Wild Horses Couldn't.. (raining cats & dogs version)

“W“Wild Horses Couldn’t..”: Typically, that’s the beginning of the expression “Wild Horses Couldn’t Drag Me Away” - meaning “I’m so engrossed in this activity I’m not going to leave it even under extreme pressure.” In this case, there may just be a different ending to the saying. I love swimming, I love the ocean, I love swimming at the edge of the ocean & interfacing with the waves & the undertow. I haven't been for something like 11 years. I wanted to go but I didn't have much money, I wanted to go but I don't have any friends who would or could go with me. I decided to go by myself. My destination for my long-overdue ocean vacation was Assateague, the island off the coast of Maryland famed for its wild horses. When I’d made the reservation 2 weeks or so before the weather forecast had been mostly sunny. I looked at it now that I was there: total rainstorms all week long, no respite, all clouds, no sun. Oh, well, I’d swim anyway. I had very little light left to set up my tent in, it’d taken me almost 12 hours to get there. My tent’s cheap but it’s ‘modern’ in the sense that it’s lightweight & efficient with adequate resistance to rain & wind - or so it had been in my previous uses of it. I was a bit surprised to see that my fellow ‘campers’ mostly had RVs of a rather upscale nature. Once again, I was the ‘poor guy’, even though by my standards I was doing pretty good: a car that works & a reasonable tent. That night it rained. By 6:30AM it was pouring & most of the interior of my tent was a puddle. I didn’t get much sleep but it could’ve been worse. Then I had an epiphany of sorts: I actually thought this was FUNNY, I realized that I’m one of the only people I know who could actually laugh about this. Thinking about my ability to turn things into a joke made me quite cheerful for awhile. That night it didn’t rain as much as it did turn into a windstorm. My tent was severely buffeted & the sound of the tarp flapping violently was a bit difficult to live with. I don’t know whether my campsite was smack-dab in the middle of the wind’s path but it sure seemed like it. The tent kept collapsing in on me & the noise was fierce enough to make this even more of a sleepless night than the one before. When I dragged myself out of the tent that morning I took the tarp off. A positive effect of the wind was that the clouds cleared occasionally & I got to shoot some sunny footage. I did actually go swimming but I was the only person I saw do so. The waves & undertow were astonishingly strong, I would’ve been terrified if children had been in the water but they weren’t. I managed to keep busy while I was there, exploring & shooting a fair amount of satisfactory footage. That night, Wednesday night, the wind showed me that it meant business. The tent was inflating like a balloon & then collapsing like it was burst. The rain was unrelenting, the lightning was frequent. I tried braving the storm to see if I could add more tent pegs & otherwise tweak things so the tent wouldn’t have a tendency to flatten so severely. I had moderate but unspectacular success. By midnight I realized I didn’t stand a chance: the tent was going to flatten eventually, I couldn’t stop it, the wind was too fierce. I got in my car & hoped the tent wouldn’t completely blow away because I didn’t want to have to try to find it the next day. Even the car was bouncing constantly on its shocks. I started to wonder if it, too, might get blown away even though the car’s pretty heavy. That was another largely sleepless night. Early Thursday morning the rain had lessened enough so I figured I could strike the tent & leave the island. The tent was FLAT & pointed in one direction. The pegs on one side had pulled out but those on the other side has stayed put so at least the tent was still there. I didn’t try to make it neat, I pulled it off the sandy ground, shoved it in my car & left 2 days before my reservation ran out. EXHAUSTED. I enjoyed editing the movie partially because it’s the 1st one I made using the newest version of iMovie which, for technical reasons not worth going into here, enabled me to make it higher definition than usually available to me: 1080p. In 1990, I went to Assateague with my girlfriend of the time & her 8 year old daughter & friend. We disobeyed the rules about touching the wild horses because we wanted to & because we figured that if we were gentle the horses would be. I shot overexposed super-8 of this interaction. No horses, children, adults, or cars were hurt in the making of this movie - despite some appearances. THIS IS NOT TO SAY THAT YOU SHOULD ALSO DISREGARD THE WARNINGS. A horse can severely hurt you & you’re not exactly safe either there, buster. I suspect this was an especially positive experience for the kids. I should go on these trips more often. Care to join me? - October 15, 2016 notes from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE