31 March 2008 by Sandy Hemphill
The Saga of the Best Bottle of Wine I Never Drank - Part 2
No one had brought much more than pocket change along because we’d never expected the chance to go shopping way, way, way out here in the wilderness. We pooled our meager holdings and bought as much beer as our money would buy. We drank the beer that night, supplementing our small but newly purchased supply with the odd six-pack some of our fellow volunteers had stashed into their duffel bags. Obviously, adult beverages were OK with this gang.
The little store recycled cans and paid us about a nickel for each can we returned. We saved every can and “reinvested” our beer fund each day on as much beer as our recycled cans would buy. This became a game to see how big a party we would have each evening as we also collected discarded beer cans gleaned from our workstations throughout the park.
The next day we split into groups and got down to some serious business. My group gathered before dawn at the KP tent, ate a quick breakfast, assembled sandwich lunches, along with fruit and snacks we stowed in our backpacks. Also in our backpacks, we each carried a gallon of water (almost nine pounds of water!), work gloves, sunscreen, insect repellant, first aid kits, flashlights, whistles to ward off wild animals and signal for help if need be, snake bite kits, blister packs, and anything else we thought we might need before returning to camp at the end of the day.
My group was headed up the mountain a few hundred feet, which meant a very meandering hike up, up, and up for about three and a half miles. Once there, we’d be tearing down a rock retaining wall that held up a side of the hill along a hiking trail. Tourists claimed it looked too civilized for such a remote wilderness area and distracted from the experience. It had to go.
Before beginning the hike, each volunteer grabbed a shovel, pick, or some other such tool. As we departed camp in the predawn darkness, mining tools over our shoulders, we began singing, and whistling, “Hi ho! Hi ho! It’s off to work we go. . .!”
My body wasn’t ready for this. It took me two hours just to get to get up the hill to the work site. My car commutes to work in the city never took this long.
But we had so much fun when we got there, and along the way, too. Somehow, contests developed – who could throw the biggest rock over the side of the cliff, who could through the most rocks the fastest, which two people could heave the biggest rock over, and games such as that. I’d never worked so hard while laughing so hard in my life.
By the end of the day, I could barely make it down the mountain to an absolutely scrumptious spaghetti dinner at camp. My wine would have been excellent with this feast but I just didn’t have the energy to open the bottle. And, after all that hard physical labor, I didn’t have much of an appetite, either. The wine stayed in the duffel bag.
My group did the same work for three days and each evening I just didn’t have the energy left to enjoy the wine with the appreciation I felt it deserved. It stayed in the duffel bag.
We were a long way from enough water to shower with. Deserts are like that, even those in the mountains. Some of our guys had rigged a sun shower in the only tree in sight that was tall enough for an adult to stand, and shower, under. Pretty much everything else around was cactus, rocks, and wildflowers.
This thoughtful team of bath engineers had even rigged up a shower curtain for privacy and a spread of flat rocks below so feet wouldn’t get muddy while in the process of getting clean. The rattlesnakes really loved our shower and took up residence before the first night was over. Our shower became more a conversation piece off in the distance than a cleansing reality.
There was a public shower facility in the park but it was about 30 miles away from our campsite. Vehicles and gas money were scarce and we had a long drive back home so we were very conservative about making this time-consuming journey.
Besides, bathing seemed to become less important when nobody else was bathing and the park rangers had shown us the way to a couple of natural hot springs along the river, although in locations that looked pretty “snaky” to me. But after long days of such hard, but fun, work, I was just too tired to spend the time or go to the effort very often.
After work the fourth day, however, I couldn’t resist. I jumped in back of the “shower truck” and splurged on the maximum – 3 minutes of shower time for 75 cents a minute. I felt so good when we finally got back to camp that I just curled up in my sleeping bag on my rocky ledge and quickly fell asleep. No drinking the wine that night.
This is pretty much the way the rest of the journey went. Just too tired to do my friend’s wine justice.
And there was the beer thing. Seems each day we were able to buy more beer than the day before, using only recycled cans for cash. We even elected a beer committee, chartered with buying the beer early enough in the day that it would be perfectly chilled by the time our work was done at the end of a long, hard, but tremendously rewarding day. After a few nights of “recycled beer,” as we called it, it seemed almost sacrilege to drink anything else.
The wine stayed in my duffel bag all week long.