Show Me The Colfax

No Monday Night Zazen tonight (my friend and Schwarzkommando guitarist Michael Goldman opened for me) as I got up early and drove to the airport, despite the late night antics of my Refrigerator Goblin, which had kept me up much of the night before. I caught the 8:45 flight to Alexandria, rented a car from National, and drove back to Colfax, Louisiana, where I had done some field work last spring.

The site had certainly grown up since then. In fact, it was damn near impassable. Honeysuckle and vines as high as my waist made covering even the shortest distances an exhausting task, which along with the Gulf Coast humidity, soon had me soaking with sweat. My task was to find no fewer that 17 surveyor stakes laid out for me the week before, so I had to cover nearly all of the 25-acre site at which I was working. By the time the rain started, I was already so soaked with sweat that the precipitation was refreshing.

Once I completed my mission and found all 17 stakes, I then had to repeat the task to show the staked locations to the field crew that arrived later and will be working at the site all week, and then again to the State environmental inspector, and finally to the bulldozer operator who was going to clear us a trail so that we could get drilling equipment to the 17 locations. After all that, I was soaking wet from head to toe, grass stained, mosquito bitten and sunburned (although nothing like last summer's disaster).

Not that I'm complaining. To be honest, a bad day in the field can be, in fact, quite a bit worse that a good day in the office, but this was not a bad day in the field. This was just a hot and steamy, sweaty and buggy, typical day in Swamp Thing country, and by the time I got back to my hotel room in Alexandria and out of my wet clothes, showered, and got a cold Abita Turbodog or two under my belt, I slept like a baby, finally away from the gremlin for a night.