Essay

Transmogrified by Fire and Ice:

(And a disdain for Garfield)

“Now you can transmogrify things just by pointing at them! Say you don’t like the color of your bedspread. Well, you just zap it, and presto, it’s an iguana!” - Calvin

So there I was. Doha, Qatar. Sitting at the computer desk of the 2^nd floor of our villa with its upchuck green and mucous yellow paint scheme. I was perusing the information super highway full of its many roundabouts, Cul de Sacs, bloody 10 car pile ups, little old ladies in their Chrysler LeBaron’s with ceramic kittens glued to the dash and a hint of 10,000 spent cigarettes wafting through the air, and all other sorts of annoying bric-a-brac, in search of a future. Not just anyone’s future though. I would find no benefit in trying to figure out the when’s and where’s of Joe Nobody’s future. No, this was mine.

So there I was, in search of an open door to tomorrow. I was in my last year of school with no desires of pursuing any sort of post high school education. I didn’t want to be a doctor; I could live that life vicariously through the cast of E.R., without any of the residual guilt of lives lost under the knife. I didn’t want to be a lawyer; insert denigrating joke here. And Clown College was just too expensive and time consuming. No, I would defy the status quo, and NOT go to college. I was treading into waters that the rest of my small graduating class of 54 students would have found unfamiliar, and perhaps a little wet.

So there I was, and there it was. A small outdoor centered Christian Bible school with bi-weekly hiking trips, tucked away in the fjords of Norway. Ahhhh, such contrast! My mind and body breathed in the fantasized crisp cold air. But in the realm of reality, outside the window in front of me, beyond the AC controlled comforts of my home, the desert heat of South East Asia blazed across the Neo-Arabian cityscape carrying with it a saccharine aroma of date milk and biblical multitudes of feral cats in heat. On this particular day, those aforementioned smells were found courting with the stench of aged livestock urine and cheap gutter water cologne. My nose voraciously hungered for Norway and was on the brink of mutiny against my face if I did not take all necessary measures to take it there.

So there I was, having returned to my native abode in the Pacific Northwest with its granola, rain, left-wing politics, pants made of tree bark, lumberjacks, stoned out drop outs playing hacky sack, and every other facet that makes up Washington State. I would be there for the remainder of the summer, spending the days preparing myself for the transition from sand to snow. Shorts and sandals would not fare well in the frozen tundra.

Forays into subfreezing temperatures require but are not limited to:

1. Gloves to protect my digits from rabid and senile Old Man Winters frost bite

2. Gloves for my gloves (mitts as they are actually known) to keep them company on lonely nights

3. Sturdy, comfortable, polar bear stompin’ hiking boots

4. Gaiters (No relationship to our reptilian friends, but they do keep snow out of your boots)

5. A down jacket filled with the fuzzy insulating offerings of Mother Goose and all her little goslings

6. A back country hiking pack big enough to smuggle out prized seal pelts (relax, I never did…)

7. Various knick knacks and such, thermal skivvies, wool socks, some spares of those little plastic bits at the end of shoelaces and so on and so forth.

There is so much potential for the unexpected while hiking in backcountry, so you always try to be prepared and carry with you as much as possible while at the same time carrying with you as little as possible. The Outdoorsmen Conundrum.

So there I was. The summer had drawn to a close, and the gates to Valhalla, the paradise of Vikings, with its glorious halls filled with steins overflowing with ambrosia, opened before me as I said my goodbyes and stepped onto the plane, bound for Oslo. It would have been fitting to have left directly from the oil refinery ridden deserts of Qatar for Norway instead of leaving the comparably lush and clean surroundings of Washington, but the scent of camel feces still clung firmly to my nostrils and would not soon leave me. *Bing* You are now free to move about the country.

So there I was, slowly ascending to 35,000 feet

- "Portrait of a frightened man: Mr. Robert Wilson, thirty-seven, husband, father, and salesman on sick leave. Mr. Wilson has just been discharged from a sanitarium where he spent the last six months recovering from a nervous breakdown, the onset of which took place on an evening not dissimilar to this one, on an airliner very much like the one in which Mr. Wilson is about to be flown home--the difference being that, on that evening half a year ago, Mr. Wilson's flight was terminated by the onslaught of his mental breakdown. Tonight, he's traveling all the way to his appointed destination which, contrary to Mr. Wilson's plan, happens to be in the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone.”

with the 9 hour flight from Seattle to Amsterdam with a transfer to Oslo, and then from Oslo to Bodø (like Buddha but without the belly) where I would be picked up by a van for a 4 hour drive to my school in the tiny speck on the map village of Engavågen, but before any of this took place I had to survive my flight, and wouldn’t you believe it, I got stuck between the baby that was apparently born half megaphone/half baby, and a man suffering from uncontrollable muscle spasms and the worlds pointiest most painful elbows, and in front of me was the last woman on earth to experience the amazing technology of the reclining chair, so I could understand that she would be compelled during the entire duration of the flight to frequently marvel at the miraculous abilities of said chair with its up and down features, and here I was trying to enjoy some god forsaken steamed spinach with a dinner roll and pat of Land O’Lakes butter and feature presentation of Garfield: The Movie. Which by the way was a really smart step for Bill Murray because what better way to bring more Oscar Cred to your career then to give your voice talents to a film about a CGI cat based off the character of a newspaper comic that stopped being funny about the same time that Jim Davis conceived of the idea.

Me: “Wow, Garfield sure loves lasagna.”

Garfield Fan: “Hahaha! I know! Isn’t that hilarious?! I mean, he’s a cat! Cats are supposed to love cat food, not lasagna! Right?!”

Me: “Oh no, look out Odie, Garfield is about to kick you off the table…again…for the 10,000^th time.”

Garfield Fan: “Hahahaha! You’d think I wouldn’t find this gag funny since it’s pretty much the exact same formula as its 9,999 predecessors, but you’d be wrong because I’m a moron. Man. They should make Garfield into a feature length movie!”

I don’t know exactly how it happened; perhaps the movie sent me into a zombie like trance, but before I knew what was going on, I was stepping onto the tarmac at Bodø lufthavn and into my future.

So there I was, Norway. It was dark and blacker than a coal miner’s bathtub when I first arrived and it wouldn’t be until the following morning that I would be taking in a land of epic grandeur. Think Lord of The Rings but with thick festive sweaters, snow sports and more blonde hair. God spared no expense in carving the fjords and mountains that surrounded the little school I would call home for the next 9 months. The details of my year above the Arctic Circle have all been but lost to the annals of history and may some day drift off into the unknown forever, but what I can say is this – “So there I was, and now…here I am.”

PS - I apologize to anyone that really does enjoy Garfield. It was all in jest.