When Lawn Chairs Attack!

Dad had a long-standing, near-legendary problem with folding lawn chairs.

Wait, What? Lawn Chairs?

Yep.

Looks innocuous enough, doesn't it? Woven polyester/plastic slats, 1mm thick rolled aluminum molded into 2.5 cm diameter formed piping, riveted together in a fashion ostensibly designed to provide hours - years - of support as you are entertained in the Great-Out-of-Doors.

But there's one thing the packing label won't tell you. It hints at it nowadays - but doesn't come out and say it directly.

Turns out Dad started to expand a bit once he hit 30. He always, in his own writing, would refer to himself as Slim Hunter - as, in his late teens and early 20s, he was certainly beanpole-esque at a long 193 cm and barely scratching 97 kilos.

For those of you for whom Metric is so much gobbledygook,  that works out to 6'4" and just a touch over 210 pounds.

And by 30 - getting larger. Interestingly, his limbs remained lean and very strong. Unfortunately that meant that all his weight gain for the next 30 years was in his chest and gut. He managed it by remaining active, Hiking, Running, Hunting, and eventually Cycling. I think he probably got back down to 105 kilos from cycling by the time he was 55 - but still had the legs and arms of a leaner man... so still seemed bulky.

Yes, I know Dad always swore he was 6'5". He also always wore cowboy boots. It's easy to add an inch to your height when nobody can see the top of  your head.

At any rate, I was looking Dad in the eye by the time I was 20 years old - and I've never made it past 193cm.

Let's just say that Dad was pretty freakin' large and leave it there.

I don't remember where we were the first time it happened - but I wasn't very old. Probably around 8. That would make Dad 38, and in the worst of his paunch development. He was in a lawn chair, as shown above.

On Grass. On the tiniest slope backward, and to the right. The conditions, as they say, were perfect.

The lawn chair, sensing that Dad was at ease, and therefore vulnerable, suddenly, maliciously and without warning threw him to the ground and clamped its ravenous jaws upon his buttock in an effort to eat him whole.

Dad, never one to be ignominiously eaten by mere furniture, fought back.

This did not appear to be the case from the vantage of the casual viewer, of course. The scene was more reminiscent of an upside-down turtle trying to get clear of a set of bagpipes - and it sounded imaginably similar, too.

After a few minutes of flailing around and some mildish cursing, Dad rolled to his feet, victorious, the mangled carcass of the lawn chair laying in crushed defeat before him. He escaped with only scratches, amidst much tittering from various onlookers.

I said that was the First Time. There were a few others; details mostly the same until the last one which actually drew blood in an attempt to relieve Dad of his kidneys. He liked to show people the scar.

But that was that. Mom found a different brand of lawn chair in Better Homes for Ogres and went shopping, coming back from the Outdoor Shop in the next town... which was in the next province... with four sturdy, thick-rolled, thin tube, very, very sturdily (and therefore, tame) framed chairs.

Which had canvas seats. Nice striped ones.

The canvas on the chairs suffered Dad and weather for a single season, and then promptly split on the first trip the next spring. Dad,  his backside on the ground, arms akimbo and feet dangling, sputtering and cursing somewhat less mildly, fought his way loose form the Very Very Sturdy Frame, and left it where it fell in its disgrace, laying on its side.

Mom looked at the chair. Then back to her spring edition of Ogre Living. Then back at the chair. This went on for some time as Dad, still sputtering, used his chainsaw to cut a stump to sit on.

Well - I presume it was him sputtering... it may have been the chainsaw. The pitch was similar.

Mom eventually put down the magazine with a shrug, picked up the now-denuded lawn chair frame, her bag of macramé cord, and a fresh glass of Sangria from her Camping wine box, and went to work.

Mom macraméd. And Knitted. Pretty much if it had to do with knotting up fibers, she built stuff out of it. We all had really warm sweaters. Nice ones. We had furniture, planters and wall hangings littering our house in The Sticks.

Speaking of knotting things - she also used to cut our hair. But that's, as I like to say, a story for another time.

She also liked to take a box or two of Sangria on camping trips. She says it helped drown out all the sputtering.

At any rate, over several days she built a seat and back out of the macramé cord, weaving and knotting and creating pleasant patterns in tan, cream and green. I suspect it was of her own design, I can't be sure and she can't recall. Eventually, over that summer, she had re-upholstered all four of those chairs.

And they were brilliant. They lasted forever. And superbly comfortable. But there was a drawback... and it was why they were superbly comfortable.

Macramé cord tends to stretch. A few seasons of Dad sitting on them, and the chairs were like little hammocks slung in an upright frame. You get in, and if you're under a certain height... your feet no longer touch the ground.

But you're comfortable. Especially when the backs got bent a little further back from use so your chin wasn't crammed into your chest. It's impossible to get out of the chair without help, but it's okay... you're comfortable.

Just don't decide you need to pee.

One thing though - you couldn't manage a plate in them. Your knees were usually about chest high. Balancing a plate on that was not going to happen.

I haven't sat in one of those chairs in 15 years. Now lawn chairs are geodesic arrangements of piping covered in ballistic nylon - no way you're getting through that. But I said they come with a warning.

Maximum weight 225 lbs.

Dad would love that.

As such, I'm very careful sitting in them. I'm pretty sure that tag means that if you're less than that, you aren't a worthy meal.

The other day when I was thinking about this, I thought, "no way..." and then Googled Macramé Lawn Chairs. Yep, They exist. She could have made a fortune. But probably not.

I'm pretty sure I saw a Macramé Lawn Chair peeking around from a dark corner in the basement of Mom's house when we packed it up last June.

Wouldn't surprise me. It was probably pretty hungry.

Rum Junction

I recently recounted certain events surrounding the development of a hunting cabin called the Rum Junction Hotel. About a klick south of Highway three, barely five minutes out of the little town I grew up in - The Sticks - there is a bottle in a tree.

Okay, seriously. In that neck of the woods, there are very likely a number of bottles in a variety of trees - but none that I know of that are a named landmark for a very select group.

Couple things.  I grew up in the 80s.  It wasn't exactly the wild west, but... well, okay, it was actually the West, technically. My point is you've all very likely seen the posts on facebook how we should never have survived our childhoods... well a lot of this story would probably - nowadays...

Whatever. This story has elements that are not gonna be politically correct. I'm probably gonna offend PETA, MADD, and possibly the BCTF and a bunch of other acronyms, but that's the way things went down. Get over yourselves.

But then, my old friend Zon tells me I'm not exactly hindered in my commentary by an enormous audience, so I guess we're good.

Right. Into the abyss.

Dad and I were out hunting. It occurs to me that this is usually the way these things start.

The unusual part is that he actually saw something. An Elk.

And he saw it long enough to get a shot off.

When I was 15 years old, Dad was a pretty good shot. Having said that - a bottlecap in a tree is almost exactly unlike a 500 kilo Elk ripping up turf and trees around it as you can, realistically, get.

But I wasn't there - I was in the valley. I started moving in his direction when I heard the shot.

I found a man in befuddlement. He was certain he'd aimed true - but we could find absolutley no evidence.

Eventually, Dad found a tiny shred of bloodied flesh on a bush in the vicinity, that might indicate a bullet wound on a large animal. So now we had to track it down.

Six hours later, it was getting on to dusk, and we had not managed to find even one more trace of an animal that was injured, and we very nearly tore that valley apart. But Dad, being a Conservation Instructor and Environmentalist in his way, had an idea that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Heh.  There's an acronym I use as a matter of routine... SLAGIATT. Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time. It's a great catch-all for when things go unpredictably, horribly sideways. This seems to happen a lot in My World.

We were coming back the next day - and we were bringing The Dog.

I grew up with dogs. There were usually two. And they were generally large - as in over 40 kilos, and 30 cm tall at the shoulder, and very often both. This Dog was both. He was the unregistered offspring of a purebred Shepard and an Alsatian Police Dog, and a couple years later would be diagnosed with genetic Retinitis Pigmentosis, and then develop cataracts.

That's a story for another day, of course.

He was in no way intended or trained to hunt or track... but there was nothing wrong with his nose.

The next day, we were back in the draw at Roberts Creek.

Dad handled the Dog. The Dog was somewhere over 50 kilos, and still otherwise prime, and Dad, rightly, was concerned that he'd yard me off my feet running a blood trail.

Four grueling hours up and down 45-degree slopes with nothing to show for it, the Dog pulls Dad off his feet. In landing, Dad came down beside a bush and one of the twigs slid under his glasses, and gouged the cornea of his right eye.

Never done that, but I wear contact lenses sometimes. I'm pretty sure that it HURT. I seem to recall him mentioning that once or twice.

Dad was on a mission, though, and gamely carried on through excruciating pain, his eye tearing to the point of useless.

And for several more hours, we continued to find absolutely no trace of this evidently phantom Elk. Dad, finally, had had enough, and sat down beside the old snag in the center of the draw up the valley. He pulled a bottle of  overproof Demerara rum out of his pack. It was a 750 ml bottle; back then we'd have called it a 26er. It was about a third full.

"I brought this to toast with in case we found that Elk," Dad said. "Don't imagine you can drive us home." I thought about it for a second or two, and, having never touched a steering wheel in a moving vehicle to that point, knew my limitations.

"Thought not. Well, I can't see a damn thing, and this is the only painkiller we have. Pass me one of them cokes."

So we sat under that tree, and killed the sixpack of coke we had in my bag, splitting the remains of the bottle between us. When it was empty, Dad decided to hang it in the Snag we sat under, in the bottom of that draw. there was a perfect broken-off branch pointing straight up about 10 feet high.

I rode Dad's shoulders and mounted the bottle on the branch... and we hiked down the 20 minutes to the truck and drove home - very fortunately without incident. It took years for dad's eye to heal all the way. And now - we have cellphones so such events would never happen.

That bottle sat upside down in that tree - hell, as far as I know, it still is. Eight years after we placed it there Dad expressed amazement no one had shot it out yet. I have not been through that draw in 22 years, though, so I can't even tell you the snag is still standing, let alone the bottle.

That Snag in that Draw lives forever as Rum Junction. Welcome to the Group.