Death March

Let’s have a lesson in definitions.

Death: (noun) a permanent cessation of all vital functions; the end of life; the cause or occasion of loss of life

March: (verb) to move in a direct purposeful manner; to move along steadily usually with a rhythmic stride and in step with others

And one more.

Coordination: (adjective) able to use more than one set of muscle movements to a single end

Uncoordination would, of course, be an example of lacking the aforementioned skill set.

Bear with me on these, they'll make sense in a minute.

We are a bit short handed at work as of late, and I have no boundaries.  These two things together mean that I have basically been working my happy little hiney off.  It’s exhausting.  And YES, I realize it is totally my fault, and that I need to find some stinking boundaries already.  Or maybe just some medication.  I digress.

Last week I had a particularly eventful day at work, and while I cannot elaborate on the details here, suffice to say that the end of the day, I'd had a brief (but intense) encounter with some of Tillamook’s finest law enforcement officers, had been given one of the worst insults I have ever received by a coworker, found out some extremely disturbing news about someone I thought I knew quite well, and cleaned up poo off my office floor.  That’s right.  POO.

(CBS are you listening?  I have four words for you: REALITY TELEVISION IN TILLAMOOK.  I’m telling you, it’ll be bigger than Survivor.  Call me.)

The whole drive home (all half a mile of it) I was obsessing over how I couldn’t wait to change into comfy sweatpants and hit the couch to watch DVRed episodes of Breaking Bad.  And let me tell you folks, it was heaven.  HEAVEN!  I was settling in and contemplating, if I decided never to move from that spot again, how many days it would take my work to fire me, and whether I could just have my last check direct deposited.  Then MacGyver stands up, puts his coat on and says: “You ready?”

Am I ready?  It’s 7:09pm and I just finished cleaning POO. off my office floor.  What the hell could I possibly need to be ready for?  He must have understood my thoughts in that one, wordless stare, because he informed me that low tide was at 7:15pm and he wanted to take me to this "really cool beach" he found. 

Now, I’m all for long walks on the beach, etc.  And any other day I might have jumped at the opportunity.  But in this moment, this moment right here, my first thought was to call Tillamook’s finest back and file a harassment charge against MacGyver.  OFFICER, HE’S MAKING ME GET OFF THIS HERE COUCH AND I DON’T HAVE TO TAKE THIS KIND OF ABUSE!  But considering my interactions with them earlier in the day, I decided against that.  And I got my ass off that couch.  AGAINST MY BETTER JUDGMENT. 

So we go to this “really cool beach” he found.  And we park.  On the side of the road.  And this is what I see when I step out of the car:

What do you notice about this picture?  Lovely day, blue sky, beautiful ocean.  Ocean THAT IS REALLY FAR AWAY FROM WHERE I AM STANDING.  I turn to MacGyver and ask as nicely as I can muster, “how do we get to the beach?”  

“We go down some stairs.  It’s really cool, you’ll see.”

Stairs?  ARE YOU FREAKING JOKING ME?!

Oh and the STAIRS!  131 of them, to be precise.  I counted.  At least, I’m fairly certain that’s how many there were.  That’s how many I counted in between the parts where I passed out and had to be resuscitated.  I should also mention that these stairs are not STAIRS like you might find in an office building, or apartment complex.  They are STAIRS like the kind that are fashioned out of railroad ties and old pieces of scrap wood and rocks to pick your ways over and climb up on to because the next step down is two and a half feet away.  131 of THOSE kind of STAIRS.  These STAIRS are starting to make me think they deserve the LOWES! standard of reference. 

Remember when I said to trust me, that I would explain these definitions in a minute?  DEATH MARCH.  Does it make sense now?  I thought so too.

MacGyver had told me about this place a few days before when he had discovered it, so I knew there were tide pools and things around here somewhere, but when I got to the bottom of those STAIRS!, I didn’t see any.  That’s not to say it’s not a beautiful place.  It is.  Breathtakingly beautiful, in fact.  But if I’m getting dragged down here, off my couch, after a horrific day at work, completely exhausted, I want to see some damn tide pools!  I asked him where they were, and he points over yonder to some very large, very ominous looking rocks. 

I should mention here, that MacGyver was a mountain goat in a former life.

(Image taken from Flickr by Eickholt)

(Image taken from Flickr by David Couse)

I’m not kidding.  MacGyver is extremely agile on big scary rocks like this.  Me, on the other hand, I am the very definition of the opposite of COORDINATION (see above reference).  I have never been able to able to use more than one set of muscle movements to a single end.  Ask anyone who has seen me play softball.  It’s embarrassing.  And dangerous!  I trip over air molecules.  And I have never met a set of stairs that I have not either fallen down, or up.  Oh yes, I am the master at falling up stairs.  It’s a gift. 

So we go picking our way across these huge boulders that were perched over the ocean and covered with some sort of sea slime – actually, no, MacGyver went prancing over them like the Sugarplum Fairy, and I went sprawling much like Bambi on a frozen lake.  Only less graceful.  Two weeks later when I finally caught up to him,  I was an anxiety ridden, sobbing mess, absolutely convinced I was going to die, we were going to be stranded, the Coast Guard would have to be called to pluck us off of these ridiculous rocks, only to find out that it would be too dangerous to save us and we’d be left for dead and eaten by seagulls and tiny crab creatures I was certain were going to reach up from those dark crevasses in between the rocks and tear my feet off.   

DEATH MARCH.  See, the longer this goes on the more you understand!  I told you I was going to die out there.   

MacGyver, bless his heart, was oblivious to me standing there completely immobilized by my fears of heights, rocks, looming ocean, sea gulls eating my eyeballs, and the crab people that live under the rocks.  Oh, and then I look back and see that the stupid tide is coming in and it’s getting dark.  BECAUSE OF COURSE IT IS.  When I look back, MacGyver has levitated across this huge pool of sea anemones and onto another HUGE rock 20 feet above me.  I start yelling at him, but we’re next to the ocean and he’s deaf, so that didn’t work so well.  I can’t lift my arms above my waist for fear of losing my already precarious balance, so I start flapping my forearms around me and yelling at him to look at me, BECAUSE I AM NOT GOING TO LET THE DAMN TIDE COME IN AND GET EATEN BY THE CRAB MONSTERS!  How about that for a mental image?  Next time you’re stuck somewhere and your bored out of your mind, just picture that.  See?  All better.

He finally sees me flopping around and, thinking something catastrophic has happened,   goes leaping across the rocks back toward me.  I swear, it’s not human.  I point in the direction of the rocks we just came from that are now lapping with water, willing him to understand the direness of our situation.  He takes my hand and moves it about 10 feet from where I was pointing, to a path (if you can call it that) that is completely dry.  Apparently THAT is where we just came from.  I’m guessing he saw one of the crab people at that moment though, because he decided it was time to go.  We made it back with relatively little incident.

Was it worth all that?  I’ll let you decide.

Will we go back?  Totally.  But not when the crab people are out.