Wednesday night I went down to the girl's camp for gate duty. I've been down there other years for pre-camp setup and down for a day of visiting, but this is the first time I went down for gate duty, and wasn't really sure what to expect. Last time I was down there, we stayed in an A frame cabin, I only had a sleeping bag, and slept on the floor. The guy that went down with me snored louder than anyone I ever heard before, which is saying something. I didn't get that much sleep that night, and slept off and on the rest of the next day.
This time, it poured down rain here at home in the hour before I left. The rain set a record. I was worried about being cold and wet, but the camp is about 70 miles South of here. (The weather said it would get down to 47 degrees. I didn't know much about what gate duty entailed, I envisioned sitting in a camp chair at the gate at a campfire, and staying up all night. We kind of heard we would be up all night.
The guy that was supposed to come down with me had to bail, instead of having me find someone else, they got someone to go with me. I didn't know anything about the guy. I ended up borrowing Drew's new truck, (which is nice, by the way) and we headed down.
The guy was a little - I don't know - off, I guess. Maybe I shouldn't say that, but I say a lot of things I shouldn't say. He was kind of squirrelly. He would talk a mile a minute about stuff, and flip topics here and there in mid thought. Then he would decide to read, spend five minutes reading, and eventually start talking like crazy again. All kinds of topics. When we got to the camp, we had about a half hour before going down to the gate, and we visited with the young women. One of them offered my a licorice, I said 'no thanks'. She offered him one, and he went into a several minute monologue about wheat allergies and how licorice has wheat, but no one knows. Later, he told me he needs to learn to just say 'no thanks'...
The caretakers at the camp told us to drive down, close the gate, back the truck up to it, go to sleep, wake up at 6am, and go home and go to work. Not exactly what I was expecting, but it sounded ok to me. We ended up letting a couple of people out, a couple of people in, and generally tried to sleep. At midnight, we had lights shining in our faces, because someone needed to get in.
A little later, the guy that was with me woke up and insisted that there were four guys coming up the road with flashlights. He jumped out of the car and was yelling at them, trying to turn on his little light to see them. He insisted they were there, so I turned on the headlights on the truck. No people. He got back in the truck, and said 'Sorry, sometimes I do that when I am asleep.' I told him if he did it again and ran into the woods, I wouldn't go off searching a five mile radius looking for him. He promised not to. The term may be 'odd duck'.
Anyway, Drew's truck is nice to drive, not so nice to sleep in, but we didn't have too much trouble, and the assignment was way easier that expected. All in all, it could have been much worse.
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