headless

Insomnia has not gone away, but it is less wearing than it used to be. I've developed a system, and that's good enough for me and the Guy, who is no longer forced to defend himself when I start thrashing in sheer rage on my side of the bed. I am small, but my legs and fists are quite mighty; he is prone to getting hit by friendly fire when I get upset at my inability to sleep. In lieu of staging a frontal assault, I now just get up and head to the other bedroom, where I can thrash around in isolation and eventually go down out of sheer pissiness.

It is not a mature or particularly dignified coping mechanism, but it works for me.

My sister's boyfriend John is in Argentina, climbing in Patagonia. At least, I assume that is what he is doing; Sako tells me that the airline lost his luggage ten days ago, and that it contained a great deal of very expensive climbing gear. When I called her earlier today, she was engaged in trying to track it down.

"That sucks," I said. "He's gone all the way there and he doesn't have any gear."

"It's okay. He has a lot of friends down there."

"So he's borrowing gear?"

"Yeah. And one of his buddies decided to bring extra."

"Lucky."

It's one of the perks of being a seasonal worker that you make good friends with people during a season, after which those people go off into the world and return to their places of origin. Yosemite's summer staff is, in many ways, a giant club of like-minded people with similar interests, similar lifestyles, and similar personalities from all over the world. The draw is obvious: the National Park is practically designed to appeal to the outdoorsy, active nature-lover. Seasonal work is obviously temporary, and most people who engage in it have to live a certain kind of lifestyle, one that involves traveling where the work is.

At the drop of a hat -- and my sister has actually been a living example of this, so I do not say this flippantly -- either Sako or her boyfriend could pretty much hop on the next outbound flight, destination unknown, and end up someplace where they have a friend who'd be willing to put them up, lend them stuff, and go climbing with them.

It's a vast and open-hearted community, by all accounts. Sako fits right in. If she had any real estate, I'm certain she would make it available to her friends, too.

"So the other day, the weather was bad so they couldn't go climbing," Sako said. "So they went hiking instead and found a headless body."

I should know to be prepared for these sorts of things when talking to Sako. And yet. "...what?"

"They found a body," she said patiently, "and it didn't have a head. It was a hiker or something who probably got lost or something."

"Oh my God. Did they bring it down? Were they able to ID him?"

"He was up there for a long time. They probably knew he was dead."

The use of the word "probably" implied a general lack of commitment to the proper authority notification process. "Did they go to the police?"

"Well, they're in Argentina."

"They have police in Argentina."

"It wasn't going to go anywhere."

"Yeah, but a dead body sounds like something you should inform the authorities about."

"I suppose," she said. She sounded unenthused. More, she sounded uninterested.

I had a sneaking suspicion. I voiced it. "They finished the hike, didn't they?"

"Maybe if they were in the park," she said, still on the topic of informing the authorities. "I could see that."

There is this about living the kind of itinerant lifestyle: if you are to survive it, you must be practical. Ruthless pragmatism is the order of the day. It does not hurt that both Sako and John are in (or in the case of Sako, about to be in) medicine; more than any other profession, I imagine pragmatism needs to be a dominant personality trait to succeed.

"They know pretty much where it is," she assured me. "They could probably point people to the location. They'll probably go back up and try to find it again."

"Crazy," I said, and hung up the phone to spend the rest of the day goofing off at home.