Somewhere along the line, something in our trans-dimensional high-efficiency washing machine went horribly awry and ruined two of my favorite shirts. Though they were in the washer, I’ve Been to Duluth and Eden Prairie were gladly spared, but two other shirts emerged with horrible brown stains.

One was a cream-colored polyester shirt that I picked up at Ragstock many years ago, that went wonderfully with my Lucky Red Pants (note: pants have yet to be proven lucky). I remember that I wore ’em when a bunch of us camp counselors swarmed Valleyfair in ’02. The other shirt was a Hawaiian number featuring some cool Tiki gods, that I picked up at Pacific Sunwear during my Pamplemousse days back in ’98.

I suppose seven years out of one shirt isn’t a bad run, all things considered, but I’m still not happy. I’m a small guy. It’s tough finding clothes that fit. I get lost in the cushions.

I don’t know what’s up. I still haven’t gotten back in the groove since returning from Baja, and I’m still feeling pretty spaced out and miserable. I have no excuse for this. The place where I live is beautiful. I enjoy my job and love my co-workers, and I am in constant proximity with some of the coolest gear on the planet. I finished reading Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, and am close to finishing Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos. To read again is nice. I should consider doing it again.

I am able to pay the bills without needing to eat Cup o’ Noodles and Spam. I’ve gone for a two-mile run every day for the past week, and even today’s rain failed to curb my enthusiasm. The airline found my case of CDs that I left on the airplane in Las Vegas and mailed them back, reuniting me with such favorites as Primus, Love Cars, My Morning Jacket, Guster, Modest Mouse and Weezer. My iPod Shuffle is supposed to ship within the week. Apple lowered the price on the iPod Mini. My parents mailed me a copy of Napoleon Dynamite for Valentine’s Day, and it’s every bit as genius as I remember it.

I am in the market for a new digital camera. I got around to disemboweling my old camera, and by the looks of things I am certain that it will not be going back together again. For those who have never seen the insides of a digital camera, there’s only one thing you need to know: there’s a lot of it.

I really don’t know what my deal is. I’m in a funk for no good reason. I feel that the walls in my 9′ by 11′ bedroom are closing in; that I’m being chewed away on all sides. On Saturday I crossed over into Washington and drove to the general store in Trout Lake to buy a Henry Weinhard’s Orange Cream Soda. It’s a wonderful drink that one can purchase in any gas station in Hood River, but I needed the excuse to get out and think.

And think I did. I’ll be in Hood River for two more months, and in May I pack it all up to move back to Minnesota. I’ll spend a week in Minneapolis for a wilderness lifeguarding class, and then it’s north to the BWCA for a week of wilderness first responder training, followed by a week of camp orientation mixed with a canoe expedition into the wilds. And then I begin my summer guiding canoe trips, followed by an autumn of ambiguity.

And it was on that ambiguity I pondered, while basking in the weak afternoon sun on the front porch of the Trout Lake general store. I would swirl my orange cream soda in its bottle while listening to a group of boys build a wooden bench, and think of the path ahead. There’s a decision I need to make, and it’s not an easy one. It carries with it many facets, decisions within decisions, each one harboring its own risks and concessions.

Whatever choice I make, it will be insane to most and sensible to few. Then again, that’s nothing new. Nothing new at all.

Want to see something truly horrifying? Pull the drapes and put the kids to bed, because we’ve got head wounds!

Besides that, I promise I do have more photographs from my trip that are a bit more pleasant. I have pictures of the ocean and a rooster and cars churning through flooded streets. I don’t have as many pictures as I would like to have, however, as I managed to drop my camera in the ocean. The explanation of how that happened dates back to last August, perhaps as far back as January.

You see, in late August my friend Shane and I decided to hike Mount Bachelor to go snowboarding. As we trudged up the slopes (we decided to trudge) friendly people shouted encouraging words at us from the chairlift, speaking optimistically of how much snow there was on the mountain in August, and informing us of how large a bunch of douche bags we really were.

It was nice of them to say such inspirational things. There is something about chairlifts that will always turn regular people into loud-mouth cock suckers the second they leave the ground. It’s not as obvious during the winter because people must jeer into their coats to avoid frostbite, but when muscle shirts, chairlifts and the baked glory of August come together, an irresponsible social hell hangs from suspended cables.

Despite commentary, Shane and I found plenty of snow, and we hiked the crater a number of times so we could keep making turns. On one trip down I noticed something buried in the snow, so I hopped up to it. I found a digital camera laying in the snowfield and it looked like it had seen a rough life. The lens was beaded up with condensation and the camera body had rusty edge marks running down its length. Nevertheless, I tossed it in my pocket (the pocket of my board shorts, cuz hell if I was gonna snowboard in August in anything but board shorts) and took it off the mountain. Leave no trace, I always say.

I tried turning the camera on after getting it home, and nearly jumped out of my skin when it started making horrible noises. The battery was obviously powering something, but it didn’t sound like it was anything good. Nevertheless, I opened the camera and left out to dry. A few weeks later I powered it up again, and was greeted with what looked like a fully functioning camera. The lens opened, the LCD screen lit up and it was ready to go.

As soon as I tried to take a picture the battery died. Crap. My interest now piqued, I invested $30 in a battery charger and started to juice that baby up. In the meantime I removed the flash card from the camera and hooked it up to my computer, first to see if it worked, second to see if it had any pictures, and third to see if I could figure out whose camera it was.

The flash card worked, and it was full of pictures that seemed to document a father and son’s trip to Portland, the Gorge and Mount Hood Meadows. The last picture showed a bluebird day near the summit of Mount Bachelor, on the exact slope where I found the camera.

Something wasn’t right. There was far too much snow on the Sisters. There was way too much winter for this camera to have been dropped in August, or even July for that matter. The people were completely bundled up. There was snow in Warm Springs. There was snow on the Hood River Toll Bridge. Why, one picture even showed the two of them golfing in snow, in Portland.

From what I could fathom, I assumed that the camera had been sitting on Bachelor since January, eight months before I found it. When the battery finished charging I fired her up, and after a few minor protests she started working perfectly.

Amazing. How perfectly, you may ask? Well, you’ve already seen its pictures. Anything in the Photolog since September has been taken with a digital camera that probably sat in a snowfield for eight months.

At first I honestly did want to find the owners, poured over their photos to see if I could figure out who they were, and I found a video that they had recorded at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. When I played it back the audio was garbled, and at first I thought the video was corrupted, or playing backwards, or something. I watched the video a number of times and it slowly dawned on my that there was nothing wrong wrong with it, that the words I couldn’t understand were in Russian.

Having evaporated the possibility of reuniting camera and owner, I adopted it as my own. And like most foster parents, I beat the hell out of it. One day I threw my coat on the railing for the stairs to the basement, and a few seconds later heard a loud CA-THUNK, THUNK, THUNK, patter… My new camera had dropped out of my pocket, fallen ten feet and bounced down the remaining hardwood steps. Miraculously, it still worked.

Another day I took the camera mountain biking. After launching over the handlebars and rolling a few times I took it out, only to discover that the LCD screen was shattered. I was sure that this would be the final blow to my new camera, but Shane took it apart, Googled the part number for the screen, and found a camera forum that listed replacement information, prices, even phone numbers for the parts center.

I ordered a new screen and it showed up in the mail three days later. I carefully finished taking the camera apart (carefully meaning I lost half the screws in my carpet, and the ones I kept I failed to make note of where in the camera they came from) and replaced the shattered LCD screen with a fresh one. Again, when I booted the camera up it worked just fine.

Hardly satisfied and never responsible, I snuck the camera along to the lawless country of Baja California Sur. In preparation for my trip I had picked up a new flash card, bringing my total digital photo storage up to approximately 500 pictures. One morning in Baja, with thoughts and good ideas still leaking out the back of my head, I decided to go out for a spin in the kayak.

I got the kayak launched and everything, but after I clammored aboard I realized that I had been standing in waist-deep water. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that my camera was in the pocket of my board shorts. Despite intuition to the contrary, salt water is not good for electronics, and a digital camera that has been immersed in salt water does not take photographs, and instead makes terrible hissing noises.

I took the camera back to my casita and washed it off in the sink, figuring I couldn’t do any worse than I already had. I removed the battery and flash card and washed them as well, figuring everyone could do with a playful bit of Montezuma’s Revenge. Over the next week I let the camera dry out (its lens was filled with beads of condensation, after all) and charged the battery, but nothing I did could bring her back to life.

Now that I’m back from vacation I plan on completely taking the camera apart and cleaning it, but this time around I really feel like it is the end. Of course, I’ve felt that at least five times before, too, and the damn thing always manages to pull through. We’ll see what happens.

In case you’re interested, the tough little guy is a Canon PowerShot S400. They no longer make the S400 model, not after that one got possessed by demons and went on a four-day killing rampage. If you can find an S400, I promise that it’s the perfect gift for the retard in your life.

After a long and wonderful journey I am back in Hood River. My remaining days in Baja were extremely pleasant. The haunting rains of yore never returned, so we enjoyed day after day of blessed sunshine. The wind continued to be a bit of a disappointment, though I managed to get in a kiteboarding session on Wednesday. Though short in length, the session was amazingly productive. I was making turns and linking my reaches together, and the white-knuckle terror with which I have typically approached kiteboarding gave way to a sensation of raw, unadulterated fun.

As promised, I got my stitches taken out on Thursday. Dan, a veternarian from Fargo, had to come over and take the stitches out of Wayne’s recently-spayed terrier, so after he doctored up the dog he went to work on the back of my head. The dog had to be held down by some gorgeous women, but I only needed to be muzzled. Yup, I got my stitches removed by a North Dakota vet. That’s the way things are done in Baja.

Ultimately, the wind was lousy enough that I only missed two days of kiteboarding because of my injury. That being the case, I’m almost glad it happened. For one, I now know that I’ve got my obligatory kitemare out of the way. For another, Motoshi and I now have matching scars. Most importantly, it really set the mental stage for my trip. The whole time I was in Baja I was simply thankful to be alive. To be alive in such an exotic place, surrounded by friends and neat people, was icing on the cake. The fact that I got to do some kiteboarding was total butter.

I still cringe when I think of that time I reached back to feel the back of my head, and found my fingers disappearing into a deep, slippery gash. For how bad it was, I’m glad that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. If the fin was a few inches lower I would have had a slice through the back of my neck. A few inches higher and I may have been knocked unconscious. I consider myself very fortunate, and I know that there are better people in the world who have been dealt worse hands.

Anyways. Geez. There was so much to this trip that I can barely figure out what to recount. How to begin?

Randomly, of course! Where rhetorical flourish is absent and coherence is discouraged!

There was Luciano, Knox’s hot date one evening, who is an 85-year-young lady from Austria whose family lost everything to the Nazis during World War II. In any given night, Luciano will get up on stage and sing karaoke, dance the macarena, drink you under the table, and hit on 24-year-old guys. This I know.

Out in the ocean there were jellyfish and urchins and rays and dolphins and whales. Real stinkin’ whales, the biggest animals on the planet, who will jump completely out of the water because it’s the only way humans can comprehend how magnificant a creature they are.

Then there was this narcoleptic dog who would trot beside you, sit down to scratch his ear, stretch and fall asleep, all in the course of about two minutes.

Then there was this mountain town. During the gold rush it was home to 20,000 people, but now it holds a handful of families and a museum of pianos.

The food in Los Barriles was delicious. I frequented a particular taco stand where every time some people would sit down to eat, a gorgeous rooster would pop through the fence to peck for scraps.

After our kiteboarding session on Wednesday, I drove a dune buggy with Alaska license plates into town to grab some ballenas of Pacifico. Ballena means whale in Spanish, and ballenas is the classy Mexican equivalent for 40s in America. We didn’t have a bottle opener, so Jim figured out a way to pop open our beers on the barbed wire fence.

I had never even ridden in a dune buggy before going to Baja. Driving a dune buggy is a lot like driving an old Volkswagen Beetle, only rustier. You park it on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store, against traffic, next to the four-wheelers and motor bikes.

After two weeks in Mexico, the thing that I missed the most about America was folk music, bluegrass and Johnny Cash. Boot Liquor Radio describes it as American Roots Music for Saddle-Weary Drunkards. There’s elegance in that.

A few uncollected thoughts…

The Fayla Super in Los Barriles (Barriles is the correct spelling, despite my previous declarations otherwise) is a wonderful grocery store. You can get a can of Old Milwaukee for ten pesos, just in case you can’t get enough of that classic Midwest flavor. I have yet to find a venue that sells PBR.

It hasn’t rained since Friday, and yet the roads are still wonderfully flooded. The water is more than six inches deep in places. Walking out of our street requires that I squeeze through a bush covered in four-inch spikes. Wayne told me what kind of plant it was, and I believe the name roughly translates to green death.

The old lady at the counter behind me speaks worse English than the Mexican girl she is attempting to communicate with. According to her, the best way to speak with people who are familiar with your native tongue, but not you theirs, is to speak loudly without verbs or grammar.

I try my best to speak Spanish as much as possible, but too often I find myself getting involved in conversations far over my head. I don’t know Spanish. I know the horrible language of a rude little country whose citizens are affronted when you speak English, and are offended when you speak their native tongue. I hear that they respond really well to body language, though, like thrown punches and stuff.

Nay, right now I really wish I knew Spanish. Even the conversations I strike up with four-year-olds down here are making me feel self-conscious.

I have one doctor telling me to take antibiotics and abstain from alcohol, and another doctor telling me to drop the antibiotics and drink more tequila. I haven’t decided who to believe, yet, but I must say that both Leo and Martine make a fabulous margarita.

Today I went kayaking. It is fun to kayak in azure waters and play in the swell.

The back of my head is all but healed. The stitches are starting to itch, which means it’s just about time to get them taken out. On Valentine’s Day, I almost died from a broken heart while watching everyone else out kiteboarding. Thankfully, that night Kelsey and Jeanie treated me and Chris to a wonderful dinner of Alaskan salmon, mango salsa and fresh salad.