Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [126]
All down the list, familiar stuff. People still carried around things to do the same things. Frank’s kit had a provenance of thousands of years. It was a beautiful thought, and made him happy. He was Alpine man!
And so when he hiked into site 21 and saw again the bros’ ramshackle shelters, he said, “Come on guys. Let’s try to get up to paleolithic code, eh? I brought along a roll of ripstop nylon this time, check it out. First class army-navy surplus, it’ll match your camo flak jacket color scheme.”
“Yarrrr, fuck you!”
“Come on, I’m going to cut you all a tarp off the roll. Everyone in the park is under this stuff but you.”
“How you know?”
“You Santa Claus?”
“He knows because he give it to them all is how.”
“Yeah that’s right. Just call me Johnny Appletent.”
“Har har har! Perfesser Appletent!”
They cackled as he measured out rectangles of about ten by six, then cut them off with the scissors on his Swiss Army knife. He showed them how the nylon could be secured, in many cases right on top of their already existing shelters. “Dry means warm, bros, you know that.” A well-set tarp was a complete home in itself, he told them. Sides down to the ground, suspend the middle on a line, high enough to sit up in at one end, don’t worry about how low the rest of it was. The lower the warmer, except don’t let it come down on the bottom of the sleeping bag. Get plastic to put under the bags for God’s sake.
It was the kind of camp work that Frank enjoyed. He wandered around among them as they fiddled, evaluating their obstacles and the solutions they were concocting to circumvent them. They were inept, but it was a learned skill. Winter camping. Maybe they had only stayed out in the summertime before, and in previous winters sought conventional shelter. Winter backpacking was a very technical matter—well, ultimately simple; but it took attention to detail, it was a meticulous thing if you wanted to stay comfortable. A technique. The Alpine man would have been superb at it. And now they were all being carried up to the heights.
The bros lay there watching him or not, Andy calling “Watch out, will ya.” Some lit cigarettes and blew plumes of smoke onto the new insides of their tarps, frosting them grayly.
“The first wind’ll knock that down on you,” Frank warned Andy. “Tie that far corner out to that tree.”
“Yeah yeah.”
“Here, I am going to save your lazy ass.”
They all laughed at this.
“He’s saving us now! Look out!”
“Preacher Pastor Perfesser.”
“Yeah right!” Frank objected. “The Church of Dry Toes.”
They liked this.
By the time all the tarps were set Frank’s hands were white and red. He swung them around for a while, feeling them throb back to life, looking around at the scene. You could see another fire down toward the zoo.
He bid them goodnight. They mumbled things. Zeno said, “Nyah, get your ass outta here, quit bothering us with your crap, goddamn Peace Corps bleeding heart charity pervert think you know what you’re doing out here fuck that shit, get outta here.”
“You’re welcome.”
Another night, through the snowy forest under a full moon: a solid snowfall had come down at last, and now surreal whiteness blanketed everything, every bump and declivity suddenly defined by the snow’s infinitely shaded luminosity. Low cloud, noctilucent on the western half of the sky, every black stroke of branch and twig distinct against it, wind and even a bit of snow whirling down, the flakes catching the moonlight and sparking like bits of mica among the stars. The world all alive. “The great day in the man is the birth of perception.