Everybody Called Him "Wilkes"

Brainerd, MN--In the Brainerd Public Library, resting and drying out after an 18-mile day. It was raining last night and into this morning and we were considering taking a day off, but the rain stopped and I kayaked. Six miles in, I had to portage around a dam (providing the hydropower which now constitutes probably no more than ten percent, if that, of the paper plant's electrical usage--all this just like in Grand Rapids), which, because a chain-link fence prevented Eve from assisting with the portage, provided the first opportunity for me to carry the kayak on my shoulder in the real world. At the outfitter's we all picked it up real quick just to make sure we could, but then it didn't have a whole bunch of extra stuff in and on it. I've had more fun. I did get some footage of the portage and the plant and dam, all of which probably puts me on some terrorist watch list, before kayaking through Brainerd and ending up at the State Park where we're spending the night. I'm sorry, I know this is all really lame and fact-fact-fact and probably boring as hell but I'm pretty tired and just kind of felt obligated to post. Because I suspect that most of you don't check this very often, which is of course fine because usually I can't post very often, lacking what you might call "access to the Internet" for much of the day, but I figure if I put up something dumb it just might keep you all coming back for more.

So I suppose I don't really have a whole lot to say (Ed.: I'm sure you knew this was coming, but what was the point of that?) and on the whole you might say I'm pretty wiped. And plus, a lot of the time there just isn't much to talk about oh wait wait WAIT I remember what I was thinking earlier.

So. A lot of the time there's not really much to do on the river. Sometimes it's just like going for a really long drive, except that you can sometimes tune out. So today was one of those days, after the portage and a series of bridges, I had like ten miles to do and nothing in the way of an interesting view or reason to, well, think. So I started singing, which is nothing new, I've done it a few times before. So I was singing "Rocky Raccoon" and then "Ballad of Booth" (devotees will recall a previous reference to this latter song) and then I started, well, kind of hallucinating. It started off fairly innocuously--I was singing "Ballad of Booth" and then imagined Stephen Sondheim pulling up on a boat, having heard me butchering his wonderful song, and as a matter of course (according to my mind), we got to talking. We talked about having gone to the same college, and I expressed sympathy for the difficult time he would have had as a gay Jew at Williams in the 1950s, and we discussed my introduction to his work, and I discussed "Ballad of Booth" and some other bits of Assassins, and in the course of all this discussion he had slowed his boat down to my speed, in order to talk to me, and I actually started looking over to my left where I imagined the boat would be. About halfway through these events, I was looking off to port, talking to Stephen (I never really got around to imagining what he might prefer to be called, but I suppose that by this point we were familiar enough for it to be "Stephen", and plus I can't really imagine that he would insist on "Mr. Sondheim"), and all of a sudden I hit a rock and almost tip the boat over. And not only that, but after recovering from the shock, which had jerked me out of my daydream, I went right back to the conversation as if I hadn't missed a beat. I remember that I had recognized him based on a composite of two images: the photo from his Wikipedia page and circa 1972 video of him watching Carol Channing (right?) trying and failing to record some song at like two in the morning. He was very nice, and only mildly annoyed at the fact that not only could I not remember all the words to "Ballad of Booth", I could barely remember any other song, and nothing at all from works other than Assassins (well, if West Side Story counts--he helped Lenny with the lyrics fyi--then I suppose I could always belt "America" for all the nothing to hear, as I was doing just the other day). So yeah. (Ed.:...)