For some time, I was back and forth about a sitting myself down and doing a short write-up detailing what exactly went on during the 4 days and 3 nights that some of us were in Cape Scott. When we had just returned from the trip and the memory was still fresh in my head, I suddenly got fed up with my computer's continual crashes and took it to the vendor for them to swap in/out parts till the problem went away. It was gonna be a time-consuming operation; they had all the parts; it was their fault to begin with; I felt justified.

Suffering from PC withdrawal, I drowned my sorrows in a week-long biking/camping trip along the Sunshine Coast (another story, for another time). Even after I returned from THAT, I never got around to getting my computer back from the store till a week later. So, as you can imagine, things got pushed back and back and back...

Some of you are already aware of my childhood altercation with a certain block of lead, the continual licking and polishing of which led to the current state of forgetfulness that my swiss cheese brain is in today. That alone is compelling enough reason for me to leave a little something of my trip somewhere, where I can find it later and go, "Wow, I did THAT?"

At least that's my current, running reason. It's certainly better-sounding than the truth, which goes something like this: Kat's gonna make some of us hike in the dark for her birthday, I believe I'm going to die this time for sure, I better get this story out now while I can.

I suppose you already have strong reasons to believe that---no matter how horribly exaggerated my words will be---I at least SURVIVED the Cape Scott trip... since I am telling you the story. Don't you hate it when horror stories are ruined this way?

However, as far as you know, anything could have gone wrong with the 3 others in my car: Slack, Zaven, and Richard. So milk suspense out of THAT when you get to the good parts.

The world is divided into Crash Test Dummies Lovers, Crash Test Dummies Haters, and "special" individuals who like Britney. The Lovers try to push Brad Roberts and anything close to his baritone-bass voice (namely, Tom Waits) upon the Haters. The Haters do what they do best, which is to hate, and hate furiously. But in this heated struggle, should a Britney suddenly show up, the Lovers and Haters would turn on him/her instantly and aid each other in destroying a common enemy.

We made it to the Island in good time, and started the 4-hour drive to James' place in Port McNeil. The drive was best described as, "the perfect setting for a horror movie": long, meandering highway devoid of other cars; overcast sky; frequent bridges crossings (any of which could have easily crumbled behind us); etc...

To worsen matters, discussions were in full swing about sordid things that yokels in the boonies could do to outsiders. The question, "Have you seen 'Deliverance'?" became a well-visited topic. It probably didn't help either that earlier that day, on the ferry to the Island, I had introduced the three of them to Munchkins: a card game involving shafting and backstabbing other players till they resent you in real life. The right mentality was there for one of us to just, I dunno, SNAP, y'know, and reach over to where another guy was sitting with a strangling pair of hands and...Gaaagggghhh!!!!

Hypothetically speaking, I probably had a few thoughts in the vein of: "That Zaven... and that SHRILL SHRILL voice... those bewildered eyes darting about furtively like a groundhog out of hiding... I wonder if he'd look good in a noose", or "That Slack... you never know about the quiet ones, always thinking. I'll bet he's plotting something right now... Ya, he's glancing my way... He's up to something 'funny'. He's probably in cahoots with Richard... God, that insufferable Brit... The guy never shaves... If I have to hear about how he dislikes Crash Test Dummies ONE MORE TIME...."

We had spent barely 3 hours together and already tension was mounting. I thought we were just about done-in when Richard zoomed through my 6-CD changer, rejecting my music left and right. You don't ever touch a Thai man's radio without permission; nobody knows this because no one ever lives to warn others about it; it's a terrible insult.

And then, what they did, they forced me to put in a 'decent' selection, of THEIR choosing, from a plethora of music CDs in my CD folder. Oh it was going to be 'democratic' this time. And so we went round the cd changer, once again zooming through all Crash Test Dummies songs, stopping occasionally on some other favorites of Richard, and then repeating those over and over and over... I had zero say in it; Richard became our dictator. Slack, he chose not to say anything. And Zaven, well, let's talk about how he lost the privilege to have any say whatsoever the rest of our trip.

Now, without going into the sordid details of why I was in possession of a Britney CD in the first place, I think it's fairly obvious now who I meant when I said one of us was a closet Britney. I'm surprised we suffered through as many songs as we did. I was so distraught that, before i knew it, I was singing along as if I, somehow, knew the words by heart. The horror, the horror, the horror!

From there onward, I believe the concensus was that Zaven was simply going to have zero voice in our group discussions. These included but were not limited to: Munchkins rulings (reserved only for the all-knowing owner of the game, me); choice of in-car music (usurped by Richard); and other life-critical decisions like, "Should we hike out of Cape Scott in the middle of the night?"

We stayed the previous night at James' place. Being the first ones to arrive, we had a plethora of beds from which to choose. I blame sleepiness, as Zaven and I somehow ended up sharing this old air mattress, which leaked slowly over the course of the night and became nothing but 2 thin layers of bed sheet between ourselves and the chilling cold cement.

At the trailhead, we congregated briefly before starting out together. We were: Greg, Lim, Michael, Adrian, Tudor, Emily, Jessica, Rich, Zaven, myself, Slack, and... uh... company (swisscheese!).

As the hike wore on, it became obvious that Richard, James, and I were of the same mind. We wanted to see how fast we could do the hike with as few stops as possible. We would hike for an hour, rest for five minutes, then continue on, keeping a brisk but steady pace. The only timekeeper on our journey was Richard, an observer from our own time... who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear... And so Doctor Beckett finds himself Leaping, life to life, striving to put right what once went... Ok, just seeing if you were still paying attention.

We were well ahead of the others by the time we reached the lagoon. As you know, it's not really a lagoon; but it was still quite nice and calming yadayadayada... We were at that moment fairly intolerant of 'scenery' and 'nature'. Our struggle was personal: we were racing against our own expectations in a man versus himself kind of way, where nature had no place. Zaven was of a different mind, socializing and taking his time like most other normal folks. He was also nowhere to be seen. Later, we should have realized from this that involving him in a night hike might have been a bad idea; but at the time we had not yet conceived of such a horrible thing. We pushed on.

On such a hike, you don't talk about the pain in your feet, you don't complain about the soreness in your shoulders, and you don't whine about how far there's left to go. I've always found this machoism silly; but on this trip I understood. Machoism had very little to do with it; there was simply no time, no energy to waste on that sort of thing; it drained at your willpower, which was your strongest asset. You save all your complaints till the end.

I can't describe how thankful I was when the trail opened up: the overcast sky pouring through the gaping wound between the last row of trees, the others' voices lifting in exclamation, my own breathless gasps filling the octave between elation and relief.... We had reached Nels Bight. 3 Hours, 54 minutes, 16 seconds.

The three of us hobbled together to a log and fell on it, grunting. Our feet were out of our shoes faster than you could say, "Hut of Brown, Now Come Down" (I got nothin... ); and then we were feeling the fine, warm sand between them.

Someone far wiser than me once said that "after a long hike, everything is better. You appreciate the simple things. Drinking is better. Sitting is better. Eating is better. Want sausage?" All the while I was sifting through sand with my feet I remembered this and withdrew into a quiet trance.

Out came a bag of dried fruits from James's pack. We were snacking on these earlier at the creek, and I took to them instantly. I was warned not to eat too many, however. Being diuretics, they would have forced me to drink more and more water till I had diarrhea. Yet, despite being real tasty, they had no such effect on a Thai stomach. I did not feel energized from them either; in fact, quite the opposite: the moment James's tent was set up, I crashed in it and did not emerge till dinner time.

That night, we slept to the cacophony of Adrian et al exchanging obscenities and sexual solicitations. I was relieved that James and I were on the far side of the camp, where such grievances to my virgin ears were more diluted. I was equally relieved that James was a heavy sleeper: my body is an orchestra at night.

I awoke to the smell of rotting seaweed, kelp and a plethora of other sea-dwelling plants. A storm had strung them high above the shoreline at some point earlier in the summer and they never finished decomposing (as explained by Greg, the park ranger) The smell reasserted itself with every gust of wind. I envied sea gulls and their immunity to stink.

Convinced that I was the only one to be up and about, I birthed myself as quietly as I could from the tent and went about exploring. To my surprise, however, Richard was already there, walking in a triangular pattern on the beach, kicking sand. He was about half done this elaborate bout of sand kicking when I greeted him; and we chatted. The others joined us eventually; but for a time, it was Richard, me, the sand, and the sea gulls.

I could tell then that we were going to spent the second day lazing around the camp. It felt like everyone was coming down from the big hike. Personally, I felt that the three of us needed it. We needed to stay put somewhere, to let whatever humanity we left behind during yesterday's blitz catch up.

We got out the disc, played with James' boomerang, commented on the sand fleas.... It felt like a lazy afternoon prescribed by Calvin & Hobbes.

At some point, Zaven, Richard, and I went tossing the disc. We slowly progressed along the beach, tossing ahead of ourselves and occasionally into the wind. Zaven decided to leave his shoes on the beach and go barefeet.

We caught up with another group from our camp headed somewhere purposeful. The sun was out briefly. From the beach, we saw the grooved husk of humped back whales rolling above the water, a tail fin breaking the surface here, a jet of blowhole vent there. There must have been a family of them, swimming out in the cold water like it was nothing.

When I looked about me again, I saw that Zaven, Richard, and Michael were missing. The crazy hooligans had taken off their shirts and gone for a swim! We watched as the waves broke against them, and endured inwardly every torturous minute they spent out there. God, it looked cold. They came back to us shivering, but grinning like Cheshire cats.

By then, the tide was fast on the rise. Zaven suddenly became worried about his shoes. We debated at some length whether or not he had left them above the tideline, whether or not the tide would have reached them yet, whether this or that... When we got back to them, they were soaking wet and poised to drift off into the sea.

That night, we gathered wood and started a fire. We tried to get a few games of Mafia going, but it never took. People were too busy watching sandfleas dive to their fiery deaths, cheering them on morbidly. We gave them internal monologues and pretended they were on the brink of a major discovery. Imagine: sandfleas with the technology to make fire! All the while, we suspected that the barrage of sandfleas hopping into our fire was a mere distraction, that a larger and more organized group of sandfleas were slowly surrounding us, ready to do us in the same way they did in the other campers. We were still living in a horror movie.

It rained the previous night and the next morning. We scampered to set up a tarp. Everyone had their own ideas, their agenda, their input. Feeling slightly removed from the situation, I withdrew to a log and watched the organized chaos come to pass. I felt restless that day; I needed to move again. The tredium of setting up a tarp weighed me down heavily. Moreover, I was becoming tired of getting James to pump water for the three of us (he didn't let me touch the filter till later, when I demonstrated that yes, I could make crushing motions with my two hands).

I looked to Richard and Slack and saw the same restlessness reflected on their faces. Something was also making them want to get a move on, go somewhere, do anything. It soon became clear, however, that the others did not feel this. We took far too long assembling a group to visit the lighthouse.

The hike out to the lighthouse was, if I remember correctly (fat chance), 7.5km. It was a fancy stretch, spanning two beaches and a few trails on wet, slippery, rotten planks. The lighthouse itself was not much to write home about: a 2-meter mechanical horror housed in some metallic erec... uh... structure. Once there, we took some requisite photos, filled up our water bottles, and bought chocolate. Ahhhhhhh chocolate...

I suddenly realized then that I was addicted to pop! I had been bathing in free pop at work and now I was succumbing to the craving. It was too late to try to fight it; I needed a quick fix, an bandaid solution... I immediately bought a can from the lighthouse keeper. *ZZzzzt!* Ahhhhhh Coke....

Perhaps it was the combination of the coke, the chocolate, and the restlessness... But on the hike back, Richard and I got ahead of the others and started to scheme...

But then our minds were racing. We were plotting and scheming first about how we would 'hypothetically' do it. Then, when we realized that might actually be able to pull it off, we became excited about it. Yes, we could do this. We needed to tell Zaven, we needed to tell Slack. We were GOING TO DO THIS. A god-sent calm suddenly descended upon Richard and me. The idea of moving somewhere was very appealing; it quelled our restlessness, to be able to plan this escapade.

1) We needed something to challenge us on our 17.4km hike to the trailhead. We had already completed the "do it as fast as you can" challenge on the way in; now it was time for something different.

2) We had never done anything like it. Moreover, its not having anything to do with drugs, smokes, or alcohol thus made the idea instantly appealing; we wanted to try it for the first time... and the first helping's... well... always free.

3) There was something inherently adventurous about half-baked schemes. No one is usually around to let you know any better. I think we kept ourselves purposefully ignorant to the fact that it was half-baked because the idea of following through a full-baked scheme was less attractive. Yet strangely, realizing "half-bakedness is part of the attraction" made an item on this list. We also know doublespeak if anyone wishes to learn.

4) The very idea frightened us. But fear can sometimes be a motivator (to do even more stupid things, probably). A good line in our resumes could have read, "able to turn fear and anxiety into readily consumable sources of energy". Monsters Inc. style!

We waited for Zaven to catch up to us and let him know of our plans. For this to work, we also needed to consult with James on the ferry schedule. We could be home by Sunday afternoon!