Back in Black!

Well, I'm finally back from the woods. It's really amazing what 10 days in a canoe completely removed from everything except nature will do for you. Strip away all the pressures and problems of your life, and everything is just perfect.
Granted it'd be considerably harder if we were living there full-time and all. We go up there with enough food and clothes for 10 days, not 10 years. We don't have to worry about caching food for the winter. Or somehow making and repairing our clothes. But that's not my point. When the sun comes up, we got up. When it went down, we went to sleep. The only thing we really had to decide on a daily basis was where we were going to fish and where we wanted to have shore lunch. Everything else just took care of itself. Rain, wind, cold, you can't control any of it. You just wake up, see what the day has given you, and go about your business doing what you need to do. If it's too windy to safely go out in the canoe, you try to fish from shore and find something else to do. Take a nap, read some of the newspaper we bring to start fires, explore the island (again). Once you stop trying to force yourself to do things that clearly can't be done, life gets pretty simple.
And once you stop running around so fast you start to notice all the great things around you. When was the last time you just took some time to watch the clouds go by? Or check out a storm front as it moves in or out? How about just watching another animal go about it's day? It's amazing what you can learn about the world around you once you start watching it and paying attention to how you fit in it.
Yeah, I'm going to be all mellow and reflective for at least the next 4 or 5 days. I come back all idealistic about what I want to do with my life, people I need to get back in touch with, changes I need to make, etc. And it all inevitably falls apart as soon as I get back to work. Probably by Wednesday of next week it'll all be over and done. But you never know. Sometimes these changes and thoughts stick with me.
And of course I'll be posting various stories and events from the trip as time goes on. And once Dad gets the pictures developed, I'll post some of those. I know, analog film! But when you have to travel 20 miles to get where you want to get, every pound counts. And neither of us wants to carry in extra batteries to power a digital camera for 10 days when analog works just fine. Pictures can't even capture 1% of the actual image, so we don't need it. The photo just serves as a way to remind ourselves and jog our memory. That's where the real image is. The sights, smells, sounds, etc all together.
But it is good to be back. No more crapping in a hole in the woods. No more wearing the same dirty clothes for 4 days in a row. No more having to slice up ~5 fish every day for lunch and dinner. Every normal activity becomes so much easier to do. Kinda like this! Sure beats trying to send smoke signals over the horizon to try and communicate with someone else.