Dave Short

Link of the Update: Dino-Riders: Does anybody else remember this? Lasers and dinosaurs? The two coolest things ever?

So I went up to Priest Lake for a few days this week. My grandparents used to have a cabin up there, but they sold it. We found the guy who owns it now and rented it for a week. I hiked to a beautiful upper lake and even built a sandcastle.

It was, I can quite honestly say, the best sandcastle ever built in the history of humankind. I put up 5-foot long board as a breakwater. I gave my tiny sandpeople a moat fed by the lake, and lined it with rocks to keep the banks from eroding, sending hundred of thousands of imaginary sand dollars’ worth of imaginary sand houses to their imaginary sand deaths. I even managed to create two towers — you know, the kind you build by putting wet sand into a bucket and tipping it onto the beach — despite the fact that the sand on the beach was so coarse that my brother was skipping grains of sand across the lake. I thought to myself, not even God him (or her, Women’s Libbers) could destroy this marvelous piece of engineering.

I managed to spend about two hours on the dock before a storm blew in. Now, this is not an uncommon occurance at Priest Lake — everybody’s heard about the crazy weather in Idaho! (EDITOR’S NOTE: this is a joke. Obviously, the people in Idaho are crazy, not the weather. Maybe a little bit of both)

This was not your garden-variety, get-the-towels-drying-on-the-rack-wet storm, this was a storm. Two trees feel on the cabin property (each one managing to hit a building), it was hailing, new creeks formed on the trails, and the cleats on the dock broke loose, putting my uncle’s boat in peril.

My uncle, of course, ran on the dock to tie it up. In a raging storm. With rain. And hail. And waves going over the dock. So of course my father, cousin, and cousin’s husband ran out to help him. It was insane. This was a scene from some stupid movie where the Captain of a dilapidated old freighter decides to sail into a hurricane for some reason and very nearly sinks the ship. The hail began sticking to the dock, turning it into a sheet of ice. It turns out that Sid, the owner of the cabin, had lost a finger and his boat doing the same thing. All I could do, man that I wasn’t, was sit there sipping my Mike’s Hard Lemonade (that alone proves I’m no man) and shooting pictures with a camera.

The storm abated and the boat did not sink, but something horrible did happen — my sandcastle was erased, as if God were challening my audacity. Lesson learned, God. Jerk.