oh hell

el capitan

I made an effort on the California State Park website to make reservations to camp at what has always been described to me as a beautiful campground north of Sant Barbara , on the beach , called El Capitan State Beach . In my defense , the website is notoriously difficult to deal with , but I gave it a shot.

Actually , I gave it a few shots . The first few didn’t work at all. Then I got all the way to the end and tried to hit the button to make the reservation but it wouldn’t do anything . I thought maybe that I had to already be on their registered list so I spent a few minutes signing up . Then I went through the entire process again , finding the right campground , picking one of the only three available sites still available , and paying the fifty -dollar fee plus an extra eight dollars to have had the privilege of booking the site online .

I never got any direct confirmation . I booked the site , #122 , and immediately checked availability . A minute after I booked site #122 was no longer available . Putting two and two together , I assumed that I had successfully made the reservation . They seemed to have easily accepted my payment which , between you and me , I think is outrageously high for a small patch of earth for a night , but so be it .

That was two weeks ago . El Capitan is a busy campground and reservations must be made well in advance , especially before kids are back in school . Also , the state recently closed the national forests because of the danger of wildfires , so I figured more of those misplaced campers would be heading for the state parks . I felt lucky to have made reservations for a spot .

But of course the reservation never went through . Ada and I drove the two and a half hours to El Capitan and were told by the young woman at the entry kiosk that the site had been taken by someone else . She asked me several times if maybe I had registered under a different name , or maybe I had registered at one of the private campgrounds nearby .

Nope.

She said that by chance there was one spot still open, #120 . Did we want it ? Sure . We paid by credit card and saved the eight dollar internet fee . I was feeling pretty lucky .

We checked out the spot , right next to the one I thought I had reserved . It wasn’t great . Where were the hedges between the sites that my friend Bill had told me about ? Site #122’s truck was up against our site . It wasn’t ideal , but here we were . We had a car full of camping gear , food and a cooker , and Ada was looking forward to hitting the beach which , by the way , didn’t seem to be within walking distance , but so be it .

I forgot the poles for the tent . I checked for any possible alternative . Hang the tent from trees ? Improvise some sort of tent support with branches ?

Nothing . My fault , no tent poles . Everything else was there , ready to go , but no way to set up the tent . We decided that we had to bail out and give up .

We drove down to the kiosk and I told the young woman that we had decided to cancel .

” You can’t cancel , ” she said . ” You would have had to call before six o’clock the day before to cancel . The site is yours until noon tomorrow . ”

” But I was just here fifteen minutes ago , ” I said.

” I know,” she said . Now , I’m not the sharpest tack in the box , but I stood there trying to process how someone could have called a day before to cancel a transaction that had just occurred a few minutes ago . Maybe some kind of time machine that I’m not aware of .

I wasn’t yelling . She was just trying to do her job . I was wondering how she thought that I might have cancelled the reservation yesterday when , 1. it wasn’t a reservation and , 2. we had just made the payment on the credit card fifteen minutes beforehand . Ah , but she gave in and decided that she could void the payment , and she did just that .

Ada and I drove south a few miles and spent the day on a nice beach.

The site at El Capitan wasn’t so good anyway, I said , and this mistake would be a good lesson because I would never make a mistake like forgetting the tent poles ever again , and what if we had been with friends who had their tent , what would we have done then ? And I spotted a couple of other better campgrounds near the beach on our way back home .

Ada mentioned something about hearing a classic case of sour grapes . Well , yeah .

cat 2

I heard our cat Cosmo fussing around in the living room yesterday . That sometimes means that she pooped on the floor or on the throw rug , as she sometimes does , and is trying to cover it up ; but this time it was a lizard that she was attempting to follow.

It was a large lizard , as the types of lizards in these parts go , and Cosmo hadn’t been outside for hours , so I wondered if she had brought the creature in or if it had somehow found its way into the house on its own . Either proposition was a mystery . Cosmo never was a great hunter , and now in her old age she’s even less interested in the sport . I can’t picture her capturing any lizard , much less a big one , these days . I can’t imagine the lizard finding a way into the house on its own either , though anything is possible .

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The lizard was scurrying along the hardwood floor as best it could , slipping along and probably hoping for any possible exit . Cosmo was standing on the other side of the room , watching . I called for Ada to come look at the lizard . She was about as freaked out by the slithering thing as was Cosmo .

Now , as a kid , having grown up near lizard-laden canyons , I would have done what every kid in the neighborhood would do and grab the reptile behind its head with two fingers , so that you had a good grip and it couldn’t bite . That’s what I might have done as a kid , but I’m not a kid anymore .

Several years ago my mother discovered a huge lizard in her kitchen and she asked me to get it out . Not being that kid anymore I picked it up by the end of its tail and intended to calmly carry it outside .

It didn’t move until I reached the threshold of the kitchen door . Two more seconds and it would have been peacefully released into the wilds of the back patio . Would have been . Instead , at the last moment it decided to strike . It curled its long body suddenly and its head sprung up and its sharp little teeth bit my hand . Hard . It hurt . That surprised the hell out of me and I flung the overly aggressive thing out into the yard .

Ah , to be a kid again and to unabashedly use the proper method of capturing a lizard !

So , with Cosmo’s lizard I again shied away from the kid technique . I got squeamish in my old age , but I wasn’t going to repeat my kitchen-lizard mistake. I tricked the poor little creature into rushing into a box and it was easily caught . Ada was watching and she appreciated my method . Cosmo was still watching too , probably totally befuddled with the entire drama . When I had Cosmo’s lizard in the box she didn’t object to my taking over . In her younger days she would have put up a bit of a fuss .

Cosmo is sleeping on the edge of the bed right now , as usual . The excitement of the lizard loose in the house will probably do her for several months . She doesn’t even go outside much anymore . What for ? She doesn’t hunt leaves that drift with a breeze anymore . She used to proudly bring a dried leaf in and show it to us . She doesn’t put any effort chasing flies any more , not to mention bugs or birds or lizards or anything else .

She was never a good hunter , anyway , if you ask me . I don’t remember her ever catching a bird , for example . If she were out in the wild on her own she’d be a complete flop . She merely has a few of the old familiar feline instincts deep inside of her psyche . And , to be honest , Cosmo hates cats ; always has . We’ve had other cats during her life with us and she has never treated any one of them with any bit of respect . She makes a point of hissing at a neighbor’s cat that wanders into our yard now and again , minding its own business .

We give Cosmo a pretty good life , if you ask me , and I think she realizes that and so she tolerates Ada and me . In her old age our cat seems to have less of an appetite , too , and is extremely tolerant as she waits to be fed . She’s calmed down quite a bit from the old days when she staged dramatic tantrums if she wasn’t immediately fed when she wanted to be fed .

I’m not much of a cat person , truth be told . Ada is the cat person . I think Cosmo somehow senses that about me and that’s part of the reason we get along so well since she evidently shares the notion .