Saturday, March 20, 2010

Stepford Deer, Designer Boots and Harvest Gold Toilets

I am not a cold weather person. I’m a Southern California girl and cold weather has never appealed to me. Ask my sister whose sole job in high school was to preheat my car if she wanted to avoid riding the bus to school. Ask my friends about my Christmas caroling method of staying in the car with the heat blasting and the window down. I use my heated car seats year-round and I live in the Deep South! So call me crazy when I decided to spend a long January weekend in the mountains of Virginia. Despite the cold and the snow I learned a few things:

1. It’s true…I still don’t wear practical footwear. Yes, boots are great for hiking. Mine have three-inch heels and were not meant for hiking the Appalachian Trail or snowy mountain paths. Even so, I didn’t let a little thing like that stop me.

2. Frozen paddle boats abandoned in the woods do not paddle and the ice covered seats are very cold but it does make for a fabulous photo shoot and a story. Who leaves their paddle boat in the woods?

3. The wind sounds different on the top of a mountain. Cold, hollow, and eerie. It truly makes you feel alone.

4. I forgot how the snow can form a crust on top like crème brûlée. I remember as children my friends and I would challenge each other to walk across without breaking through the surface. If I was careful, I could clutch a piece of the crunchy surface in my mitten like snowy peanut brittle.

5. It is not easy taking frozen fallen rocks from the side of the road, especially when they are stuck to each other with layers of fast-holding ice. A hatchet helps. Good thing I carry one around with me. I’m so Lizzie Borden.

6. The back roads in West Virginia are narrow and scary. Okay, everything in West Virginia is scary.

7. Just because the passengers in your four-wheel drive truck insist that you hit some West Virginian’s crazy dog who was trying to chase you off the road does not mean you actually hit the dog. So it is not necessary to stop and meet the West Virginian mountain man, especially if you distinctly remember not feeling a large bump in the road. It is permissible to stop if you have the hatchet ready.

8. Deer are creepy. Especially fields of deer. No cows, no horses, no goats, just creepy Stepford Wives’ deer. Pull up next to the fenced-in field of deer and they all stop eating at the same time, turn their creepy little deer faces to stare at you while twitching their gremlin ears and flicking their tails. Totally the stuff of horror films.

9. A port-a-potty in the middle of a snow covered field is apparently not unusual and is quite serviceable. Do not attempt to use the harvest gold 1970’s toilet on the side of the road in West Virginia. Back away.

10. I may have mentioned my habit of impractical footwear. I also have a similar habit of packing unsuitable clothing for winter weather. With that in mind, the best place and only place in town to buy a sweater is at the Goodwill. $3.50 is a bargain in my book!

11. I can still climb trees. Even in a cemetery. Even in designer boots with 3-inch heels.

12. The best coffee is at the Courthouse Café. A bottomless cup and they don’t care if you serve yourself or stay all day. I was sad to learn that the café closed and is now a snow-cone shack. I’m already cold! I don’t need snow cones.

13. Never drink a bottle of “J” wine and then attempt to follow the storyline in a movie. Even a movie with such a complex plotline as Tomb Raider. Along the same lines, do not drink a bottle of Spellbound’s Petit Syrah and attempt a thousand piece puzzle.

14. My grandmother is always right…wear a hat!

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