But, in the interest of being a little more grown-up and productive and, y'know, experiencing the big bright beautiful world in fully-sentient Susie form, I curtailed myself pretty sharply one night so that I could haul my ass out of bed early enough to hit a fairly ambitious double-summit hike and add a couple new 14ers to my checklist. Possibly because this sort of self-imposed cutoff has, historically, been rarer than a heterosexual unicorn and so may have confused and frightened them, the rest of my friends set sail for Blackout Island without me, and so I was left to tackle the following day's pursuit solo. Surprise, surprise.
The peaks I had my sights on are accessible via a trailhead that requires a pretty burly 4WD vehicle to reach, or alternately, an additional three-mile approach hike on the barely-driven/barely-driveable "road." As my car, what with its highly-practical zero-clearance construction, ranks somewhere between "GirlyMan" and "Haha!" on the Rugged Scale, I got up extra-early, parked at the turnoff, and started to hike in.
(Except mine only does wheelies when I've gained excessive amounts of weight and/or have a Billy in the trunk.)
Somewhere halfway up the road, I heard the first of only two vehicles that would pass me. Maybe ten minutes later, a young dude in an ancient Land Rover slowly picks his way past, waving as he bounces by.
Now, it's been a long-running, well-known fact among people who know me that Husband Watch 2013 (or whatever year - not sure when this kicked off, likely because I am too old and forgetful now to be bothered with details like that) is in full-swing when out in the wilderness - I like to think someday, I'll meet a dashing daredevil on the summit of some high-alpine scrambler and that'll be it. Boom. Co-pirates. But I wasn't really thinking much about HW'13 at this point, because that road was goddamn steep and rocky and had myriad river-crossings and I was tearing up it like a madwoman (i.e., huffing and puffing and flailing my hiking sticks about like carbon-fiber épées), intent on the actual trailhead.
(Me, master of the uphill grade.)
Another 30 minutes in and I can see the basin between my two target peaks - where the actual trail head should be. I also, rounding a switchback, come face to face with the gentleman in the Land Rover again, who has parked and is "coincidentally" just now donning his daypack.
We chatted for a minute, and he asked if I minded if he hiked in with me. He seemed normal enough, although his vehicle had seen better days (approximate content: 1 part side-panels, 1 part Bondo, 1 part laughably mismatched green paint, possibly of the craft-store variety, 1,823 parts suspiciously-suggestive-of-living-in-your-car accoutrements - I later found out that yes, he *was* living in the car, but only as part of a roadtripping move to some southwest canyon town for a new job as a river guide so actually, points to him for that). And he was actually in pretty decent shape and made good sentences - the very top two immediate screenout criteria for all HW'13 candidates. So, off we hiked. Turns out he was a former-local, had skinned-and-skied most of the neighboring mountains, and was a great resource for orienting myself to the names of the surrounding geography.
At the first summit - which we had to ourselves - I shared some food (not unlike feeding cute ground squirrels), our joking somehow ran off the tracks of normal "I don't really know you" polite-banter and veered toward how a summit would be the perfect place to get away with an anonymous murder (Ha! Hahah. ...Ha?) and then we parted ways, as I still wanted to bag peak 2, a more difficult adventure, and he was just in it for an easy day.
On my solo way down, lo and behold, there's the Bondo-mobile, with Billy Bondo sort of casually lurking around and waiting to see if I wanted a ride back down to where I had parked. Having walked *up* the whole thing (the key), and having just come down a pretty aggressive grade for a couple hours already, I accepted. We rode down, cracked some jokes, and then did the "nice-to-meet-you-you-too-good-luck-you-too" handshake thing when I got out of the Land Rover and closed the door behind me.
Once in my own car, I basically forgot about Billy Bondo. I mean, he was nice and all, but he was setting up shop several states away (if there's one thing I've learned from the Billy Builder saga, it is that long distances are an overwhelming FuckNo) and also, neckbeard. That's apparently really a thing.
But guess who didn't forget?
The next night, I got Facebooked by Billy Bondo, who sent an email frankly mentioning that he felt he "should have tried to kiss you, or at least lick your face." Waitwhat? Lick my face? I know that my humor is a little off-kilter and sometimes that leads people astray, and maybe this was his attempt at quirky, lighthearted self-deprecation or something. But lick my face?
OK, I'm going to just let neckbeards go, but let me talk about face-licking for just one minute.
One time, my sister and I, at some assuredly shitty age, got into a spit-fight in the back seat of the family car. I think it started out with a "sucker-kiss" - you know, how Kid A will whip a sucker out of their mouth, whack it to Kid B's cheek, then back goes the sucker into Kid A's disgusting little laughing pie-hole while Kid B is left stunned, with a sticky spot on their face. Well, with my sister, something like this escalated into slapping with spit-laden fingers, then into all-out airborne hocking wads at each other, which then escalated into parental yelling (possibly accompanied by some degree of swerving), which then rapidly de-escalated into being subsequently trapped in the silent, hot car for another hour with nothing to clean off the globs of spit festooning us, which dried, and which fucking. Smelled. Awful. This exact memory. This is what I think of when I think of face licking.
(Now, neck licking, on the other hand? All for it. Unless there's a beard there.)
It was decided, amongst my friends while once again spilling martinis at each other later on (one of whom astutely pointed out that, for example, in Korean there is only one word for both blue and green, which are apparently not considered to be two distinct colors by Koreans even though Jeezus H. Christ, they obviously ARE), that perhaps Billy Bondo had maybe somehow culturally missed the finely-nuanced anatomical difference between the face and the neck, as evidenced by his similarly-misplaced beard, and therefore didn't know appropriate lick/non-lick zones.
Resultingly, I have devised the following helpful matrix to clarify the matter for any other similarly-confused Billys:
Resultingly, I have devised the following helpful matrix to clarify the matter for any other similarly-confused Billys:
So what, exactly, does one say to "I should have tried to lick your face"? I went with the short, vague "lol" (sans punctuation really indicates Idon'tgiveashit), sort of attempting to both brush the e-mail content off and let
him off the hook for a weird joke fallen flat, and hoped for the best. Not to
be deterred, Billy Bondo immediately persisted: "You know you'd love a good hard face-licking."
This is where the e-mail conversation ended.
This is where Husband Watch 2013 continues.
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