Copyright 1989 by Joel Furr (jfurr@furrs.org)

Night and I get along in a strange sort of way. Don't get me wrong here; I like night, we're pals, we get along. If night wants to come by my place late one evening for a drink, you know, he's welcome, he doesn't even need to call ahead. Night and I go way back.

This is not to say that we don't occasionally have our difficult moments.

Let me give you an example.

It was nighttime, just a few hours after midnight on July 17, 1986. I was lying in bed fitfully sleeping. Suddenly, I sat bolt upright in bed, tried to focus my eyes on the clock on the bedside table, and somehow got the idea that it was 9:30 in the morning -- and I was going to be late for work!

The darkness outside should have immediately convinced me otherwise, but I wasn't in my right mind. I jumped up out of bed, took two steps toward the door to the hall, and WHAM! -- barked my shins on the chair sitting between my desk and my bed.

Whimpering and gasping "Mom, mom, mom" (it seemed to make sense at the time), I tottered toward the door and stood, holding the door-frame, waiting for the pain to go away.

When it did, I half-stomped, half-tiptoed up the hall (smash your shins sometime and see how you walk immediately afterwards) and through the kitchen to the garage, glancing at the kitchen clock as I passed and still not registering that it was the middle of the night.

The garage door was open and I went out on the driveway, gingerly walking on the gravel. The stars were out and a cool breeze was blowing and I realized that I wasn't wearing any clothes. In midsummer, sometimes I wear pajamas and sometimes I don't. Anyway, at that point, I should have realized that it was the middle of the night and that I didn't have to get up for hours and that I should go back to bed and that I should stop wandering around in the dark.

Well, I didn't.

Instead, I started thinking, fuzzily, and tried to figure out what could be causing the strange darkness at nine-thirty in the morning. Eclipse, I thought, then realized that it was pretty pitch-dark, even for an eclipse. Nuclear war, I thought, throwing up clouds of smoke and ash to blot out the Sun. I looked around and realized that the stars were visible, so where were the clouds of smoke and ash? Nowhere, I realized, and started trying to figure how my clock had managed to display 09:30 when it was really the middle of the night. Power outage? No, then the clock would have been flashing 12:00 over and over, and anyway, that would have slowed a clock down, not sped it up by six hours.

Eventually, I must have woken up completely. With the vague idea that something was wrong nagging at my mind, I went back inside, went to my room, checked my bedside clock, and saw that it read 04:17 AM.

Mildly pleased that all the confusion had a logical explanation (i.e., that I was sleepy and had been imagining things), and that I wasn't going to be late for work, I crawled back in bed and started to drift off to sleep again.

About five minutes later I sat bolt upright again and said "What was I worrying for? I have today off! I don't even have to go to work today!"

That's what I mean when I say that night and I get along in a strange sort of way.

When morning came for real on Thursday, I let the clock tick by unobserved until nearly 10:00 in the morning. I'd meant to get up at the crack of dawn, seven-thirty at the latest. When the alarm went off, I'd sleepily told myself that I'd sleep a half-hour longer, no more. Hah! A thousand times I've told myself that and I can count the times it worked on the fingers of one hand. It didn't work this time, that's for sure. I got up when I woke up again, over two hours later... 9:47 A.M.

I called Fritz before showering and found that he, too, was just getting up. I told him I'd be over when I was over, then I went off and took a shower. I had to have my shower or I wouldn't feel human. Power outages were very bad for me.

Showered and human-feeling, I decided to have a little breakfast before leaving to pick Fritz up. I got myself in the mood for a large omelet and some side dishes, but when I looked in the kitchen I knew that I wasn't going to get the sort of thing I wanted. Sure, we had all sorts of food, but no one in our family ever had put much stock in a large breakfast and so we didn't have the raw materials for the spread I'd had in mind when I was showering: grits, toast with cherry preserves, an omelet with green peppers, ham, cheese, and onions, maybe some sausage or bacon, grapefruit juice, and coffee.

Sure, we had bread, but no cherry preserves. It was grape jelly or nothing. We had eggs, onions, and green peppers, but no ham, and if I knew my mother, she'd have a use in mind for the green peppers and would get annoyed if I ate them. I'd eaten all the grits and I'd forgotten to put 'grits' on the shopping list. We didn't have any grapefruit juice because I always drank it all within about twenty-four hours of its arrival in the house. The sausage was frozen in the freezer with the bacon. What it all worked out to is that we had lots of food, but not the kind I was in the mood for.

Most heroic figures don't have to worry about finding a good breakfast before starting out on their quests. It just shows up from somewhere. Valhalla, maybe.

"Aargh," I said. Instead of an omelet, I had a bowl of cold cereal and some black coffee. Probably just as well anyway. If I'd had a big breakfast like I'd planned, I would've felt logy all day. My body had gotten used to eating a small breakfast, a small lunch, and a large dinner. College dining halls and oppressive class schedules can do that to you.

It was a good day for an invasion: warm, not too hot, sunny, with the barest hint of a breeze. I'd been half-expecting a torrential downpour but it looked as if I'd have to do without.

Fritz was sitting in the Knacks' family room reading the morning Roanoke Times & World News when I came in. He sprang lightly to his feet when he heard me shuffling into the room.

I looked him over. He had on his black polo shirt and a pair of cutoff shorts. That would do. I had on my favorite green-and-black Hawaiian shirt and blue corduroy shorts. In a strange sort of way, we'd both chosen clothing that seemed appropriate for the occasion. With Fritz, wearing black on Fridays and special occasions was sort of a personal tradition; with me, wearing a Hawaiian shirt was a tradition that I intended to start. I'd grown to like Hawaiian shirts and if they'd only been on sale more often, I'd probably have been buying a couple with every paycheck. No such luck, however. It was the middle of July and the stores were already stocking their fall lines.

Receiving my nod of approval, he said, brightly, "Now what?"

"Did you get the Whoppers?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, holding up a quart carton. "What about the other things we needed?"

"The flag's out in the car, along with the flagpole. It came out looking a little odd, but it's not like anyone's gonna notice. I couldn't locate my camera and I don't really know if we'd have much to take pictures of anyway so I wouldn't worry about it. I guess all the traffic cones are back in your bedroom and you've got the slingshot and the Whoppers. What does that leave? I guess that just leaves the beer. What are we going to do about that?"

"Well, I figured the easiest bet would be to go to the 7-11 next to work in Christiansburg. I know just about all of the cashiers there and some of them have sold me beer before. If that doesn't work, Mom told me to come by work and she'd take ten minutes off to go down to the supermarket. I don't see any reason why we won't be able to get what we want at 7-11, though."

"Okay, fine. Let's get the traffic cones loaded up and get going."

I don't know what sort of spectacle we made, carrying fifteen traffic cones out to the Subaru, parked in the Knacks' driveway. I guess it's a good thing the Knacks didn't live in the sort of neighborhood where all the people spent their days watching each other through barely-parted curtains. At least, I don't think they did. Maybe someone was calling to the police even as we drove off. Maybe the police showed up five minutes later, searched the house for signs of illegal contraband, drugs, and/or traffic cones, found only an octopus in a small jar in the refrigerator, pummeled the nosy neighbor into submission, and left in disgust. Who knows. We weren't arrested, in any event.

Even without the police arriving to turn the whole ugly mess into a real disaster, I felt self-conscious sitting in a car with a mostly-inflated yellow and black rubber raft poking me in the back of the head, fifteen traffic cones of various sizes stuck underneath the boat in the back of the car, a small tree with a piece of red and black cloth attached sticking between the driver's and passenger's seats, Fritz sitting eating Whoppers in the passenger seat and snapping his slingshot elastic every so often, and all the other drivers on the road wondering what we were up to.

The flag, as I said, came out looking a little odd. The top of the flag was red and the bottom of the flag was black and there was a big white HERE in the middle of the flag, but the paint had bled under the tape somehow and the HERE looked a little sick. The red and black overlapped each other in places and the whole thing didn't look so much like a flag as it did a really bad high school art project. It would serve our purposes admirably. I had no doubt but that the ducks, geese, squirrels, and other assorted vermin would head for the hills out of fear for their lives thinking that an army of ninth-graders was coming over the horizon.

Of course, we had to keep from getting over-confident. We might never make it to Pandapas Pond at all. There was always the danger that we'd suddenly have simultaneous nervous breakdowns while driving past the Triangle Lanes Bowling Alley at the intersection of Route 460 and Route 114, crash the car into the bowling alley snack bar (which would disturb the cockroaches, an added risk), and spend the day trying to climb into the ball-washing machine while howling at the tops of our lungs.

I cleared my throat. "How's your brain doing today, Fritz? Well-oiled, not leathery at all?"

"Maybe a little leathery," he mused. "I didn't have time to take it out and oil it this morning. You know how it gets, you have to spend a half-hour working Vaseline into it if you want to get it good and supple and I just didn't have time for it."

When we got to our favorite 7-11, I had an irresistible urge to tromp next door to our Hardee's and tell everyone what we were about to go off and do. I gave Fritz some money and shoved him in the general direction of the 7-11's front door and told him I'd be back in a minute.

I'd imagine that the people in Hardee's were probably thinking they had things good that day; it was a Thursday, middle of the week and not very busy, and neither Fritz nor I were there to abuse the help and generally wreak havoc. Then, all of a sudden, the door swings open and I walk in, looking wild-eyed and babbling something about squirrels and ducks and bloodshed and invasions. Moments later, in walks Fritz, also looking wild-eyed and clutching two six-packs of beer at 10:45 in the morning. "Is this what my horoscope meant," they think, "when it said to beware of strange people and to stay home today?"

We didn't stay at Hardee's too long. It wouldn't have made Charleen very happy to have her two strangest employees raving incoherently in the dining room, clutching large amounts of beer, scaring the customers away -- and on their day off, yet.

I checked with Fritz. He'd picked up a six-pack of Michelob and a six-pack of Michelob Dark with no special difficulty, so we were all set and ready to go. It was amazing how easy it was in those halcyon days to buy beer underage. If you didn't know a cashier, there were always places you could go that just didn't bother to check the ID of anyone over the age of 12. The real key to knowing whether or not you could buy beer at a convenience store was this: if you could tell that Tech students went there a lot, it was no go. The only places that the police ever checked up on were the convenience stores frequented by the underage Tech freshmen and sophomores. Go five miles outside Blacksburg and it was the same as it ever was: "Noooo problem, man!"

It occurs to me here that it may seem a bit hypocritical of me to condemn drug use on one hand, while glorying in the illegal purchase and consumption of beer on the other. My answer to this is "Yes, it is sort of contradictory. Life can be that way sometimes." I was young and foolish, anyway.

We stuck the beer next to the traffic cones and ate a few more Whoppers and set out for Pandapas Pond. We hadn't alerted the news media or anything but it was too late to do anything about it. If the varmints wanted to do anything about us they'd better get going on it, I thought. It was nine or ten miles north to the Pond, we'd be there in no time at all. All we had left to do was to go back to Blacksburg, go around Blacksburg on the Bypass, and go a little ways north of Blacksburg on route 460 into the Jefferson National Forest and thence to the Pandapas Pond Recreation Area.

It was a nice day for a drive, regardless of whether or not we succeeded in our mission.

Route 460 went over a high ridge, Brush Mountain, on the way up north to the Pond. You could see for miles from the top of the ridge. Well, all you could see, really, were mountainsides covered with trees and the occasional cliff face, but that was better in my opinion than seeing smog and billboards and I wasn't about to object if the landscape happened to be monotonously serene and placid. We'd be interrupting the serenity and placidity in no time anyway.

I stopped the car atop the ridge and asked Fritz if he still wanted to go through with it. Fritz was drinking a Michelob and took it away from his mouth long enough to say "We'd be fools to turn back now."

Good enough. The Pandapas Expedition moved forward.

By daylight, the landmarks that I used to find the Pond looked a little different and I almost shot by the turnoff. Fritz saved me when he said "I thought we were supposed to turn when the median started having trees on it?" We were rocketing along and the trees were in plain view. I put on the brakes and hung a left across the crossing strip, across the southbound lane of the highway, and down the gravel road leading to the Pond.

At that time, there wasn't a sign or anything to tell you what was down the gravel road to the Pond. I figured that a lot of people took it for a driveway or something. As I said before, the only reason I knew differently was because of the many trips I'd made to the Pond with various Scout groups.

In no time at all, we were climbing out of the car in the graveled parking lot at the Pond, looking around for any signs of opposition. The parking lot was empty; there were no cars or trucks or bikes or motorcycles or anything, no sign that any fellow humans might be lurking about somewhere, ready to carry word back to our heirs if we didn't make it. It was not too late to head back to Triangle Lanes and start trying to cram ourselves into the ball-washing machine.

Pandapas Pond was a strange place, even by day when there were no apparitions out on the surface of the Pond. It did not seem appropriate to have a small, peaceful forest lake in the rowdy, rough-and-tumble environs of Montgomery County. Either some backwoods resident should have had a falling-down shack over on the far side of the Pond, or there should have been a Virginia Tech research station running experiments on the water and wildlife. It seemed odd that neither world had left its mark on the site. Pandapas Pond was one of the few places in the county (not counting the grocery stores and the mall) where the University and professional people could mingle with the rednecks, and vice versa, without thinking it odd somehow. Bespectacled Tech professors could walk with their kids around the Pond trail, pointing out various species of wild flora and fauna without paying any special attention to the families of locals wearing John Deere baseball caps who'd be drinking beer from a cooler and throwing rocks at the ducks. It was nice in a strange sort of way that such a place existed, but someone like me couldn't help noticing the incongruity.

I wasn't really sure where I fit into the whole spectrum. We weren't really there for a nature hike, but neither were we there just to get messed up on the shore of the Pond. Operation Pandapas Fury was sort of a combination of the two worlds: a planned disorderly confrontation with nature.

The whole idea was to inflate the boat, paddle out to the island, subdue any defenders, put down any resistance, run up the flag, declare the "People's Republic of Here," shout some bombastic slogans, drink a lot of beer, throw traffic cones in the water, and then do whatever else came to our minds.

It was really a good thing that no one else was there. Of the various sorts of people that could, conceivably, have been at the Pond at that time, very few of them would have quietly ignored us if we'd gone ahead with the plan in front of witnesses. Your average college professor would take a dim view of a couple of teen-agers throwing traffic cones into the Pond. Your average Scout leader would have had a similar reaction. With our luck, the average redneck would have been related to a sheriff's deputy. In fact, there are very few people who would have understood that we were actually two souls in pain, striving for identity, needing to be left alone.

So, as I said, it's a good thing that no one else was there.

We started lugging things down to the Pond. ("Lugging" -- I like that word.) First the boat and the paddles, then the beer, then the various accouterments such as the flag, the Whoppers, the slingshot, and so forth. Finally, thanking our lucky stars that nobody was around to see, we each grabbed an armful of traffic cones and lurked on down to the edge of the Pond.

The boat was already mostly inflated, smelling slightly of methane from its last voyage. I filled it on up with air and had a Michelob while I waited for my chest to stop heaving.

Then there was nothing else left to do. It was time.

Actually, there was one other thing left to do.

We had to decide how to get the traffic cones over to Here.

You know those puzzles that you probably had to solve as a kid, the ones where you're walking along with a sheep, a cabbage, and a wolf, and you come to a stream with a small boat tied up on your side of the bank, and you've got to cross the stream? The boat, of course, only has room for two passengers, and you've got some work on your hands to figure out how to get across. You can't take the cabbage across and leave the sheep and the wolf behind, because the wolf would eat the sheep. You can't take the wolf across and leave the sheep and the cabbage behind, because the sheep would eat the cabbage. I don't remember for sure how it went after that. I think there was something about not taking the sheep across and leaving the cabbage and the wolf behind because the cabbage and the wolf would plot against you while your back was turned.

Our situation was similar. Both Fritz and I had to go across in the first wave, to hit the island and secure it for future landings. We didn't want to leave the beer behind, since we knew that doing so would summon thieves from out of nowhere to steal our beer when we weren't there to protect it. We didn't want to take the beer across and leave some or all of the traffic cones behind, because we'd have some hard explaining to do if someone happened along and found them. If we could only get the traffic cones out to Here, we'd be safe. We could make sure the coast was clear and as soon as it was, we could begin heaving the traffic cones into the water. The trick was getting them there without swamping the boat or leaving the beer behind.

I explained to Fritz about the cabbage and the wolf and the sheep and tried to show him how ours was a similar situation.

He missed the point. After staring off into space for a moment, he said "I think this is how you do it. You take the sheep across and leave it there. You go back and you get the cabbage and take it across. You bring the sheep back with you and leave it on the bank, then take the wolf across. Once you've got the wolf and the cabbage across, you go back and get the sheep and take it across, and then you're all done."

"Wait," I objected. "How do you keep the cabbage and the wolf from plotting against you when you're off taking care of the sheep?"

"Huh?" he said, looking confused.

"Never mind," I said. "We'll put some of the cones back in the car for safekeeping and try to get the rest across in one load. If the boat swamps, grab the beer. The traffic cones are going in the drink eventually anyway."

"Okay," he said.

This is how we did it: I placed the boat upon the water, then climbed into the boat and knelt in the front. Fritz passed me the beer, the paddles, the Whoppers, his slingshot, and the flag. He hefted one stack of traffic cones, I twisted and grabbed hold, and together we put them in the middle of the boat. Finally, Fritz climbed in and knelt in the back of the boat. I handed him a paddle and together we pushed off against the bank and the mud.

The boat didn't move, of course, as loaded down as it was.

We had to squirm and twist and push as hard as we could to get the boat to move forward a little, then a little more, and then a little more. Finally, we pushed and the boat floated free and moved a yard or so out onto the waters of the Pond.

It was the first time I'd ever navigated the Pond, in fact it was the first time since the night I'd seen the ghost that I'd even been back to the Pond. Light and sunny as it was, I had no trouble dismissing that memory and concentrating on the serious work of paddling out to Here.

Fritz had one paddle, and I had the other. We tried to stroke together, on opposite sides of the boat, but very little came of it. We turned a little to the left, then to the right, but made almost no headway. We tried again, with the same result. A few more strokes later, we were almost three yards offshore and Here wasn't looking any closer.

I sighed and said "Let me have a try." I took Fritz's paddle and tried the technique I'd learned in the Lake Terrace Motel swamp a few nights previously. I knelt in the front of the boat and made short strokes with both paddles at once. It worked, and we moved forward. It wouldn't be the fastest crossing of the intervening distance on record, but it would get us there.

We were halfway across the Pond and making decent time, me in the front paddling and Fritz in the back holding the flag upright, when we detected the first signs of life on Here. Something moved in the underbrush near the lone tree at one end of the island, and when we got a little closer, we could see that it was a duck of some sort.

"KVACK!"

"Kvack yourself, duck," I said. "It's too late to be trying to warn everybody now."

We got closer.

The duck waddled around in apparent distress. I wondered if we were about to interrupt something unseemly out on Here. As we pulled still closer, the duck hopped into the water and paddled away on a course perpendicular to our own.

"Good," Fritz said. "One less to worry about."

A few seconds later, we were close enough to have to start worrying about where to land. Here was ringed by thick brush, with only a couple of gaps apparent in the whole perimeter. The gap we could see was on the side of the island facing the main shore and the parking lot trail. It didn't look very wide and I didn't think much of trying to beach the boat with small branches jabbing me in the face.

I turned and looked at Fritz. "Gonna go around to the far side," I said. "Gonna see what it's like around there."

"Okay," he said, holding the flagstaff like he was ready to inflict harm with it.

The other side of Here was also mostly covered by brush and small bushes. There was a beach-like area a couple of yards wide that I figured we could run aground on, saving us from having to wade a couple of yards to the island. I looked at Fritz again, and shrugged. "What do you think?"

"Looks okay to me," he said. "Go in carefully."

"Gotcha."

We went in carefully. I looked warily around, saw no signs of life, peered down into the shallow water near the island to see that no suicide guppies were readying for an attack, and saw none. No foes of any sort were in evidence.

The Pandapas Expedition moved forward.

I stroked one last stroke and felt the bottom of the boat scraping against the Pond-bottom-mud at the edge of Here.

It was action time.

"Gimme the flag," I said. I stuck my hand backwards and took the banner and clambered out of the boat onto dry land.

[Music swells in the background] "I hereby claim this island in the name of the People's Republic of Here. Anybody who doesn't like it can get out."

I turned around to help Fritz out of the boat and saw that the force of my clambering had pushed the boat back out into the Pond. Since I had the flag, I held it out to him and pulled him back in.

He got out of the boat and together, we pulled the boat onto Here.

"Well," I said. "Say something."

"Like what?" he wanted to know. "You already hogged the good lines for yourself."

"I dunno. Think of something that sounds impressive."

"Ave, Imperator. Nos morituri te salutamos."

"Attaboy, Fritz, I knew you had it in you."

"This calls for a beer."

I concurred, we broke out the beer, and together we toasted our success. Then we turned around to survey our new domain.

As islands go, it wasn't really much to look at. It couldn't have been much more than fifty feet long from one end to the other and was probably about twenty feet wide at its widest spot. Here was dominated by one large, gnarled-looking conifer of some sort, old enough to have a large canopy overhead. The rest of Here was rimmed by brush and small treelets, hanging over the edge of the island and forming a sort of umbrella over the water nearby. There were only three places where you could stand on the "shore" without having to push branches aside to get there; one on the side of Here facing the parking lot, one on the side facing away from the parking lot, and one down past the tree at the end of the island.

The center of Here bore witness to the people who had been there over the years: there was an ancient heap of black ash where someone had made a fire once; next to it, a couple of old Schlitz beer bottles brittle with age; a small scrap of cellophane about an inch square. I was surprised that there wasn't more of a human presence on Here. After giving it some thought, I decided that most people didn't come to the Pond for boating, after all. If you owned a boat and wanted to go recreate in it, the New River was a much better place. All you could do with a boat in Pandapas Pond was paddle around in circles and go out to a postage-stamp sized island. Anyone who had any sort of serious boating ambitions would go elsewhere.

Fritz and I looked around for a place to mount the flag. The ground was too hard to dig much of a hole in, and there wasn't much of anything to pile around the staff for support. All the rocks had been thrown into the Pond years before.

"Well?" I said, looking at Fritz, who was holding the flagpole and glancing around same as I'd been.

"We could put it up there," he said, pointing up at the branches of the tree.

I looked up and thought about it. It looked as if there might be a couple of places he could try to wedge it where it might stick. "Okay," I said. "Give it a try."

Just then, we heard a keening sort of moan, soft and high-pitched, from behind us. We both spun around and looked down to the other end of Here, which is where the noise had seemed to come from.

Down in and among the brush, we made out a small brown shape, about the size of a squirrel, perched on one of the branches out over the water. It turned and looked at us, and Fritz and I both recoiled. Its eyes, as much as we could see of them, were red. Not bloodshot-colored red, but more like the red of a traffic light.

It made the keening noise again, then jumped into the water and swam off.

"Jiminy cricket," I said. "What the hell was that?"

"I don't know," he said. "Some sort of strange island denizen."

"Going to spread the word to the rest of the population. We'd better be on our guard."

"Yeah," he said. "Who knows what sort of forces he'll be back with?"

"I'd better go get the rest of the traffic cones," I decided. "Can you get the flag mounted up in the tree by yourself?"

"I think so. If anything happens while you're gone I've always got the slingshot to fight back with."

"Okay," I said, "but don't eat all the ammunition. We might still need it."

I got back in the boat, reversed motors, and backed out onto the water again. I was halfway across the Pond heading towards the main "beach" when ALL OF A SUDDEN THERE WERE MASSIVE EXPLOSIONS GOING OFF IN THE MIDDLE OF THE POND!!! I TURNED AROUND JUST IN TIME TO SEE THE TREE ON THE ISLAND TAKE A DIRECT HIT, FRITZ'S BODY TOSSED THROUGH THE AIR LIKE A RAG DOLL, SHRAPNEL EVERYWHERE, AND FROM THE BUSHES THERE CAME A HORRIBLE CACKLING! OH GOD, IT WAS HORRIBLE! 'Scuse me. None of that happened. My imagination ran away from me for a second.

Fritz clambered on up the tree as I paddled onwards. He had the flagpole wedged between two branches and was coming down as I was scraping up onto the mud flats at the main beach.

No one had showed up yet and I was very happy. If no one showed up for another hour or so we'd be home free. By that time we could have the traffic cones safely at the bottom of the Pond and we could get down to some serious drinking. If we made it that far without getting arrested, everything would be okay. People showing up for a nice afternoon's nature hike would not suspect us of being anything more than a couple of hopelessly drunk college boys out wasting an afternoon for no adequately explained reason.

I left the boat and paddles on the sand at the main beach and trudged back up to the parking lot to get the other armful of traffic cones. I heard a truck braking up on the main highway and was worried for a second that it was the Forest Service Traffic Cone Police coming to get us. Whatever it was went on by without stopping and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Going back to Here with the second batch of cones, the first bit of trouble occurred. Splashing vigorously with the paddles as I went across the water, I'd managed to slosh a couple of gallons of Pond water into the boat by the time I'd gotten back to the island.

This would have been okay, since I wasn't sitting down in the boat, except for what happened when I got back out to Here. I was coming up to the beach we'd landed on previously when a duck paddled straight out from the island at me. I lifted one paddle high in the air, ready to fend it off if it went for my throat. It paddled on by, but I lost my balance and fell backwards onto the traffic cones and slid down into the bottom of the boat, which is when I managed to soak my shorts and underwear pretty thoroughly.

That took most of the fight out of me right away. I cursed the duck and it paid me no heed. It paddled on out into the Pond, acting as if it didn't care at all that an invasion was going on.

Fritz shot at me with the slingshot as I was getting out of the boat and I threw my beer bottle at him. He was still in the tree and the bottle ricocheted of a branch and came back at me. "Wheep!" I said.

"Did you see that duck?" called Fritz, safe in his perch up in the tree.

"Yes I did," I said, wringing the water out of my shorts as best I could without actually taking them off. (Level with me now, you who are reading this. Isn't it true that you haven't really lived until you've gotten to spend a day wearing wet underwear? Makes being buried in a hill of red ants sound like fun, doesn't it?)

"Think it was a spy of some sort?"

"I don't know," I said. "It was a weird-looking duck, I'll give you that." It was a weird-looking duck. Unlike your average duck, this duck had a white head with a brown bill. The bill itself had a sort of spur or projection or horn coming up out of the center of the top, sort of like some sort of tropical bird.

"Maybe that's it," I said. "It's a migrant duck from the wilds of Patagonia. That hornlike thing on top of its bill is for opening cans of Peace Corps supplies. Condensed milk, corned beef, things like that."

"Could be, could be. Help me down out of this tree."

He handed down the slingshot and the box of Whoppers and then jumped down himself.

I was starting to feel giddy. The lack of sleep combined with a breakfast of cold cereal followed closely by two lukewarm Michelob beers was taking its toll.

I had the urge to begin throwing traffic cones into the waters of the Pond. Already I could envision it. A mighty heave, followed by a splash. Then another, and another, and another! Mighty gouts of water fountaining up as the traffic cones splashed down to Davy Jones' locker. "Let us heave," I said. "Let us hurl."

"This is a magic moment in Southwest Virginia history," Fritz said. "Too bad Brendan couldn't be here."

"Yes, too bad," I quickly agreed, and changed the subject. "Look, the duck with the funny bill is on the way back."

Indeed, it was. Apparently, the commanders of the opposing forces had sent it back to keep an eye on us. It was circling around Here, looking for a safe place to waddle ashore.

Fritz and I exchanged silent glances. We didn't want to find out for ourselves how destructive that razor-tipped bill could be.

"Look," I said. "There's another duck!"

I pointed back at the main beach of the Pond. A second duck was idling in the water about fifty yards away, near the invasion's jumping-off point. This duck was different. It was brown all over, and shaped like your average Brand X duck, as opposed to the Attack Duck that had been sent out to keep an eye on us. No horny projection on the bill, no watchful gleam in its eye.

"Hmm," Fritz said. "I guess we should figure out code names for them."

"Yeah," I agreed. "Hate to get those two confused."

"Right," he said.

"Well," I pondered. "We could call the duck that hangs around Here 'the Inhabitant' and we could call the duck that stays near the shore 'the Mainlander.'"

"Okay," he said. "What should we call that thing that screamed at us?"

"What thing that screamed at us?"

"The brown furry thing with the glowing red eyes."

"Oh, that thing. I thought that was keening, not screaming. Are you sure it screamed at us?"

"Keened, screamed, what's the difference? What should we call it? The 'Keening Screamer'?"

"'Denizen' is as good as anything else, I suppose. That's what you originally called it."

"Okay," he said. "The Denizen it is. The Denizen, the Inhabitant, and the Mainlander."

"Good," I proclaimed. "We've been here for less than twenty minutes and we've run up the flag, repelled the opposition, and now we've got code-names for the enemy forces. Fasten seat-belts, everybody, full speed ahead!"

"Heh heh heh heh heh?" said Fritz, trying to get into the spirit of things.

"No," I corrected, "More like 'Hee hee hee hee hee.'"

"Hee hee hee hee hee?"

"Right. Let's get cracking on those traffic cones."

"No," he said. "First, Joel, we must have another beer."

I was halfway through my second beer and he had just finished his second bottle. I told him to go ahead and have another, and tipped mine back to finish it off.

We'd been drinking out of the six-pack of regular Michelob. When I finished my bottle I snaked a bottle of Michelob Dark out of the virgin six-pack we'd tucked in a patch of shade near the boat. I liked dark beer better than regular beer most of the time anyway. Germans, I guess, would look at Michelob Dark or Lowenbrau Dark or Tuborg Dark or any of the cheap Americanized dark beers and sneer, but I didn't know any better. This is one major distinction between me and the rest of the male half of the population of Southwest Virginia. To the best of my recollection, I'd never seen or heard of a Blacksburg or Montgomery County resident voluntarily drinking dark beer. (Unless you count Fritz, who probably went along with me for the sake of variety.) Budweiser and Pabst Blue Ribbon (Mmm, there's good drinkin'!) were much more in vogue among the socially active rednecks.

"Well, Fritz," I said, "Time to get heavin'."

"Okay," he said. "You go first."

I wondered why he was so ready to let me have the lion's share of all the glory. Perhaps he'd been talking to the wolf and the cabbage again, or maybe the ball-washing machine at Triangle Lanes was exerting a pull on him. After hastily searching the shore of the Pond for cops, I selected one of the regular traffic cones from amongst the heap and positioned myself on the small beach facing the Pond parking area.

If you've never thrown a traffic cone into the murky waters of a pond before, and I'll grant you that this would be a distinction you'd share with most of the world's population, you probably have no idea of what it looks like as one of them slowly sinks into the water. It's something to see, really.

Holding the thing with both hands, I wound up, leaned back, and threw it as far out over the Pond as I could manage, about twenty or thirty feet. As it traveled through the air the base rotated around to the bottom so that when it hit, it smacked into the water standing up. It remained standing up for a second or two, settling a bit. Then, finally, it began rocking a few degrees back and forth and sank into the water an inch or so with each rock. When there was only an inch or so of plastic remaining above the water, it stopped momentarily, then plunged below in one quick jerk. All that was left to mark its passing was a momentary spurt of water and a trail of bubbles.

"Oh Lawd," cried Fritz, falling on his back and twitching like an overturned beetle. He appeared to be in some sort of fit of religious ecstasy. I noted, however, that he was careful to avoid spilling his beer.

I took a swig of mine and hauled him back to his feet. "On your feet, Knack. There's at least one traffic cone in that pile with your name on it."

Fritz soberly looked over the pile and selected one of the Matildas, one of the small yellow cones. He looked around Here and selected a vantage point overlooking the dam at the far end of the Pond and carefully set his beer down before winding up to throw.

"Get a good grip on her," I said. "Those cones can buck like rhinos."

Fritz gave his cone a mighty heave as well, but the weight or balance must have been all wrong. Instead of rotating and going in base-first his cone sailed like a football, complete with a gentle spiral that would have made Billy Kilmer jealous. It hit the water point-first and was gone in moments.

"Oh well," he said. "Where'd I put my beer?"

"Right there, next to your foot. Now what?"

"Well," he considered. "We can keep on throwing traffic cones into the water until we run out or they arrest us, whichever comes first. Or we can explore the island."

"Which would you prefer?"

"I dunno."

"We're getting complacent, Fritz. You know what happens to invading armies that get complacent."

"No, what?"

"People come along days later and all that'll be left of the invading army is their belt buckles."

"Can't have that, I guess."

"Well, then, let's explore Here."

As I'd previously noted, of course, there was not a lot of island to explore. There was a mostly clear central area, three places along the edge that were mostly free of brush, and a large tree. The rest was just small trees and brush. Fritz didn't seem to be paying attention to the narrative, because he was pushing his way through the brush at the far end of Here with little concern for the branches and leaves that were in his way. I sighed and took off after him and discovered what he'd already discovered: that there was an open space beyond the brush that a man could stand on and throw a traffic cone from if the urge struck him.

Fortunately, I'd brought a couple along. This spared me the effort of going twenty feet back down Here to fetch a couple. We each took a turn lobbing one into the water but again the success of my first effort eluded us. I tried to sling my cone out over the water so it would land base-first. Nothing doing. It flopped over in midflight and came down on its side and sank immediately. Fritz's attempt worked out in pretty much the same way.

"I don't know," I said. "This looks bad."

"Well, maybe it's got something to do with the way we're throwing them."

"You really think so?"

"Naah. I was just kidding."

"Whatever."

"We ought to name some more of the landmarks here on Here," he said. "There are at least four beaches. At D-Day in Normandy, they named the beaches things like 'Omaha,' 'Juno,' 'Gold,' and so forth. We ought to name our beaches."

"Well, what should we name the one we're standing on?"

"Well, this beach is the one with all the brush around it. Let's call it 'Brush Beach.'"

"You're a strange person, Fritz. Your talents are wasted on Hardee's."

"I know," he said. "I've known that for years, Joel."

"Then why don't you stop seeing Candi, start pumping iron, and bulk up? You could be ready to compete for the Mr. Olympia title in a couple of years."

"If I can't get a traffic cone to sink right, I don't think I'd ever be ready for the Mr. Olympia title. Anyway, I don't have an Austrian accent."

"You could fake it. Think about it," I urged. "You could cover yourself in baby oil and wear furs."

"Hmmm," he said, obviously intrigued. "It's possible," he mused, "but not likely. I'm not tall enough."

"Details, details," I cried. "What matters is desire. Speaking of which, you ready for another beer yet?"

"Not yet," he said, holding up his two-thirds-full bottle.

We wandered back to the middle of Here, looking around to see if anyone had shown up yet. I was a little bothered by the fact that we had the Pond completely to ourselves. I mean, it was good that we did because we still had eleven traffic cones to dispose of, but still I wondered what was keeping people away. Was there something going on that we didn't know about?

I heard a rustling in the high brush at the northeast edge of Here. The Denizen, whatever it was, was back in the bushes looking at us.

I threw a bottle cap at the beast and missed by a mile. It occurred to me that this was the first hostile action of the whole engagement. "Inconclusive," the history books would say.

The Denizen keened at us again and jumped out of the brush and flew away.

"How many creatures do you know of, Fritz, that are furry, can swim, and can fly?"

"Hmmm," he said. "Can't think of any. A bat is the only furry thing that can really fly, and bats can't swim."

"Plus, bats don't have glowing red eyes."

"Good point. No, I don't guess I know what it was. Weird, huh?"

The Inhabitant, the duck with the horny projection on its bill, had come around to Here again and was sitting on Brush Beach where we'd just been standing. It didn't seem to be up to much of anything except maybe a little innocent spying and I didn't really feel up to chasing the thing, capturing it, and hanging it. (I think that's what you're supposed to do to spies.) We didn't have any rope anyway.

I looked around for the Mainlander and found it still on the opposite shore of the Pond, sailing back and forth as if it was expecting a herd of peaceable Girl Scouts to show up with a couple sacks of stale bread.

Fritz sat down on the ground and looked around Here again. "What shall we name the beach we came in on?" he asked, furrowing his brow as if to think of something appropriate.

"How about 'Landing Beach'?"

"Fine," he said. "Be boring. 'Landing Beach' it is."

"And the beach that faces the parking lot can be 'Main Beach,' and the beach that's on the end of the island down here looking out over the far reaches of the Pond can be called 'Lookout Beach.'"

"That sounds good."

"Now what?"

"Now what?" was an excellent question, in fact. I mean, look at the progress we'd made so far: we'd taken Here, run up the flag, dropped several traffic cones in the water, had three beers each, chosen names for various points and promontories, and run off all significant opposition. What was left to do?

Ideally, if we'd been able to locate people who wanted to come along, we would have all been having a merry time out there on Here, drinking beer and singing happy island-capturing songs. It was really too bad that Fritz and I had mutually exclusive groups of friends or we could have gotten a big crowd together. My friends wouldn't have gotten along with either of his two sets of friends: the weirdos he knew through Hardee's or the people from his high school graduating class.

Maybe once we'd completely finished the invasion, we could go home and come back in a couple of days with a party's worth of people.

There were lots of traffic cones left, of course, so I knew that at some point I'd have to go ahead and get rid of them all.

That was it, I decided. I'd take a stack in the boat with me and I'd paddle around the Pond and I'd drop traffic cones off into the water so that the bottom would have an even distribution of traffic cones by the time I was done.

I started piling the remaining traffic cones into the boat. As I worked, I wondered what would become of them. Suppose the Pond had to be drained for some obscure reason, and as the water level dropped lower and lower, muddy traffic cones would begin to protrude above the surface. Suppose someone went fishing with some high-test line, snared one, and brought it to the surface ("Look, Murray, we caught a traffic cone! No more boots and old bottles for us. We're in the big time now!"). Suppose the Pond silted up over the years, eventually vanished, and the mud turned into stone; millennia later, archaeologists would be digging around and uncover the perfectly-preserved traffic cones. What would they make of them?

Who knows. I'd never played a practical joke upon yet-to-be-born archaeologists before. It'd be hard to predict.

Fritz climbed back up the tree to adjust the flag to catch the wind and I told him I was going back out onto the Pond to drop the traffic cones into the murky waters.

"'Murky Waters,'" he said. "Wasn't he a blues singer?"

"Something like that."

Humming the melody from the song "The Great White North," ("buh- bup- bup- bup- bup- bup- bup- buh, buh- bup- bup- bup- bup- bup- bup- buuuhh") I pushed off into the water and started looking around for good places to drop a traffic cone or ten. Since the water in one part of the Pond greatly resembled the water in any other part of the Pond (wet, cold), there was not much need to be overly picky about which spots to pick.

I tried to spread them around evenly. One in the Great Bight at the southwestern end of the Pond (ploosh! gloop!), one in the methane-producing area between the back of Here and the far bank (ploosh! gloop!), one over by the bird boxes in the far northeastern end of the Pond (ploosh! gloop!), one near the suntanning beach at the end of the dam (ploosh! gloop!), one right out in the middle of the Pond (ploosh! gloop!), one a bit to the left of center (ploosh! gloop!), one off a ways to the north of Here (ploosh! gloop!), one right in front of the dam (ploosh! gloop!), and one last one lobbed blindly over my shoulder (ploosh! gloop!) as I rowed back to Here with a couple of traffic cones left in the boat for Fritz to dispose of. I'd saved back the Otto-cone, the big one, and one of the regular Sidney-cones for Fritz to do something with. He didn't seem as enthusiastic as I'd been about the whole business of mining the bottom of the Pond with traffic cones, but I thought he'd appreciate the chance to throw a couple more out in the water if the mood hit him.

Fritz was having a fourth beer and I decided to join him.

We toasted our success and I said "You know, we'll really have to try harder next time to get some people to come out here with us."

"Yeah," he said. "We could maybe even put up a tent out here or something and have a picnic out here."

"'Out Here,' you mean," I said.

"What did I say?"

"'Out here.'"

"What's the difference?"

"You didn't stress the capital H."

"Whatever you say, Joel."

We just sat there for a while unwinding. My arms were tired from all the paddling and Fritz was getting pretty glazed over from the beer and the trips up and down the tree. If the Denizen and the Inhabitant and the Mainlander had wanted a perfect moment to sweep back in an expel us from Here, right then would have been a perfect moment. It would have all been over in seconds.

However, nothing happened. The Mainlander was still crusing around over at the far side of the Pond, looking hopefully up the trail to the parking lot in apparent hopes of getting fed some tasty white bread. The Inhabitant was still sulking down in and among the weeds and fallen twigs at the far end of the island. The Denizen was nowhere to be seen, fortunately.

After a few minutes of just sitting there tossing small pebbles into the Pond, I checked my watch and saw that it was after one o'clock in the afternoon. With a little bit of luck, I thought, I might even get a little bit of a tan from sitting out here all this time.

Eventually, we were spurred back into action by the arrival of a couple of noisy cars in the parking lot. We heard them coming a long way away; it sounded as if at least one of them was missing its muffler. I said "Fritz, you oughta go ahead and get rid of the two remaining traffic cones that I saved for you. I don't know who these people are going to turn out to be -- Cub Scouts, probably -- and we ought to get rid of the remaining evidence just in case it's someone who'd get upset about our sinking fifteen traffic cones in the Pond."

"Okay," he said, standing up and stretching.

He took the massive Otto-cone and gave it a mighty heave that landed it in the water a good ways out in the Pond. The sound it made as it hit was akin to the sound you'd expect to hear if a hopelessly overweight wildebeest did a one-and-a-half gainer into the Pond off the platform: WHUMP! SPLISH! Gloop! Gloop! Plrp!

"Jeez, Fritz," I said, covering my eyes as water splashed back onto us.

I heard the happy cries of small children in the distance, coming closer, so I handed him the Sidney-cone and got up and stood back.

With a Whsst! Ploosh! Gloop!, the last remaining cone went down with all hands... just as the Brownie troop pelted into view down the trail from the parking lot, babbling and giggling and shrieking and towing a couple of hapless-looking ladies behind them.

"Aargh," I said.

"Aaaagh," Fritz agreed.

We decided to strike camp and head for home.

Thus ended the Battle of Pandapas Pond, and thus ended P-Day. We took the flag down out of the tree and picked up our garbage and paddled back to shore, leaving the Inhabitant as military governor of Here in our absence.

Before we left for home, however, I stopped on the main beach of the Pond, turned around, and addressed the Pond at large:

"We won today, and we'll do it again if we ever have to. Don't think that just because we're going that we're out of your hair. Forget that. We'll be back."

"That's right," said Fritz. "We're going to be all over you like ugly on a gorilla." He walked on back to the car, carrying the equipment.

I hefted the boat, looked around one last time, and turned to go back to the car. I was looking forward to the prospects of getting a change of dry underwear from home.

"Remember," I said. "We'll be back."

A cloud passed in front of the sun.

We left.

Through Time and Space with Joel Furr