What Would Bear Grylls Do?

Whee doggies! That duty this morning was a bit bone-chilling. Silly me! I took the weatherman's word that winds were out of the west. That, to me, meant the building would block the wind. I can weather the cold with my Berber hooded coat when the winds are calm.

Can you believe the wind was actually out of the south? And whipping at times from the east, at 39 mph? That, and the actual temperature of 38 degrees, made me a mite uncomfortable. So to pass the time, I pretended that I was Bear Grylls.

Okay, not the actual Bear Grylls, because that would mean that I had to parachute out of a plane and drop into the parking lot. And I'm never going to jump out of a plane. But I did take note of my surroundings, and picked where I would bed down for the night. It was in the concrete retaining wall alcove by the locker room doors. Oh, perhaps I could have jimmied the door open to spend a comfy night inside with heat from the furnace. But that's not what Bear would do. No sirree Bob! Bear wouldn't go inside if the door was propped open with a big ol' "Welcome! Bear Grylls! Come on in!" sign painted on it.

Since concrete can sap the body heat right out of my ample body, I decided that I would break some branches off the spindly trees growing in the rock beds dividing the student lot from the teacher parking area. No leaves this time of year. But I could gather some dead weeds down by the pond. It's not so much a pond as it is a sewer lagoon. But it's water! We'll get back to that. Right now, we're gathering the dead weeds to put under and over the branches for my bed, in case my layers of fat are not cushy enough for comfort.

Since I need water, and Bear has mentally shamed me into refusing to dart inside the building to the water fountain, I will use my shoe to dip some water from the lagoon. To boil it, I will find that old snapping turtle that accosted me on my end of the parking lot a few years ago, and yank that shell off his back. Sure, it won't sit level with those spine ridges, but I can balance it on some uneven limbs. And Mr. Snapper, all slim without his shell, can be the main course. All I have to do is put him back IN his shell after dipping some more water from the lagoon with my shoe. That's gonna be one tasty beverage I'm brewing.

Alas, I do not carry a lighter. Do you think it would be cheating if I knocked on the locker room door and asked to borrow one from a student? I don't. And if I'm still peckish after my meal of snapping turtle, I can use my shoestring and a paper clip to fish in the lagoon. There's fish in there. And not just brown trout. Plenty of locals dip a pole in there. Which reminds me. To pass the time, I can sing a little ditty over and over.

"You get a line and I'll get a pole, Honey. You get a line and I'll get a pole, Babe. You get a line and I'll get a pole, we'll go down to that crawdad hole. Honey, Baaaby, mine."