Too lazy to make s’mores? Too worried about being in the woods on a campout with sticky fingers and smellin’ like bear bait? They make s’mores and package them. Civilized, and your pants legs don’t wind up with marshmallow smeared all over them where you tried to clean it off your hands.
Or maybe you know a big guy like Lowell whose glucose levels have dropped out…
I’ve said in the past that I would try not to degenerate into crotch-area humor. But this is a product review, not a cartoon.
The subject of The Camp Shuffle comes up on long outdoors trips. Going down the Grand Canyon for a couple of weeks, say. Or taking your kids to Scout Camp. They warn the kids and warn them good, but you know somebody in the group will neglect to take proper showers or change his underwear or not take the proper precautions in the sweaty days of Summer camp.
I feel bad for them. Because I’ve gotten the Camp Shuffle. I’ve staggered along like the crippled sidekick in an old Western, wishing I could quit the hike, go back to camp and let my tenders heal. It happened this past June. I was miserable. I could have been MORE miserable, but another scout leader told a funny story about a buddy of his that got the Camp Shuffle. The guy had gotten some powder, figuring that would fix it all up. But, the story went, he bought MENTHOLATED powder. Everyone laughed, and I felt better. My drawers were uncomfortable in the extreme, but at least I hadn’t dropped menthol down in ’em. Ha. Hilarious.
This gave me a good idea, though. While the scouts were being taught or tested or whatever the heck during their Camp class, I’d step over to the trading post and see if they had anything for Camp Shuffle. I figured that if it was standard practice to lecture the kids about it during our first few moments at camp, surely the trading post would keep powder or something on hand. And they DID. They had two different kinds of Gold Bond powder. Regular, of which they had a dozen containers, and Extra Strength, of which they had two containers.
It hadn’t been that long since I’d heard the story about the idiot who dropped Menthol down his pants, so I looked over both bottles carefully. ‘Extra Strength’, the one bottle said. ‘Healing’, it said. ‘Triple Action Relief’ it said. ‘Cooling, Absorbing, Itch Relieving’ so far so good, and I’d exhausted the front of the bottle. No mention of ‘Mentholated’. The directions on the back say, ‘Apply freely up to 3 or 4 times a day’. It also says, under ‘Uses’: temporarily relieves the pain and itch associated with: minor cuts, sunburn, insect bites, scrapes, prickly heat (!) minor burns, rashes (also “!”) and minor skin irritations. The ‘Warnings’ say it’s for external use only (good. I had no plans to eat it.) and to keep it out of my eyes. (also, no problems. I’ve never powdered my eyes and couldn’t see a reason to start.) There was some ‘ingredients’ list at the bottom. It didn’t mention ‘menthol’, though it did say ‘methyl salicylate’, which worried me since I had no earthly idea what the heck it might be or if I wanted it on my tenders. But I figured that there were only a few ‘Extra Strength’ bottles left because that was the kind everyone bought. And I bought the Extra Strength.
Then I went to the car. It was very close and mostly, no one goes to the parking lot during the day, so the lot was empty. I opened both doors on one side, stepped between them, and discreetly medicated my nether regions.
Which is to say I set my own crotch on fire.
Fire. fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire!
While I am trying to hold still and wondering if I should, maybe, run around or call for help or die or something, my son comes up from the trading post. He said… something that didn’t have to do with testicle fires, so I don’t recall what it might have been.
Nerve endings, says my wife who was a burn nurse for many years, die. They burn up and the victims of fires no longer feel the pain- not until they begin to heal, that is. I decided, while standing there sweating, panting, gasping and trying to answer my son (I thought, I’ll tell him I’m okay. Everything’s okay and I love him very much. Those would be good last words.) that I would just wait until there was enough nerve damage that I could get on with the day.
Finally, things changed. The fire didn’t go out, you understand, it just started oscillations between nuclear fire and nuclear winter.
fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice
I had never thought that I’d be happy to have my gonads light up and freeze over and over again, but I assumed that any change in blinding furious pain was a good thing. Maybe someday I could live like normal people again, and this was the beginning of it.
•••••
Okay, that was about as funny as this story gets. Eventually, the pain turned into a confused discomfort that I was able to see through and deal with. It was probably only a couple of minutes that I had flop sweat, agonizing fire and ice and a sincere concern that I had crippled myself to the point of needing hospitalization. It seemed like longer, but you know how that is.
I finished the day and got back to our campsite. Another Den Leader with us had Johnson and Johnson’s Baby Powder. I used it that night and the next day, and didn’t have another minute’s discomfort.
So here’s the conclusion: If you have Camp Shuffle DO NOT put Gold Bond Extra Strength powder in your shorts. Even if you DO NOT have Camp Shuffle, do not put Gold Bond Extra Strength powder in your shorts. If you have a bitter, bitter enemy for whom you have nothing but a seething hell-born hate, and you find that you have an opportunity to put Gold Bond Extra Strength powder in his shorts, DO NOT do it. It’s and evil thing to do, and you’re not that evil. No one is that evil.
You have some poison ivy rash on your arm or leg? It’s itching like crazy? Use Gold Bond Extra Strength powder. Use it. It’s fine. It feels good. It even smells kinda nice. Need something on your pits before you go out on a long hike? Go for the powder. Back of your neck a little sunburnt? Use it according to instructions. It’s good stuff.
But DO NOT put it on your genitals. Ever. Under any circumstances.
Last thing- I must have been in a desperate hurry to get relief. The label on the back of the bottle? Yeah, at the bottom there’s those ingredients listed? They’re ‘Inactive’ ingredients. Up at the top, Right under ‘Drug Facts’? THERE’s the ‘Active Ingredients’ and the first thing listed is ‘Menthol’ 0.8%. You might want reading glasses to see it, but it’s there. Oh, it’s there, my friends. On the label and in the bottle. It’s THERE.
On an only semi-related note… in this video they are using the non-mentholated Gold Bond:
By the way, THIS is the stuff I’m using next trip. Mostly cause ‘MonkeyButt’ is just too funny not to have on some kind of packaging around here. Click on the bottle if you’d like to buy some too:
The tough part is pretty much over. I’ve done all the confusing, frightening, stupid, dead-ended things that can be done, and now, I’m ready for the part that, while maybe not EASY, is at least straightforward. Climb a ladder. Out. No more questioning the options. This was it. Just one long climb and I would be out.
So I climbed.
The Royal Gorge Incline Train’s incline is, I see at http://royalgorgebridge.com/about/facts.php, 1,550 feet long. I had to have been a little better than halfway up after all this nonsense, so let’s say I had maybe 700 feet to go. 230 yards or so. Rounding up, maybe a quarter of a football field. It seems like longer in my memory, but you know how I exaggerate.
I would now like to point out that the tallest ladder you’re likely to run across in your life, or more specifically in MY life, is one of those 24 foot jobs that reach to the top of your two-story house to let you reach, say, the wasp nest that has been built in some inaccessible and frankly vertiginous corner where you wouldn’t normally go on a bet, especially since it’s full of wasps. But I digress again and the commas are getting plain silly. You ever climbed on one of those 24 foot things at full extension? No, because at full extension, they bounce like trampolines. But that’s not the point. The point is 24 foot ladders. What about 29 of them, end to end? Right. You haven’t climbed 29 fully extended 24 foot ladders because you’re not an idiot. Hardly anyone is, or could even imagine getting oneself into the position to climb that far. But let me tell you that such a climb uses muscles that boot camp workouts don’t reach. You use neglected, dehydrated, twanging muscles that are wobbly from bathing in old adrenaline that went sour in your bloodstream four or five chapters back.
But there is very little incentive to stop, because numbers of feet and dehydration aside, you’re nearly OUT.
My wish for you and your life is that one day, you can have a task that has such single-minded purpose and such dawn’s-awakening results. I won’t say it’s like seeing a child born because saying so can get you killed by some woman who remembers her own purpose and results and knows damn well if you try to equate climbing a ladder to it, she’ll kill ya. And because it’s not really the same anyhow. Frankly, though, it’s affirming to just climb along as best you can,counting missing bolts on the ladder (98 in case you’re wondering) and knowing that you’re on a straight road out of Dodge.
By the time I got to 98 missing bolts that should have been holding my ladder in place, it was no longer my ladder.
It now belonged to the guy whose face suddenly popped over the end of the ladder as I approached the top. I was now the interloper and I was on HIS ladder. He had a genial face, a work-smudged face, a suspicious and a baffled face. He said, “What was you doing down THERE?”
“Kayaking.” I said, “I lost my boat.” After a brief thought I added, “Please don’t tell me that I’m the first dumb son-of-a-bitch to have to climb outta here.”
Without missing a beat, he said, “Well, son, I got bad news.” And he grinned. Ass.
That wasn’t adding insult to injury. That came a few minutes later, and we’ll get to it in the Conclusion Of Boy Gorge, next time.
My brother, on a recent motorbike trip around Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas, boggled at how he ever could have lived here in the land of Poison Ivy. He’s in Washington state now, where they have poison ivy, it’s just not EVERYWHERE. I thought I was used to it- until a week and a half ago.
On the first day of the school year, my wife tries to walk along to school with the kids, and on the way back, she uses some handy garden clippers to snip off the limbs and things that have grown over the sidewalk in the intervening summer. Snip, snip, and the kids can walk to school without taking a locust branch, with its attendant thorns, in the eye. Very community minded.
I was going to ‘help’. As I was reaching up to snip some high branch, helpfully, my wife asks if that’s not poison ivy. No, I think. Couldn’t be. Sure, there’s sort of three leaves in groups, but they’re HUGE, and they’re way up there… that can’t be poison ivy. But that wasn’t a branch from a tree, it was a creeper coming off a vine that had strangled the tree. Weird.
Poison Ivy has gotten SNEAKY. Must be an evolutionary trick. Anyhow, it fooled me, and as I had snipped, big ol’ pseudo branches had tumbled down along my arm. I guess I wasn’t convinced that it WAS poison ivy, or I had a lot on my mind, or … I don’t have an excuse. Instead of boiling my arm when I got home, I went to work. It was morning. I was probably worried about getting a Hubris cartoon ready for you guys. ‘Cause I love you.
When you sit at a desk and draw and answer phones, and draw some more, you brush your arm against other parts of your body, and scratch, and generally your arm doesn’t mind it own business. And I had peeled my sweaty shirt off when I got home, and probably smeared a towel around so that I wouldn’t leave sweat all over my drawing board and drawings. So a few days later, when it was far too late, I had an exhibit for the local cub scouts- “Here’s what happens when you don’t wash your arm carefully after touching poison ivy!” I refuse to peel the shirt and show everyone the myriad smears and swipes across my chest and back. I don’t want anyone thinking I’m STUPID.
Here’s some modern poison ivy medication. Click on the tube if you want to shop:
Sorry I’m running behind today, and posting this after fifty-odd folks have already come looking for it.
Look to the right, see the facebook thing over there? Do you facebook? Go like Hubris, would ya? It’d mean so much to him. And he’d win a bet with Paste, but that’s a whole nother story.
Watching home video shows and reality TV is ruined if you just remember WHY there’s a guy with a camera standing right there, and the people in the shot know it.
Don’t let ‘Crashin’ fool ya:
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