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Chapter 20: Tangled Up In Blue

     "Rise and shine," I holler from the screen door, sweat trickling down my ribs and dripping onto FM's welcome mat in the mid-morning sun. "Go away!" echoes across her studio apartment through the stifling mid-June heat at the edge of the Virginia tidewater. "What happened to breakfast at 9?" I grumble back, stood up again by my fickle friend.      This was my first summer spent in Magnolia, usually retreating to Central Jersey where dog days only last for the month of August. In this torturous southern land, situated between shaded piedmont and breezy coast, the stifling humidity came in with the May flowers and remained until Halloween. T his rabid dog could live with a mercurial owner for a few table scraps, but not if she was going to stifle an occasional bark. I needed to be able to hum the tune running through my head for a relationship to last.      "Oh shit," I overhear before she shuffles out in soccer shorts and an oversized Blon...
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Chapter 19: Refrigerator Biscuits

      "So what makes them refrigerator biscuits?" I sputter, swallowing a savory scone stuffed with spicy beef. "You keep the roll cold," she expounds, opening the refrigerator door and pulling out a dough log in the kitchenette of her tiny apartment. "Then you cut it into rounds before filling and baking." "Clever," I exclaim, unable to stop myself from then humming a song that's been stuck in my head.      It had been a month since the field trip with Freida-Mae. Term papers, final exams, moving, and what-all (aka girlfriend) had consumed her semester's end. It took running into me at a graduation party for her to recall she'd invited me to dinner. By then I'd nearly forgotten we'd been joined at the hip for one breathtaking weekend in the Blue Ridge. I'd also caught sight of an interesting new woman wearing knee-torn army pants and toting a canvas messenger bag to our shared summer class at Virginia Commonwealth. And no...
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Chapter 18: Serving Somebody

      "I'm so done with camp food," FM concludes as we drive north in the spring green tunnel of the Blue Ridge Parkway. "Next week you're coming over for Sunday supper!" "What should I bring?" I entreat, delighted to be ordered around. "A bottle of wine and a salad. I'll make refrigerator biscuits."      Food had been wretched on our field trip, the only exceptions being her bottle of Chianti and my Hershey's Special Dark that we cracked into rectangles after the midnight wrestling match. Even the pitfall traps had a pitiful yield, with only a few fire ants and blister beetles toxic to even the stoutest of birds. I was wishing there was a Gibson-Henry College course in camp cuisine as we turned east into the pine barrens along Interstate 64 heading into the gathering grey of the piedmont.      "Let's have some music," she declares, clicking on the dashboard radio and tuning away from the teacher's AM pre-set. ...
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Chapter 17: Going With The Flow

       "Come on big guy, you can do it," encourages FM under the covers, spurring me on with words and hands. "It's been a long, hard day," I moan, mortified at my lack of response. "Fine then," she hisses, curling up toward the tent wall in the faint starlight filtering through the canvas. "Your loss."      After my last premature night with Freida-Mae, I'd made the mistake of asking around the foosball table about preventative practices. Coitus interruptus, thinking of your mother, taking a deep breath, and beating off everyday were gleefully offered in quick succession, the last of which I'd already put into action.       What I'd failed to bring to the table was the unthinkable for a twenty-year-old, being unable to get it up at all. So I laid there on my back listening to FM's rhythmic breathing and the slowing chirps of crickets, finally falling into a fitful sleep to the trickle of the little stream beside our tent.   ...
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Chapter 16: The Thrill Of Victory

      "Wine anyone?" enjoins FM uncorking a surprise bottle of Chianti to go with our camp spaghetti and pot salad. "I knew there was a reason I love you," I retort, accepting a pour into the Biology department's ceramic mug.  "Don't damn us with your faint praise," she chides with mock indignation, hanging the bottle from a branch by it's straw fiasco. "Here's to there being an us!" I chuckle, astonished to be tent camping with my muse under a starlit sky filtering through the rhododendron grove hiding our tent.       After the ledge rescue Freida-Mae had wanted to lie on the boulder to watch the night sky, but I reminded her that blacklight collection was still needed for the lower elevation site. She laid down anyway, but soon saw the research written in the stars.       We made quick work of the trail down that was now glowing in the starlight. Then she'd set to work counting insects - triple the number of aquatic fliers a...
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Chapter 15: Cliffhanger

     "Jeez FM, how'd you get down there?" I gasp peering over the edge of the most protruding of the humpback rocks. "Slipped off," she marvels, barely visible leaning into the massif from a narrow ledge. "But hey, I stuck the landing." "Very funny!" I simper shimmying closer to the void. "Can you reach my hand?" "Just fingertips," she hisses as sparks shoot between my right hand and her left. "Go get a branch!" "Can't chance it," I decide, finally asserting some authority. "I'm taking down the sheet." "Not before you count the damned bugs you're not!"      There were twenty-two gnats, fifteen mosquitoes, nine mayflies, seven small moths, three blowflies, two june beetles, and, the piece de resistance, a gangly cranefly on the sheet suspended between branches on the back side of the rock outcropping. That was a decent haul for about thirty minutes of darkness, but we expe...
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Chapter 14: Going Awry

     "Did you see a dark haired woman in red shorts up there?" I call to a hiker coming down into the twilight of the valley floor. "Yeah, weird that she's hanging out a sheet at dusk," he muses, pausing to glance back at the last rays of sunlight creeping up the hill. "The call of the wild," I shrug, turning off the camp stove and slapping a lid on the bubbling SpaghettiOs.      We'd come on this field trip equipped with all the camping equipment and insect collecting supplies we might need, but nowhere in that trunk full of gear was a flashlight. Sensing that Yogi Berra's assessment of right field in Yankee Stadium as "it get's late early out there" also applied to steep hollows, I decided to go get her while the getting was still good, or at least still visible.        "FM!" I howl as I stumble up the barely discernible trail winding through progressively steeper rubble.  "Cruck cruck," echoing down from the...
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