casey.com

When I was in about the eighth grade, some friend of mine and I demonstrated our research skills by heading to the Huntington Central Park Library to dig up an old Newsweek magazine and read an article about Paintball battles.

Well, I’ve looked for the opportunity to join such a fight ever since. You can’t play army and squash as many plastic toy soldiers as I have and not have some lingering desire to test your mettle on a battlefield (especially when a nasty bruise is the worst consequence you’re likely to face).

After all these years, that moment came for me today on Hogback Mountain (about 25 miles west of DC). A group of my former Senate colleagues set up a day-long session for us, and I figured it was an appropriate way to commemorate MLK’s non-violent teachings on his day.

Saturday it snowed, but by Sunday the thaw was underway. So today found Hogback mountain a snowy/muddy battlefield. There was more rain this morning, adding to the muck, but the sun came out and we battled under clear skies.

The gun, semi-automatic powered by C02 can hold about 50 marble-sized paintballs and pump them out just as fast as you can squeeze the trigger. The balls don’t really have paint, just a water-soluble food coloring. We were shooting Yellow today, so hits exploded in a sticky yellow mess. That’s if they break, which they don’t always do. So even if you’ve been hit, you don’t admit death unless you’re bleeding yellow because bounces are just flesh wounds, not death. Not that bounces don’t bruise, but you can keep fighting. Don’t bother too much with aiming, as these things fly all over the place.

The place we played had about a dozen different battlefields on which my Blue Team repeatedly fragged those pussies on the Red Team. My finest hour came in a fight at ‘The Castle’, a field on which both teams are trying to capture the same flag hung in the center tower, and deliver it to the opposing teams side. In our first fight here I did the honors, surviving a long firefight, charging to the tower under withering fire, and then hauling ass to the other teams side (with a nice fall on my ass on the way). It was great.

We played from 10am until 5pm with a brief break for a lunch of hot dogs and chips. As you might imagine, we were soaked through, caked with mud, and splattered with paint by days end. Two of the smartest things I did were wear long johns, and bring extra shoes. The muddy boots and jeans went in a bag in the trunk, and I drove home in my steaming long johns and sneakers.

Of course, these days you can’t have an experience like I had today and not think about our soldiers who are fighting where the bullets don’t bounce. God bless ’em.

Anyway, it was a great time. Take the chance to play it you get it, I hope to again. And next time you’re all in Washington we’ll skip the monuments and head to Hogback Mountain.

Luckily for the Cat, we needed gas.

As we set out to return home after a two-week long summer vacation that would ultimately add more than 2,800 to the family mini-van’s odometer, the blinking gas pump on the dashboard warned me I couldn’t be picky about where to buy my gas. ‘Just get some’, the blinking pump seemed to say, ‘and make it soon’. Among the handy features of our van’s digital control center is the ‘DTE’ or ‘Distance Till Empty’ display. It was telling us we could make about 25 miles, but in the past, DTE has been known to be a bit on the optimistic side. Regardless, we cruised the 14 miles down Route 41, and found a convenient Texaco station waiting for us at the junction of our next leg, heading east on I-70 towards St. Louis.

Luckily for the frog, we hit a lot of bugs.

Thank goodness there’s no criminal penalty for killing bugs. The gooey mess of bug splat marks on our van’s grille, hood and windshield were powerful evidence of my ongoing multi-state vehicular bug-killing spree. I don’t just hit bugs by accident; I frequently swerve to aim for them. Anyway, so while the gas was pumping, and my wife was in the store buying cold drinks and ice for the cooler, I grabbed a squeegee and started washing the bug guts off of the windshield. As I lifted the wiper blade, I felt something touch my left hand. A tiny frog, about the size of a quarter, brushed my hand as he hopped off the wiper blade I lifted. Before I could catch him, he squirmed beneath the hood.

Despite all the training gained during my previous career as a gas station pump jockey, I hadn’t been doing much under the hood checking during our roadtrip. But as I imagined the little frog getting tossed out onto the highway and in a real-life game of ‘frogger’ once we got underway, I decided to do the Christian thing and go in after him.

I’m not sure who was more startled, me or the cat. But as I stood there holding the hood up, we stared at each other for a moment and shared a simultaneous, ‘Holy-shit’, type of moment. It wasn’t a kitten, but not full-grown either, just an orange and white teenage cat. The cat acted more quickly than I could, wisely taking the opportunity to give up its seat on top of the battery and get the hell out from under the hood. It bolted into a storm drain underneath the gas station driveway.

The woman at the gas station helped me look for a little while, but that cat wasn’t coming out of that pipe any time soon. I dropped the little frog near the pipe entrance, being that he was the cat’s savior and all. I called back to the bed and breakfast we had left, but they weren’t missing any cats. The kids say that they had seen the cat walking the streets of Arrow Rock the previous day. When or how he crawled into my engine, I’ll never know. I’m just thankful we needed gas, and for the frog, because I would have hated discovering the cat at some later point during our 1000 mile return trip home.

So remember. Wash the bugs off. And check under the hood. Always.