My best friend texted me this morning because she was laughing over one of her many brushes with extreme bodily injury and wanted to share the joy. That girl gets herself in and out of more scrapes than the average ten people combined. I'd like to be able to blame it all on her drinking, but that -- while it certainly complicates matters -- is an insufficient explanation. I swear scrapes just descend upon her like flies on shit.
Last summer, I got married. It was a super secret affair that masqueraded as a camping trip (okay, it started off as a legitimate camping trip but then we crazy kids got it into our heads to get hitched and start living as legitimately wedded adults instead of merely cohabitating in gleeful non-wedlocked sin). I picked her up from the airport after work and she was already sloshed. Then, my husband-to-be entertained her and himself with drinks while I packed a bag, camping gear, and the car. He knows well her tendency to over-imbibe and tried to take it easy on the pouring, but, true to form, she snatched the bottle from his hand and topped herself off generously. She and I were driving up early to snag an additional site at the campground and spend one night before the rest of the group joined us. By the time we actually departed, I was certain she'd pass out immediately in the car...but, no. Lest you think I'm complaining, I actually very much enjoy DA's intoxicated company. She definitely has a drinking problem, but she is generally not a problem when she drinks -- at least, not when she's with me (it's all the other times that she really gets into trouble). She chatters enthusiastically and enjoys my bad attempts at humor, and she's one of the few people in the world who gets me unfettered because I know she'll always love me, anyway. So I took the responsible driver role, and she took the entertainer role, and the time and road flew past us, giggling and giddy on empty highway. Until she had to pee.
By that time, we were really out in the middle of nowhere, not to mention that the PCH drops off precipitously on the coastal side, leaving a narrow ribbon of pavement and few opportunities to pull over. She was not, she informed me, going to make it to the next town, however far ahead that might be. I managed to find an off-shoot from the main road, which had a couple of houses, and pulled to the side. Since it was past midnight, left my brighted headlights on to assist in the location of an appropriate bathroom. DA toddled drunkenly off onto the shoulder...and promptly disappeared. What the fuck? I had deliberately turned eastward, i.e., away from the precipitous 100-foot drop-off to the rocks and surf; how had this calamity befallen us? I heard her groaning painfully from somewhere, yanked on the e-brake, and vaulted out of the car. Calling to her, I checked my run as I realized that, if I fell off whatever she'd fallen off, no one was likely to find us or hear us calling for help. Sure enough, ten feet off the roadside and conveniently just at the edge of my headlights, the ground dropped off into a concrete drainage ditch ten or twelve feet deep. Full of muddy water. And blackberry vines, full-grown and vicious, with thorns an inch long and populous. And there was no way in hell I could reach DA.
She ascertained that nothing seemed broken, to my immense relief and disbelief, but couldn't figure out how to climb out. "Well," she said, ever the pragmatist, "since I'm down here I'm going to pee." I paced around the lip of the crevasse and discovered that the drop was less high on the far side of the blackberries, which she would have to climb through. If you've ever tried to harvest blackberries, you probably noticed that getting near them usually results in bleeding and pulling stickers out of your flesh. No gardening gloves I've met can prevent it (although they can be helpful in limiting the severity of the resultant puncture wounds). My best friend, though, is a superstar with the world's highest pain tolerance -- just ask her tattoo artists -- and she gamely mounted the monstrous thorny bush and scrambled up the muddy embankment with hardly more than a squeaky, slightly desperate-sounding protest when it snagged her various bits and pieces. In the light of the headlamps, I could see she was soaking wet, muddy, slightly bloody, and shivering. She theorized (and I couldn't help but agree) that it was likely fortunate she was wasted when she fell off the cliff into the brambles, because when you're drunk you don't stiffen: she apparently flopped somewhat gracefully into the drainage ditch, landed on one hip, and sort of rolled off it and spread out the impact. Fresh out the culvert, and she suggested she should strip naked so as to avoid smearing mud all over the interior of my car! For perhaps the only time, I appreciated Lucy's (my car's) aged black leather interior. After giving her (DA, not Lucy) a final once-over, we piled back in, cranked up the heater, and were on our merry way.
It was dark when we arrived at the campground and we set up the tent and went to bed, still giggling over DA's tendency to attract (near) disaster. In the light of day, which was her birthday the cut on her hip looked much more menacing...we eventually had to run to town to pick up some first aid supplies as it started to get infected. But other than needing to wash her clothes, the girl sustained very little damage from her ordeal. We got a lot of mileage out of the story as our friends arrived and we recounted it to each of them, and everyone was equally incredulous that she managed to escape unharmed (for the most part) and with her humor, if not all her dignity, intact. And then we proceeded to have a fabulous weekend with friends camping on the beach, celebrating DA's birthday, and gettin' hitched. There are plans developing to return this year, so I'd better put my flashlight back in the damn car.
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