My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places (16 page)

Ed had made a huge grid of paint squares on the wall. The guest room looked like
The Hollywood Squares
. We stared at the grid for a long time. “Paul Lynde isn’t that bad,” I said.

“I could live with Charo,” said Ed.

After a half hour of this, we had to accept the fact that we didn’t care for any of them. We had just spent more money on sample-sized jars of paint than we’d spent on the wasted gallon of Peace Yellow. We’d been taken by the names, by peaches that turned out to be first aid supplies. This is the surprising thing about people who name paint colors: Many are color-blind. What else can explain why Bonfire is dark red or Greenfield Pumpkin is brown? Ed pointed out that I have never visited Greenfield, nor looked upon its winter squashes. “You don’t know, really,” he said. “Could be something in the water there.”

If only to get away from the depressing home décor scenario playing itself out in the guest room, I went downstairs and Googled
pumpkin
and
Greenfield
. I couldn’t find an image of a Greenfield pumpkin, but I did find a news item headlined “Pumpkin Launcher Accident in Greenfield, New Hampshire.” The operator of a catapult built for pumpkin-chuckin’ contests was knocked out when the device hit him on the chin.

“What color is the pumpkin launcher?” Ed asked. Lo and behold, it was brown. Ed surmised that
Greenfield Pumpkin
was a Benjamin Moore typo and that the person who named it had actually called it Greenfield Pumpkin Launcher.

“You know,” said Ed, looking at the chip, “it’s kind of nice.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Matches the rug.”

And so we went with Greenfield Pumpkin Launcher.

Change Is Not Good

A man’s front pants pocket
is a one-way portal to his dresser top. Coins go in, but they are never pulled back out and spent. I have seen my husband, Ed, receive 97 cents in change, dump it all in his pocket and then pull a dollar bill out for the tip jar. This appears to be a near-universal male trait. We have all seen the news stories of elderly men buried under the rubble when the bedroom floor finally collapses under the weight of 55 years of pocket change.

The Bank of Ed resides in empty sauerkraut jars and assorted broken crockery that has found a second career in finance. “Coins are heavy, but at least they’re dry,” the mug with no handle will say to the chipped cereal bowl.

One year, for his birthday, I got Ed a noisy, battery-powered machine to roll his coins. Unfortunately, this particular machine used special rolls that you had to send away for. By the time your special rolls arrived in the mail, your wife and children would have long ago jammed the machine by feeding it buttons and subway tokens just to see what happened.

Most men’s coins are rolled by a noisy, irritation-powered machine called a wife. I spent the better part of a Thursday evening rolling two years’ worth of Ed’s coins the old-fashioned way. On Saturday we loaded up two canvas tote bags full of money and pushed our way through the bank’s front doors, like robbers in reverse. We began piling the rolls on the narrow shelf in front of the teller’s window, where the missing and nonfunctional ballpoint pens live. The teller stopped us. “You’ll need to write your name and full 16-digit bank account number on each of those rolls,” she said. I obviously looked like the kind of person who pads her coin rolls with buttons and subway tokens. Just to see what happens.

A sympathetic woman who had been in line behind us said that the Lucky supermarket nearby had an automatic change-counting machine. While we drove there, I gently probed Ed about his change-hoarding habits. Why couldn’t he spend the coins as he got them? He explained that he set them aside on purpose, so that at the end of the year, he’d have a couple hundred dollars to do something fun with.

“Like driving coins down to Lucky?”

“Something like that.”

On the pavement outside Lucky, a workman was unloading pallets of canned chicken broth. There were hundreds upon hundreds of cans, stacked as high as the workman’s head. It was what the top of Ed’s dresser would have looked like if stores gave you chicken broth instead of coins for change.

On the front of the Coinstar machine was a sticker informing us that an 8.9 percent “counting fee” would be subtracted from our total unless we chose to receive gift cards—for Amazon.com, Starbucks, iTunes, Eddie Bauer—instead of cash. I was surprised to see iTunes on there because I think of coin rolling and change exchanging as a pastime of the middle-aged and elderly. I picture young people just throwing their change away.

In case there was any question as to whether you’d count us among the young or the middle-aged and elderly, Ed chose Eddie Bauer.

We began pouring handfuls of coins into the basket. “Can we trust it?” I said. “How do we know it’s not skimming?”

Not that I would know anything about skimming. The five or six dollars a week that I take from Ed’s coin stash for bus fare and parking meters is not skimmed. It’s a “rolling fee.”

The machine tallied up 5,288 coins. We now own a slip of paper entitling us to $403 in Eddie Bauer store credit, which will spend its days atop Ed’s dresser, alongside the broken mugs and cereal bowls and pallets of chicken broth.

One Good Tern . . .

Late one fall afternoon,
a flock of cedar waxwings descended on our backyard. I get excited by a bird with a crest. They’re the royalty, the showstoppers. I barreled into the den to get my binoculars. Ed was watching the game. “Cedar waxwings!” I yelled.

“St. Louis Cardinals!” Ed yelled back.

I paused in the doorway. “Have you ever even seen a cedar waxwing?”

“It’s a bird,” said Ed. “I’ve seen birds. They fly, they sing a little ditty.”

I was raised by bird-watchers. My mother filled bird feeders and cadged hunks of suet from the A&P butchers to hang on trees for the woodpeckers. At a young age, I learned the simple satisfaction of identifying a new bird all by myself and then making the decisive check mark on the life list in the back of the bird guide. No one notices birds in my husband’s family. They view bird-watching as a sort of quaint, perplexing mental illness. I have heard Ed refer to birders as people who pull their pants up a little too high.

When I first went to Florida with Ed and his daughters to visit his parents, I tried to drag everyone out to the Wakodahatchee Wetlands to see the storks and ibises.
Wakodahatchee
is a native word meaning “swamp that serves as a major mosquito breeding ground for the greater South Florida region.”

“Do we have to go?” Lily would say.

“It stinks there,” Phoebe would chime in.

I once dragged them out to the Everglades in search of the roseate spoonbill, a large storklike item with a bald green head and a long spatulate beak.

“Imagine trying to eat with no hands,” I said to Lily and Phoebe, hoping to spark their interest. “Imagine trying to pick up a fish with a set of mixing spoons that have been stuck to your face.”

Phoebe swatted a mosquito. “Imagine getting the hell out of here.”

Lily yawned. “Imagine going back to Nana’s and lying out by the pool.”

The late-afternoon sun had deepened the waxwings’ colors. The last quarter inch of a waxwing’s tail feathers is bright yellow, as though it had been dipped in paint. I don’t know why this should thrill me so, but it does. “Are you sure you don’t want to come see them?” I said to Ed. He was sure. I told him birding would be good for him. He could use another active hobby, something that gets him out into nature.

“That’s true,” said Ed’s friend Brian, who was watching the game with him. “Like me. I’m taking up golf.”

Ed frowned. “I’m taking up space.”

I recently bought a software program called Handheld Birds—a bird guide with birdcall audio files and checklists built in—which can be loaded onto a PalmPilot. While it was nice to have the birdcalls with me in the field, the appeal of a handheld device, for me, was more basic: Fewer people would peg me as a birder and think derisive thoughts about me. Instead, they’d think,
There’s a successful businesswoman checking her many pressing engagements while standing in the woods at 6 a.m. on a Saturday.

I soon went back to my bird guide. If I’m trying to identify, say, a new tern species, I need to see all the terns at once, laid out for comparison on a page or two. The handheld limits you to viewing one species at a time, though it does provide a lot more information on each of those species. You can zoom in on a blowup of the bird with its distinctive features pointed out—the blue bill of the ruddy duck, the white underpants of the pigeon guillemot. It’s possible I misread this and that what it says is “white underparts.” But I prefer to picture the guillemot standing out on the rocks in a pair of white underpants, no doubt pulled up just a little too high.

Talking the Walk

It began, as most backpacking trips do, in a ranger station.
The ranger was explaining to Ed and me that we would need a bear bag. This is a special food bag that you hang over the end of a tree branch so the bears don’t come into your tent and don’t get into your food. “Bears are too heavy,” the ranger said, “to go out on a limb.”

“Lot of bears up there this time of year?” asked Ed.

His tone was calm, conversational even, but I, unlike the bears, will go out on a limb and say that Ed was uncomfortable with the bear concept. As was I.

“No bears.” The ranger narrowed his gaze. “Marmots.”

It was as close as a park ranger gets to cursing. The marmot, according to one of the handouts he gave us, “will eat virtually anything” and will “chew through your pack to get food.”

I can never get a good fix on the forest ranger personality: calm and carefree—or quietly desperate? Most likely it’s something of a mix. In exchange for being able to live in places where the rest of us go for vacation, they are forced to wear bulky uniforms and have tedious conversations about permit fees and wilderness etiquette.

Ed stood at the rack of free informational handouts, carefully taking one of each. One had a crude trail map of this particular patch of the Sierras, leading him to believe we could make do without a real map. It was the sort of decision that causes friends and neighbors to shake their heads sadly:
To think they lost their lives for six dollars.

Consulting our crude map, we chose a trail that appeared to be a reasonable day’s hike for middle-aged people bearing 25-pound packs. That is to say, a short one. In the end, the trail turned out to be five miles long with a 2,000-foot elevation gain.

At a waterfall we believed to be the halfway point, we stopped for lunch. It was well before noon, but when Ed is hungry, it is best to address the matter. He will chew through your pack to get food. Besides, we were beat. The rushing water was barely audible over the sound of our panting.

“Beautiful spot,” I wheezed.

“Yup,” said Ed, massaging his knee. “We should come here when we’re ten years younger.”

Because we had only cheese and crackers and peanut butter for lunch, it was over dismayingly soon. Backpacking is an excellent dieting activity, as the normal desire to overeat is outweighed by the desire to keep one’s pack light.

Back on the trail, we passed an old stone cabin. A plaque informed us that it had belonged to the actor Lon Chaney. Ed wondered aloud how Chaney had managed to haul the stones all this way into the woods.

“Maybe that’s how he became a hunchback,” I offered.

Ed ignored me. He took out the map. “If the cabin is here,” he said, “then we’re barely a third of the way.”

We were silent for a moment, contemplating the distance ahead. A man on a horse passed us. Behind him were two more horses, carrying the backpacks of a group of hikers who had sped past us some time ago. “Remind me,” I said. “Why is it that we didn’t do that?”

A few hours later, we rounded a bend, and there below us was the answer to my question: a glacial lake, aqua-hued and sprinkled with shimmering spots of sun. No one else was around. We set up the tent and played Scrabble. As the sky turned pink, Ed cooked up some dehydrated beans and instant rice, which we ate with cilantro and hot sauce from a teeny plastic bottle that would later leak all over the camp towel.

It’s possible the food would have tasted just as good if horses had carried our packs—but I doubt it.

About the Author

Mary Roach is the author of
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
. Her previous works include
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife; Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex;
and
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void.
Her essays have appeared in
Vogue, GQ, National Geographic,
and
Wired.

For more information, visit us at
RDTradePublishing.com
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