24 little hours

Daddy called yesterday. He was at his favorite pit-stop in Randle, Washington, where there is single strip mall in the middle of nowhere, anchored by a mom-and-pop dry goods store that I remember from its vast selection of trucker caps. Randle is the last place anyone's cell phone works outside of Mount Adams. Daddy told me I wouldn't hear from him again in the next 48 hours as he plunges his crew into the beautiful anti-civilization of Gifford-Pinchot National Forest for a trek on his favorite mountain. He took this loving portrait of it at daybreak last year while everyone else was still snoring in their sleeping bags.



Since we've heard from Daddy, Isaac came down with the his first-ever case of the stomach flu. After refusing to eat dinner last night, I really knew something was wrong when he asked me to put clothes on him, that he was cold. This is my human furnace child, who is uncomfortably hot in anything but his underpants. He quickly sprouted a 100-degree fever and some crazy bags under his eyes. He threw up for the first time around 8:00. After I put him and baby brother to bed, he threw up twice more. After the last time, at 3:30 this morning, I sat up with him in the kitchen so he could pretend to eat crackers because he was "starving".

He woke up this morning with the same fever and no appetite. Eventually we had to go to the grocery store to get him some sick supplies (Powerade, Saltines). Though he wore jogpants in the 90-degree weather and insisted on riding in the cart the whole time, when we came home he was back to the old Isaac. Perhaps grocery-shopping on an empty stomach helped bring his appetite back, and he ate an enormous starchy, brothy, even raspberry-y lunch. After nap now he still seems perky and not freezing cold, so here's hoping it was just a 24-hour bug.

It's weird, thinking that Daddy may have missed an entire illness between calls. I used to get so ticked at Daddy and his not calling when out in the field. And then one day I woke up from my middle-school-drama stupor and remembered how -- difficult to wrap the brain around, such a city girl am I -- there really aren't cell phone towers in the middle of nowhere. I mean, can you imagine your family being 2000+ miles away and not being able to know anything about what's going on with them at any given moment? It must be hard for him, the poor schmuck out there in the crisp, clean mountain air. He's going to be pretty upset when he hears about our pukey adventures tomorrow. It'll be nice when the boys are old enough that we can all join him for his summerly mountain jaunt.