I decided to tempt The Fates today and take Vaughn on a hike with me after I got off work. It was a beautiful day, and there was a trail I had been eyeing in the 30-plus-mile local "city" park here. I usually avoid any kind of physical exercise with Vaughn for a multitude of reasons. One of those reasons being I usually like to actually get a workout whenever I hike, bike or otherwise devote time to physical exertion. Once Vaughn is added into that equation, all possibilities of breaking a sweat evaporate. I have lamented before that shortly after we start in on any journey we have to take a snack break 5 minutes in, so the only true opportunity for me to eek out any pretense of physical fitness is by acting as a pack mule for all the food. You can imagine the weight of my burden on what was intended to optimistically be a 5.7 mile loop. I say optimistically because before we reached the halfway point it became painfully obvious we were getting dangerously close to the outskirts of whine country.
Now, I had already debriefed (translation: bribed) Vaughn on my expectations for the hike. If we went the full loop with nary a siren song, he could play on the computer for as long as he liked when we got home--"Until bedtime." Of course, being 8 and really having no concept of time quite yet (and not owning a watch), this seemed like a generous offering, and he closed the deal.
However, before we had reached the 2.7 mile point, there had already been a couple of "Are we there yet?"s and at least one "When is this trail going to END!?!" I wrestled with my goal-oriented self and decided to check out the time. It was 6 p.m. (Seriously? We weren't even averaging 3 mph?!) At this rate, Vaughn would get maybe an hour on the computer by the time we got home. I decided I would much rather conclude the hike whine-free than suffer through God knows what just to say we'd walked a 5.7 mile loop.
On our return trip, we passed by a spotted slug that Vaughn had previously helpfully transported from the middle of the trail safely to the other side out of harm's way. (By the way, this simple act was shocking to me. Vaughn will scream for someone to clean out the hair in the bathtub before he will step foot in it and will gag at having to pick up a dust ball to dispose of it, yet he will pick up a slimy slug without flinching. He was also the mealworm (imagine maggots) dispenser for Susan. Go figure.) Now the slug was back in his previous position before Vaughn's Boy Scout act of kindness. After a brief argument as to whether this was the same slug, I joked, "It seems you misdirected him in his travels. The slug is like, 'OH MAN! It took me an HOUR to get there. Darn kid.'" This got Vaughn chuckling (no small feat), but insisting he did help it in the direction it wished to go.
"How do you know?"
"Because he was headed that way."
"How do you know that?"
"Because of his antenna."
"Well, how do you know that was his head."
"Because their antenna are on their head."
[going into nature film announcer voice] "A little known fact about the spotted slug is that their antennae are located not on their heads, as is the case with your average slug, but on their butts, giving passersby the confusing impression that they are going backwards when going forwards. This causes countless spotted slugs to be misdirected in their travels by helpful, but misguided children, who are constantly moving the spotted slugs back to their original starting places. As a consequence, the spotted slug never gets anywhere."
At this point Vaughn is stumbling along, giggling uncontrollably, begging me for more mythical factoids on the spotted slug. I tell him I've run out of material, which leads him to pick up where I left off in typical 8-year-old boy fashion:
"Spotted slugs often poop on banana slugs, mistaking them for yellow leaves..."
Needless to say, the return trip went much more quickly.
No comments:
Post a Comment