It was early morning. My first waking-up in America. A cherished memory this: the sounds of birds and other people coming from the sun-dappled, leafy, astonishingly _Summery_ space beyond the trailer. Although the wooden underside of Alex's bunk loomed over my body with no visible means of support, Alex and Meeka had failed to come crashing down on me in the night, which I had been a bit concerned they might.
It turned out there was no hot water, though there was a communal shower block down the track (I should probably say 'public', not 'communal'.) Out of shyness maybe, I elected for the cold shower 'on the premises.' After a couple of days of doing this, I'd grown used to it, and it was a good way for me to kick-start my sluggish system, which generally only gets into high gear by bedtime.
Around this time I noticed something disconcerting. Often when I walked or stood up, the ground would seem to shift beneath me, in the same way that the floor of an elevator seems to move. I assumed this had something to do with so many hours in a pressurised aircraft, but it'd never happened to me before, and hasn't happened since. Whatever the reason, it went away when I left Massachusetts. Was it some peculiarity of the local magnetic field, or tectonic plates? Perhaps the earth really _was_ shifting, but everyone was keeping quiet about it, hoping tourists would think they were imagining it (in a similar vein to the way one Tasmanian Premier asked the TV weather people to stop reporting such low temperatures for Hobart, because it looked bad compared with mainland cities.)
After breakfast we walked down to the camping area by the lake. Trailers and shacks nestled in between the young, slender trees, or congregated by the lakeside in more sociable fashion. As before, every severalth one displayed a US flag (I learned today that the US federal government passed a set of 16 laws in 1993, pertaining to the treatment of the US flag - including that in should not be flown at night; the fine for which is apparently $1000. I hope that readers will not be scandalised to learn that, as far as I can recall, this statute was not widely observed at the camping ground in question. For fear of repercussions for the locals, I won't give the precise co-ordinates of this cell of civil disobedience.)
Near the entrance to the camping ground was a small shop, a familiar sight, looking for all the world like its Australian cousins. Here I bought a cool fox T-shirt, for a measly $9. If I'd had my wits about me, I would have bought all of their cool fox T-shirts and windcheaters (sweatshirts), as fox T-shirts proved to be extremely hard to come by elsewhere. The shirt proved a bit of a hit with furries in other places, and Alex was eventually asked to go scurrying back to the campground store, for a fox friend I met up with in California, who was so besotted by the cool fox T-shirt that I couldn't bear to see him go without one.
Just across from the shop is a small enclosure which must have passed for the local zoo. As well as an assortment of more common animals, it contained a Llama named Justin, and an Emu. It was sort of strange to see this bloke so far from home. Someone told us that Justin and the Emu were not good friends. In truth, every time I saw them they seemed to be studiously ignoring each other.
Alex told me we'd be eating with his folks that night. It was Friday, and Friday night was pasta night. In the meantime we took a walk up an unsealed road which led into the countryside behind the campground. Woodland soon gave way to pasture. Here the rural beauty I'd seen elsewhere in MS was laid out around me, glorious, verdant and sunlit, engaging all the senses with its thrilling clarity of light and richness of colour. I remember thinking "I could live here", and indeed if someone offered me a job and a house right there, I'd go in a flash.
We walked a few miles along country roads. At the intersection of two such roads was a paddock, with a splendid looking horse (Massachusetts horses are particularly splendid-looking, on the whole). He was happy to see me, but his owner, who noticed this from across the road, immediately came over and broke it up. She explained that he would bite me. In fact it seemed evident she was more concerned I might bite him (a similar sort of incident occurred at AAC. More on that when we get to it.)
Walking back down the road I saw an amazingly wolf-like Dog sauntering up the road towards us. This preponderance of amazingly wolf-like Dogs in the region was one of the most arresting and sort of wistful-making things about the area. I know that wolf hybrids are illegal in Massachusetts, but there is no way these animals were plain canis familiarus, and they seemed to be everywhere. I jotted down 'people walking wolves', when I was thinking about Framingham later. Of course I would love a Dog like that, but here that cannot be, unfortunately.
Also on the way back we came across the very noisy cows. The very noisy cows were in a picturesque pasture to the right side of the road, and when we passed, they immediately moved as near to us as they could, and set up a cacophonous noise. This bellowing went on and on. I've lived in the country. I've heard cows bulling, and I know the sorts of noises cows are apt to make, but I'd never heard anything like this racket. A pretty girl who was jogging, stopped for a while, and agreed that they were the noisiest cows she'd ever heard, too.
On the way to Alex's parent's place (about a 45 minute drive through beautiful countryside, which I was delighted to make as many times per day as was necessary - if for no other reason, it would have been worth it to go past the house with the huge fibreglass horse in the front yard) we stopped at the chemist (drugstore) so I could get some painkillers. While I was standing in the aisle, trying to remember what Tylenol was (it's paracetemol), a large, middle-aged man who was standing beside me let forth an enormous, eruptive fart. Having done so, he showed no signs of self-consciousness or embarrassment; in fact he seemed quite pleased with himself. It occurred to me at this stage that this might be an American custom of some sort - similar to some countries where people have a fondness for belching or breaking plates. If this were true, might I be supposed to fart in return? This didn't seem likely. I decided that this fart probably had no social significance - but did that mean it would be appropriate for me to register disapproval? I am wary of such things. If challenged, would he declare that he was exercising his first amendment right to freedom of expression?
I asked the pharmacist for something with codeine in it, which is what I usually get at home. She seemed taken aback at this, and I got the feeling she began to treat me with suspicion from then on. She explained that codeine is not freely available in the US (on the subsequent trip I learned that Fiorinal, which is a non-prescription painkiller I get sometimes, is regarded as a borderline dangerous substance in the US. Someone also told me I could be arrested for carrying some of the painkillers I had with me (actually I had a note from my doctor, just in case.) Someone else explained to me that in Arizona you can carry a loaded gun on the seat of your car. I wondered what sort of historical differences might have led to the enshrinement of the right to bear analgesics. Maybe if, rather than fighting, the British had sailed up and down the coast early in the morning banging pots and pans, and playing bagpipes while everyone was hungover.)
Friday night was indeed pasta night, and it was very nice. Afterwards Alex showed me his ferrets (who were very sinuous and sleepy), and his home videos of the racoons who used to come around his home every night to be fed. This was sad for two reasons. Firstly because this was the closest I got to seeing a Racoon all the time I was in America (I did see a tail disappearing in the bushes, one night on the way from the house to the trailer). Mostly it was sad though because Alex loved the 'coons, and they didn�t come around any more. I seem to remember this was probably due to rabies, or a disease of some kind decimating the regional racoon population. I remember Alex posting a very moving article about this when he debuted on ALF.
One thing I'd of course wondered about is how people would handle the way I cart plushies about with me, and treat them like other people. I needn�t have worried about this, because as far as I know people were generally very pleased by the thing I have going with the plush. Alex said as much afterwards, and I think it was on this second night that he sat and groomed his Meeko plushie while we were sitting talking. There were many more days to come, of plush in cars going places, with me alongside. In fact, the next day Alex's boiled-lolly, motorised seatbelts, vanilla-smelling purple Ford something turned into a veritable plushmobile...
