Paradise by the Yellow Bug Light

The first day of the vacation did not look promising. The four hour ride took five hours in a driving rain. It ended with a long crawl down an unlit dirt road that shrank by the minute, the trees moving closer and closer, until if felt like we’d have to get out and turn the car sideways to fit. It finally ended at a hut. Uh-oh.

We’d already been warned that there was no television at the cabin. In the near biblical downpour and encroaching darkness all it lacked were crashes of lightning to turn it horror movie creepy. With two kids, a dog, and a civilization loving wife crammed in claustrophobic quarters there was a good chance there would be blood on the walls.

But it turned out it wasn’t bad at all. First off, it only looked like a hut from front door. It was actually quite roomy inside with three bedrooms, and a big kitchen with newish appliances. There was even a coffee maker, the only antidote that keeps my wife from turning in to Mr. Hyde. The living room was downright huge with a giant stone fireplace and rickety French doors that opened out to…to…

Paradise!

Holy cow, outside the French doors was a beautiful little porch and not two steps beyond the porch was an idyllic lake. At least it looked like it would be idyllic if it ever stopped raining. Right then it looked more gray and heavy. The lake was small enough that even in the sheets of rain the other side was visible. There were no lights anywhere. It was like we had the lake to ourselves. I saw this as rapture. Julia saw this as Freddy Kruger and went inside to hug the coffee maker.

A car full of young ladies, family friends who planned to spend the weekend at the cabin, arrived shortly after we did. There was a bunkhouse next to the main cabin filled with three bunk beds. The three young ladies each planned to share a bunk with a family of spiders for a couple of days.

The dog looked very, uh, relieved to spend some quality time in the trees. On the ride up she had given me the ‘you’re kidding, right?’ look when I offered to take her for a potty break at a rest area. She’d been paying the price for the last couple of hours. Suddenly the rain didn’t seem that bad to her any longer.

We all unloaded our stuff and shook off the rain. We found dry wood under a tarp and quickly sparked a fire. Then we spent the evening playing board games before the fireplace and looking for extra blankets. The young ladies returned to the bunkhouse and swept the spiders out of their beds. We tucked the kids in under a pile of blankets and climbed in to a slightly small but comfortable bed. Everyone quickly forgot about Freddy Kruger and horror movies.

I don’t really have an Usher connection to this story beyond the fact that it started out looking Blair Witch Project bad then friends arrived and we settled in and it ended up surprisingly less miserable. In fact, if you squinted really hard, you could almost make out paradise through the raindrops. That seems a pretty apt metaphor for Usher.