my aunt’s cabin up on Togwotee Pass, the first thing my aunt did was tell us about this moose that had been wandering around the yard last night and that morning. She even had pictures to show, and let me tell you, I was immediately jealous. I’d never seen a moose so close before, and she had a picture of a cow and her calf right up next to her front door!

The moose wasn’t there at the moment, but my aunt told us that she usually came around at nightfall. So we went down for a walk to the nearby river, where my aunt fly fishes. A part of the ground next to the river was a sort of brushy marsh land; the ground was saturated with water, and you sunk into it if you went too far into the brush. It was in there that my dad spied a brown mass of fur. He said it was fairly low down and a sort of lighter brown, not a dark chocolate – near the color of the calf.

Try as we might, we couldn’t see it. We went back to the cabin, ate, and settled down for the night (mostly because mosquitoes were eating us alive). The next morning, I was woken up to my mom excitedly saying “Lindsay! There’s a moose outside!” I immediately rolled to get off the bed – and almost fell to the floor, since I was on the top bunk of a bunk bed – and ran to the window.

The most adorable thing you could ever wake up to.

There they were, a moose cow and her calf. They were hanging around a salt block my aunt’s neighbor had put out.

The calf was decidedly more interested in me than the salt.

Eventually, the cow and calf wandered off into the treeline. I guess they were tired of being models. We didn’t see them again until that night, when we watched the cow chase off another moose – it was so dark that we couldn’t see if it was a bull or a cow, but our answer came the next morning.

A cow, though definitely larger than the first.

I guess the cow and her calf decided to stay away from the area with this one hanging around, because we didn’t see those two again. This cow hung around for the rest of the weekend. On Sunday, when we were driving back up the drive to the cabin, we had to stop because the moose had stepped out onto the path. I hadn’t really appreciated the size of the creature before this. The moose was barely ten feet away, and towered over us in our car. We were in my parent’s Trailblazer. Trailblazers are fairly big. This moose was a good three inches bigger.

And then another car came down the drive from the opposite direction, and she bolted towards us. My dad quickly put the car in reverse, and luckily the cow turned and went behind my aunt’s cabin. We wasted no time in pulling up in front of the cabin, getting out of the car and going to watch her. I, of course, had to get another picture, and threw caution to the wind this time.

Closer than you should really ever get to a wild animal.

She wandered around the cabin for a good hour or so before finally wandering away. We didn’t see any more moose, and the next day we left. But I think, giving the heart-pounding moment we had when the moose ran at our car, we saw enough moose to last us some time.

Soshone National Forest

A couple of weeks ago, I took a trip with my parents to the mountains of Wyoming, where my aunt owns a cabin. It was a great trip, for many reasons. I got to see my mom’s side of the family, got to go to a state I’d never been to before, saw some moose – but mostly, it was a great trip because of the gorgeous scenery we found ourselves in.

A view of the Tetons, just outside Jacksonhole, Wyoming.

My aunt's cabin in Togwotee Pass, at 8,500 ft elevation.

We were right between Teton National Forest and Shoshone National Forest; technically, Togwotee (Toe-go-tee) Pass is in the Teton National Forest, but by the time we reached the turn-off for the cabin we had entered Shoshone National Forest.

Brooks Lake

The mountain ridge we hiked around at Brooks Lake.

We could have actually climbed those mountains, but the climb we went on was hard enough. I don’t know what elevation we hit at this point, but by the end of the hike we were at 9,000 feet.

Not quite 9,000 feet, and we found our first mound of snow. This was in the middle of July, mind you. Pictured here is my mother.

We had a bit of a snowball fight here. My Uncle Ron hit my dad in the arm with a snowball. So I turned around and hit my Uncle Ron in the chest with a snowball in retaliation. Good times.

Upper Jade Lake, covered in ice.

There was a guy ice fishing on this lake. That’s how frozen it was. After this point, we had to turn around and go back the way we came. The snow bank came all the way down to the edge of the ice-covered lake, and no one wanted to slip and fall in. As it was, we had to walk through a good mile of snow to get here and back. It was kind of ridiculous. We kept falling through the snow, and on the way back the snow had melted enough that I just skated over it like a penguin.

That hike was exhausting; we went a good four miles, two of which was in the snow. It was worth it, though.

The next day, we went to see some falls. This was close to my aunt’s cabin – close enough for my grandmother to come, which I think she enjoyed. The falls really were beautiful.

I can't remember the name of these falls, but they were gorgeous. And intense, due to all the late spring run-off.

All the pictures I’m giving you for now. The moose I saw deserve their own post, and their own story, I think. All in all, it was an excellent trip. My aunt’s cabin was the type of place writers dream of going to work on their books/poems/what-have-you. It was freezing at night, and there were mosquitoes galore, but it was gorgeous and the air was so crisp and clean… I never wanted to leave.

July 4th always requires copious amounts of alcohol for me.

Unlike some of you out there, who are either much more brave or much more stupid than I am, I cannot handle the fourth of July celebrations here in America. In fact, I’m pretty sure that my fourth of July should be spent in Canada. Probably the whole weekend leading up to it, too. But alas, I do not have a passport, nor anywhere to stay for that long. So instead I have to deal with my inane fears a different way.

Getting completely and utterly shitfaced.

See, I have a problem with fireworks. If any of you have a dog, you pretty much know my reaction to them. For those of you who don’t, let me paint you a picture of what my fourth of July’s previous to living a college town life have been like: Me, huddled in a corner of my room, headphones in and iPod turned as high as it can go, trying to read a book and just maintain myself with my dog lying next to me shaking in fear. I usually am shaking a little, too. The shaking dies down when there’s a brief respite in the noise level, but once it starts up again my heart is pounding in my chest and I feel that the end is surely nigh, we are all going to die in about two seconds because some idiot certainly just sent a firework spiraling into one of the many evergreens towering above our house.

I don’t like the fourth of July. I haven’t since I was a kid when I suffered an unfortunate sparkler incident and my brothers liked to feed me stories of people losing their fingers or noses or something, and I don’t think that I ever will. At least, not without something to make me relax and cope.

You know how most people deal with dogs that go crazy during the fourth of July? They lock them in the house and hope they don’t pee on everything or have a heart attack. This used to be the plan of action for me.

You know how some people deal with dogs that go crazy during the fourth of July? They feed them drugs to relax them and make them completely chill with everything that could possibly happen ever. This is basically what my friends do to me. They provide me with copious amounts of alcohol (actually, this year I’m supplying myself and them with it) so that they can set off fireworks and I can still enjoy their company. Otherwise I’m pretty sure last year would have been spent with me hiding in the nearest tree and refusing to come down.

This is the same plan we have this year for me. After we all go to the river, we’re going to have a huge bbq and then my friend swill set off fireworks. There may even be another Roman Candle War (in which two idiots, goaded by the surrounding idiots, aim and fire Roman Candles at each other, trusting their instincts to fling them out of the way in time). All I know for sure is that I’m getting shish kabob’s and red rum mixed in apple juice. Pretty sure this combination will make for a good fourth of July this year.

P.S. I’m going to do my best to get tomorrows flash fiction up before I leave, even if it means that it’s just another microfiction piece. Yes, I’m cheating a little. But I figure it’s the same basic concept, so that’s alright.

Dear WordPress, today I fell into a river and read The Hunger Games.

Yeah, that’s right. I fell into a river. Well, okay. It was really a crick, but I claim the right to call it a river for the sole reason that I fell in it. Every body of water seems bigger than it is when you fall in it. Honestly, the story itself isn’t that exciting. I was out on a photo safari so I could use up a roll of film (which I did) and I ended up under a bridge taking pictures and just stepped back too far. My heart jolted when it happened; one minute, both feet are planted firmly on the snowy ground, the next moment my left leg is diving down unnaturally. The cold paled in comparison to the intense fear I felt in that moment: That I would fall completely in; that I had just lost my footing on the earth (a terrible and real fear of mine; I can’t climb ladders or stand anywhere that might give way without having a panic attack); that I would get my camera soaked (even if it’s a film camera, I’m 99.9% certain that this would not be good). Luckily, my camera is fine, I got myself out of the river without any further damage, and it was warm enough out that I made it back to my car and then my apartment without my leg turning blue.

So that is the story of how I fell into a river today. I do not suggest anyone repeating the experience.

I also finished reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins today. It seems to be the New Big Thing, and I’ve actually been meaning to read it for a while. The problem is that I don’t have much money right now, and what I do get goes to bills, food, or photography equipment. Then, on Friday as I went to the bus stop late in the day to await a bus that would take me back to campus, I saw it there. It laid there innocently on the bench, looking thoroughly depressing in how its pages curled back due to the cold that chilled the air, and my heart went out to it, and to the person who had left it. Had they been busy? I wondered, Had they been reading and seen the bus suddenly in front of them and put the book down in a desperate attempt to find money or a bus pass and just simply forgot it there? The book had not been finished, I saw that immediately – there’s a dog-eared page (which I have left) near the end. They were a mere 50 pages from the end! So close, so intense!

And yet I took it anyways. It was left there, after all, so carelessly. (My roommate later mentioned that it was there when she was at the stop earlier, suggesting the person had never come back to look for it there.) I realize how terrible of me this seems, and believe me I struggled with the decision myself. In the end, though, I decided to take it and the guilt, at least for now. I put it in my backpack and started reading it yesterday morning. Now, I have finished. Tuesday (the next school day) I will put it back on the bench, with a note of thanks for the person who left it and allowed a fellow human to get attached to what proved to be an excellent book. It would be nice if he/she could forgive me for taking their book, but I will fully interested if he/she can’t.

(WARNING: AFTER THIS POINT, THERE ARE SPOILERS. BECAUSE THAT IS HOW I’M ROLLING HERE. IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED, STOP READING NOW. IF YOU KEEP GOING, YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO COMPLAIN.)

It was an excellent book, to be sure. The story was engaging, the main character charming in her own way and the world thoroughly fascinating. Collins did an excellent job in telling the story – well, not telling, per se. She very much shows us the story, bringing us into a world of post-America, a world of poverty and government cruelty through a series of very detailed scenes and excellent use of dialogue. Yes, that’s right: dialogue. Not usually heard in compliments of a book, but she writes dialogue very well. Every character has his/her own distinct style of talking; the narrator’s vocal voice is similar to her mental voice, but noticeably clipped, shortened, and less engaging (which is so like her). Peeta has his own voice – sweet, almost, and definitely with a strong vibe of innocence throughout the book. The dialogue made the story run so smoothly, I hardly realized when I had read half of it.

The book is not perfect, though. There were many flaws in the writing itself, though they all seem to be stylistic choices. It stays true to the narrator, anyways. In some places it still bugged me, though. Even if it was true to the narrator’s mental voice, I wanted so much for her to stop using incomplete sentences. It just got annoying and took me out of the story. Still, I kept going, wanting to know what would happen, which is the mark of a well-written story. I couldn’t put it down very easily.

I think the only thing that truly annoyed me was how Collins dealt with Peeta. I haven’t read the other two (obviously) so I will have to wait and see before I decide on him, but so far I really don’t like him. Perhaps this has to do with his name – I pronounce it phonetically, and it’s just like this terrible pizza place we have in town called Pita Pit. Worse pizza you’ll ever have, and so the name has a negative connotation from the get-go.

That’s not quite it, though. The main reason I don’t like him is because I am angry that he lived. It just didn’t seem realistic; I felt like Collins kept him alive for the story’s sake, not because he actually would have lived. Yes, I expected him to live past the first day for the story’s sake because otherwise it would not have been interesting, but I honestly thought – or maybe just desperately hoped – that he would die. Peeta is weak. There is no getting around that fact. He is weak and he should not have made it through those games – would not have, I’m sure, if not for Katniss, and even with her I feel like he just shouldn’t have survived. But he did, because he’s needed for the story.

And this utterly and completely disappointed me. I can move past it because this world has me so captivated that I can’t just stop here, but it still disappointed me. The rest of it was good, though, and I can’t wait to see what happens in the next two. I hope desperately that Katniss changes things, because her system of government frustrated me to no end. I kept finding myself going, why can’t they just say no? Why can’t the kids just go “fuck you!” and refuse to fight? If even one year the tributes acted as martyrs, the games would end or at least start to crumble, I’m sure of it; the Capitol would not want to even show it, and it might get the Districts to do something. And yet, the kids fight, year after year, killing one another because they have no choice. I’m almost certain that the guilt of it is the real reason why Haymitch drinks.

I don’t have much more to say right now, at least until I read the next two. Her style, though flawed, works well for the book, and I enjoyed almost every minute of it. The book is fast-paced, part of which is due to being excellently structured. Nothing seems like extra information; I cannot think of a single thing in this book I would take out due to being unnecessary, and that’s impressive.

So, all in all, I give this book a solid A-. (It lost points mostly for Peeta.)

That’s all I’ve got for today. Fell in a river, and The Hunger Games. Perhaps one day soon I’ll talk about my own writing.

Enjoy your blended monarchy, readers.
~lmmixer