Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Definitions: Basin Bog

(1) A basin bog is what's left in your cooking pot after you use it as a tiny tub for bathing, even if all you've done is to lightly shampoo your eyebrows.

The residue from even this little bit is probably thick and rich enough to support a flower garden. That is, if you are a real hiker, and actually live in the dirt.

Real hikers attract dirt the way cars attract dogs and rock stars gravitationally suck in groupies.

Unfortunately for you, backpackers (let alone day hikers) are not sexy, and never get to choose one or two or three or more temporary playmates from a crowd of the most beautiful and voluntarily willing human specimens on earth.

Part of it is that crust of dirt. (The one encasing you.)

Another part of it is the crust of dried sweat under the dirt, on the dirt, and mixed throughout the dirt. (The dirt on you.)

And don't forget the pit stink. No one around you can. Your pit stink.

Face it. You smell like ass, all day, every day, at every spot on your body.

And that is not sexy, unless you are trying to attract the kind of action that the rest of us do not ever want to know about.

If you do want that, then please do not tell us, because we do not want to try unringing any bells, though we would try, with all our might, for a long, long time. We would. Would try.

(2) The other kind of basin bog is one that is wet and has lain low.

It is one that has stayed in one place for almost ever, slowly building itself, putting itself together, rising by hairsbreadths over endless centuries until its very upmost part finally, barely, slightly, breaks the water's surface, the surface of the water that has nurtured it, whether that water is a pond, a lake, or a stagnant former stream channel, and having ultimately pushed beyond the surface tension of that body of water the bog then pauses and continues to lie still, in place, there, horizontally, waiting, stoically, sluggishly acquiring consciousness and then thinking about what to do, and to whom.

Which is about the time that you come tromping along, whistling a happy tune, completely and entirely oblivious to every one of the possibilities inherent in this situation.


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