Mancation

A few years ago a buddy of mine and I decided to start a new tradition.  He and I have been friends since kindergarten.  Our lives have taken us in separate directions and as a result we have settled down and started families in different parts of the country.  Nevertheless we remain close pals.  During a visit, and after a few beers, we established an annual “Mancation”.  This is very similar to a vacation, with just a few exceptions.  The biggest exception is we leave our families at home.  We try to center the trip on activities we normally wouldn’t force the wife and kidd-o’s to go through.  In theory we would do tough guy stuff like running with the bulls, scaling Everest or K-2, or competing in the National Hot Dog Eating Contest.  In practice this turns out to be some rough camping that we are only semi-prepared for, fishing, drinking, scratching ourselves, and generally acting like we’re back in high school.  Basically being guys without parental/husband responsibilities of looking out for anyone but you.  Did I mention the scratching?  There’s a lot of that.

This year’s trip was a great example of the importance of proper reconnaissance.  It was my year to host the Mancation, so I tried to pick something on Texas’ Gulf Coast.  It was the perfect idea.  This part of Texas has fantastic fishing and a number of camp grounds to pick from.  Asking around I was told Matagorda Bay (on the Texas Gulf Coast) would be perfect for what I wanted.  I found just the place.  Goose Island had camp grounds right on the beach, a pier to fish from, and some interesting sights to see.  I booked a camp site and felt pretty good about myself.  This was going to be great!

Trouble started on the drive down.  As it turns out the trip from Houston is anything but a straight shot.  We took a left here, a right there, another left (I think), and wound up in a city called Victoria.  Yahoo! directions failed me again.  Can someone explain to me what a “slight” left is supposed to be?  Maybe we were only “slightly” lost.  But all was not lost.  As we drove aimlessly through the town of Victoria, 2007 population 62,246, we found the single best store promotion we have ever seen.  I immediately pulled the car over and went in to do a little spur-of-the-moment shopping.  (The sign reads:  Shop NAKED And Save)  Interesting side note, off to the right of the store is a dance studio.  Unbeknownst to us as we paraded around and took pictures in various stages of undress a busload of adolescent ballerinas-in-training was sitting just to our right.  We noticed their shocked little faces too late.  We left the parking lot to the sounds of shocked children and distant sirens.

Eventually we made it to Goose Island, but our luck didn’t change.  As we pulled up to the camp site we were pretty happy.  Sure enough we were right on the beach.  We had a fantastic view of the Gulf and could fish until the wee hours from our own front porch.  But as we got out of the car things went terribly wrong.  The first problem was the smell.  Ouch.  Turns out we are going to spend the next three days in a place called “Stinky Beach”.  They didn’t mention that on the website.  It didn’t take us long to discover that the smell could be overcome with booze.  After drinking the hard stuff the senses were dulled enough to make the smell tolerable. 

Our first order of business was to pitch the tent.  Now my buddy and I are not novice tent pitchers (hee, hee, I said “tent pitcher”).  We were both in the Boy Scouts and we both served in the Army.  We know how to play outdoors and enjoy it.  But today’s tent pitching held a few challenges.  First the tent was brand new.  And it’s big, way too big for two people.  Bass Pro had a sale and I bought it with the intention of using it with the kids in the future.  Neither of these would really be a problem if we hadn’t been working in tropical storm like conditions.  Seems one of the drawbacks to camping on the shore is the complete lack of protection from the wind.  And our luck had the wind blowing straight out to sea.  More than twice we had to perform heroic, cinematic, slow motion dives to rescue important tent pieces from Neptune’s clutches.  Just over an hour later we declared victory.  We proudly drank a beer and watched as our poorly constructed tent flapped, floundered, and clinged to its precarious perch on the beach.  We have about a 50/50 chance of finding this tent on its way to Cuba.  

Some of you may have noticed in the picture another big problem a little homework would have helped.  You see our “beach” was made of crushed oyster shells.  That’s right, it was basically rocks.  We were camping on rocks.  Fun.  These little critters only appear smooth and weather worn to the naked eye.  A close inspection, with say your back as you try to sleep, reveals them to be razor sharp instruments of relentless torture.  The marbled terrain poised a number of problems for us.  The most obvious was sleep.  Don’t get me wrong we used our self-medication methods to help with the problem, but it only dulled the pain.  There was not a soft spot anywhere in the 16-man tent; I spent every night searching for one.  But there were unforeseen problems with the mollusk shells.  They caught the bottom of the tent.  We ran a real risk of punching a hole in the bottom of the tent on its maiden voyage.  Luckily we had a tarp and it saved the tent floor.  Our second problem had no simple solution.  The tent came with plastic stakes.  Plastic.  Stakes.  Try anchoring a tent to the rocky ground with a piece of plastic.  It doesn’t work.  We broke all but one steak.  Our tent’s only anchorage depended on a handful of misshapen pieces of plastic.  (Now that I think about it, I’m surprised how often men trust our immediate and long-term future to flimsily pieces of plastic)  The chances of finding the tent in the ocean just jumped to 70/30. 

Now that we have the business portion of camping complete it's time to have some fun.  We went fishing; if there are fish out there two Cajun boys born and raised in Southern Louisiana can catch them.  All we really need is a sitck, some string, a few beers, and something fish beliebe is edible and we will have our limit in no time flat.  Give us real poles, a good line, a LOT of beer, and good bait and it hardly seems fair for our aquatic friends.  We reeled in some whopper!  I fought one of these bad boys for almost an hour, and my buddy pulled a muscle bringing one home. 

Goose Island wasn’t all nautical fun.  It seems it has another attraction that brings people from far and wide.  Goose Island is home to the “Big Tree”.  Yep, that’s what they call it.  I thought I thought trees had cool names like Evangeline in Louisiana, or Treaty Oak in Austin, or even LSU campus’ Pee-Tree.  But here it’s just Big Tree, good job, very creative.  But when you see it in person it sure is big.  We took a trip to the Big Tree.  We looked at the Big Tree.  We took some pictures of the Big Tree.  We read the plaque describing the Big Tree.  I had an epiphany there.  Things like the Big Tree take about five minutes to enjoy.  Don’t get me wrong I liked it, and I think I would have missed out if we were that close and didn’t get a chance to see it.  But once you’re there you see the tree, you say, “Yep, that sure is a big tree”, and that’s that.

Three days of fishing, camping, drinking, and lying to each other pretty much recharged the batteries.  It’s an astonishing thing to realize how little we need to refresh ourselves.  A moment without work, parental, or spousal duty is good to have every now and again.  It helps you appreciate what you come back to.