From: ed@titipu.resun.com (Edward Reid)
Newsgroups: rec.backcountry
Subject: Barmadillo's Santa of the Wood
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 93 15:16:12 EST(-0500)
Organization: Accuracy, Ltd.
Reply-To: ed@titipu.resun.com (Edward Reid)
X-Mailer: uAccess - Macintosh Release: 1.6v0

Several people wrote that they liked Barmadillo's Alternative Turkey Hunt that
I posted a few weeks ago.  What follows is the Bucky McMahon's Barmadillo
column from the Tallahassee Democrat of Friday, January 15, 1993, reproduced
without permission.  (Barmadillo is a weekly column, but the topics range
widely and only occasionally relate to r.bc.)  For those who like Bucky
McMahon's writing, the January issue of _Outside_ cantains McMahon's article
about exotic animals which escaped in south Florida during Hurricane Andrew.

Sopchoppy (mentioned in the column) is a small town southwest of Tallahassee,
on the edge of the Apalachicola National Forest.

... in hopes that Santa of the Wood soon would appear
=====================================================
Barmadillo ... by Bucky McMahon

Rain fell steadily upon our campsite on Reedy Branch, an obscure brackish
backwater of Mud Swamp. It was too dark to see the rain, and the low cover of
dying deciduous leaves filtered the precipitation into a startlingly random if
indisputable constant drip; yet we had finally settled the argument that had
been bandied back and forth between the four of us, inconclusively, canoe to
canoe, all day: No, it was no longer heavily misting, it was raining, steadily
and hard.

Doubtless, shivering in the wet cold, we all had visions of clean and dry
suburban shelters, blazing indoor hearths snugly festooned with elfin booties,
one dry tree reasonably corralled in a corner, and cookies and milk set out for
St. Nick, a sante, a geist, a spirit, I had argued, of the old pagan woods. And
surely, if this Santa was to find us asleep in our dome tent on Reedy Branch,
he'd need hounds instead of reindeer.

I had wanted a different Christmas, something pastoral, in the broadest sense of
the word, and a ritual, a little more literal than usual, watching of our
flocks, such as they were in this environment, mostly rabbits and raccoons.

Some of us, especially some of those who are married to some of us, probably
wondered if this Christmas camping was such a good idea, but I said, Listen,
you can hear the Santa of the Wood with his pack of dogs. He was working the
backwaters of Mud Swamp, the Santa of this place -- a skinny Big Bend cracker
with a lip full of dip and a jelly jar full of cheap whiskey, his coming
heralded not with the Nordic jingle of sleighbells, but the baying of blooded
hounds in the rainy dark.

It was a beautiful music, full of longing and mourning and sporadic gunfire, and
we were there to hear it, however reluctantly in the case of some of us, and to
keep vigil, unless we found it possible to sleep, the whole night long.

What could we expect from a Christmas vigil of this kind? Not oranges and nuts,
nor sweaters and socks, nor coffee-table books or medium-size appliances. This
Santa, if he found us, would blunder into our campsite like a primitively armed
genetic deficient, and we would be sorely afraid. Redemption, if we found it,
would be the light of dawn, and the chance to get off this sodden spit of
semitropical jungle. But first we were guaranteed a very long night, some of
us, now that the bottom of the tent was fully flooded, and one of us had begun
to snore like a great predatorial beast suddenly breaking cover with a snarl of
wild carnivorous triumph every other second.

We had the time, for a very long time, to think of the shepherds' desert vigil
and the apparition or hallucination that manifested itself as angels, beings of
pure light, perhaps nothing more nor less than the power of the stars, that
open Eastern sky splitting to emit a white hot cruciform of staggering
brightness, the solar disc flashing in the palm of the infinitely robust
colossus of the universe. That, too, was the oldest Christmas, whether in the
backwoods of Bethlehem or Sopchoppy. It was a night of crisis, the old,
troubled world, beset by darkness and chaos, error and crime, exhibiting for
the awestruck rustics its lust for brinkmanship, perpetually, and never more so
than tonight, risking extinction on a dice roll, and winning every time with
the bet on mystery.

At one point some of us suddenly found our head soaking in a two-inch puddle, so
I have been told. And just after that rude awakening it seemed there were two
teams of hounds running the woods around us, or three -- hounds all around us
in the darkness, a pandemonium of yowls and howls out of the moral void of
instinct. They were lost but on the trail, wanting, losing, wanting again,
unable not to want whatever it was they wanted, which was probably some
very-well-hidden raccoon. Someone fired a shotgun nearby; the rain picked up to
gusts flung against the tent like hysterical weeping. Our crisis, if it came to
pass, would be a struggle in close quarters, a blind, tumultuous wrestling with
the wind and rain and the smoke of gunfire. It would be a fight in a damp bag,
arms pinned, legs constrained, the adversary as ambiguous as a poorly inflated
plastic pool float. It would feel a lot like insomnia.

But it came to pass, for each of us, with the receding of the Christmas hounds,
their baying fading farther and father away from Reedy Branch, coincident with
the coming of the weak light of a drizzly dawn. It was no longer raining, we
agreed, as we pushed back the zippered flaps of the dome tent. It was merely
heavily misting.

For each of us the experience of the world redeemed would remain private and
inexpressible, though some of us had tried to express it all night long with
really remarkable nasal exhalations which might be likened unto the testing of
jet engines in a tin-roofed warehouse. And I would hear more later from another
of us about the nature of the experience, whenever the subject of an
old-fashioned primordial Christmas came up, which was pretty often, for awhile.

------------------- end of Barmadillo --------------------

Edward Reid  (8*}>
  eel:   ed@titipu.resun.com  or  nosc!blkhole!ed
  snail: PO Box 378/Greensboro FL 32330