Petunia 'Coop' Cooper (driveeveryroad) wrote in thefield, @ 2009-07-29 09:35:00 |
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Entry tags: | bazzer, coop, z - 1st tribe - day 30 |
Philosophical Debate Without Coffee
Who: Bazzer and Coop
When: Day 30, morning
Where: near the campfire
What: early morning philosophizing
After his morning ablutions and checking on Ken, Bazzer made his way down to the campfire to see what plans, if any, were made for the day. His were fairly predicable, the skins he was working on were almost done he thought and hopefully he'd be able to announce that soon. He just wanted to be sure they were good before he said something. Spying Coop, he headed over to her, a slice of bloodmelon and a slice of meat in his hands for breakfast. "Hey," he greeted her, they hadn't talked much the day before, but she had helped to restore and clean up his tannery, a job that had been very smelly and unpleasant, but which he was grateful for the help. "Thanks for helping yesterday. You have no idea how much help you were," he said sitting down next to her so he could eat.
Coop, never very good in the mornings, managed to summon up a bleary smile for him. Her own breakfast of grazer jerky and a mug of milk melon juice mixed with goats milk sat in her lap, pretty much untouched. It wasn't the goats milk that turned her off. It was the fact that it was morning and there was no damn coffee. "Hi," she said with a gravelly just-woke-up voice. "No problem, I was glad to help." She blinked deliberately and smothered a yawn before rubbing her eyes. "Sorry, me and mornings don't get along," she apologized. Coop slept like the dead, even out here in the exposed alien wilderness. Coming back from the dead was a slow process.
"No problem," he said through a mouthful of fruit, though he did sort of cover his mouth, embarrassed. "Same here. Well," he shrugged, "I've been up for a while. But getting up is never easy....though it's easier now without a bed and such. It's much easier to sleep now without the laughers howling and laughing all damn night," despite the hard work, weather, dog attacks and everything else that had happened recently, Bazzer felt much better than he had in a while just because the laughers were gone and they weren't sleeping in trees where he worried about falling off in the night. Plus, sleeping with Ken was incredibly comfortable.
She could have agreed with Bazzer if he'd voiced his sentiment about being paired up. She rarely had trouble dropping off to sleep but even without a proper bed there was the reassuring presence and warmth of Adnan beneath the cart at night. "Tripper's still really disturbed by them but his hearing is so much better than ours." She'd left him in the camp the day before but the dog had eventually followed her back to the tannery. Mercifully, Bazzer hadn't attacked her old dumb mutt and Tripper had, for the most part, stayed out of the way of the work being done. She could hear him now, barking up a storm some ways down the beach where a bunch of those odd geese had landed to sate themselves on the lake seaweed. "They don't bother me at all though. I can't imagine what it must have been like to live right on top of them."
When he had seen the dog the previous day he had first frozen and prepared for the attack, but it never came. He had seen the dog in camp, though they hadn't formally met and he hadn't recognized him the day before, but now they had been introduced and while Bazzer wasn't sure he would recognize Tripper from the wild dogs, he did know how to find out which was which. Tripper was well behaved and responded to his name. The wild dogs did not even have names. "I don't recommend it unless you're a fan of Swiss Family Robinson style treehouses," that had been his thought if they had decided to stay there instead of moving here. They would have had to build some sort of elaborate tree house for safety and such, but then, he wasn't sure what Rowan would have done since she was so pregnant now. She was obviously pregnant when he had arrived too, but now she was hugely so and not anywhere near her due date yet either. "It was pretty messed up. How's Tripper doing anyways?" he asked, "Adapting to Wonderland okay?"
Coop lifted her shoulders and dropped them. "Hard to say," she said with a sigh. "He's great all day long but at night he's really scared. He just shakes all night long. The laughers really spook him." At least, she hoped it was the laughers and not something that they hadn't encountered yet. "What about you?" she asked curiously. "Are you alright sleeping out at the tannery by yourself?" She knew that the lookout on top of the spring, where Kenneth slept, was just a hollars distance away from the tannery but still. She thought she'd be incredibly creeped out by herself at the water's edge. Coop could swim just fine and even liked the water but at night? When the water turned inky black but you could hear the odd fish leaping after bugs, and the ripples lapped at the beach? Her imagination ran away with her. "Aren't you ever tempted to come and sleep here by the fire where everyone else is?"
"Yeah," he shrugged, noncommittal, "I like it. Sometimes, I think about building a fire over there, closer, but then I worry about the skins or something catching so I don't," he didn't mention that he didn't sleep at the tannery at all, but with Ken on the lookout. He knew Ken was not yet willing to reveal their relationship, "Anyways, Kenneth's nearby so it's not unsafe," except for now when Kenneth was injured, but he was hoping Coop wouldn't figure all that out, "I like it. Poor Tripper, that's horrible. Well, maybe he can nap at least in a sunbeam in the day time or something so that'll help? And he has you."
"Yeah," Coop nodded agreeably, accepting without much persuasion that Bazzer did indeed sleep alone at the tannery. "I can see why you're worried but hopefully once we stockpile some of those clay bricks and boards from the trees the lumber crew have been bringing back, we can build you a much more secure little hut out there." She smiled at him, feeling that Bazzer was more than brave to have taken on such a vital dirty job with no prior training save for a few passages in books. "You deserve a few of the creature comforts for the work that you do," she assured him. A conspiratorial express fixed itself on her movable face as she leaned in toward him a little. "I'm looking forward to a few of those myself," she told him and offered a wink.
"'Creature comforts?'" Bazzer repeated with a snort, "What are those? Right now, creature comforts are enough food and water, a warm flat place to sleep and a bath," all of which were not in high supply, but they got by. Sleeping with Kenneth was definitely warm, the sleeping bag was nice, but he was a walking furnace it seemed. "Analiese wants a mani/pedi," he was pleased that he remembered the term, "I think I'd like some new books to read. I had one with me when I arrived, but it's been so damaged it's unreadable thanks to weather and dirt and things. It wasn't a good book anyways, but still. We're severely lacking."
Coop nodded. "I'd like a few books too. I'm not used to all of this..." She waved a hand around them, taking in their seated postures. "Downtime." She shuddered as though it was a filthy word. "I'm used to being go, go, go all the time. When I did have time to just sit and kill I always had my nose in a book." She grinned at him. "My favourite was Agatha Christie. Miss Marple was da bomb." She took a moment to sip some of her water and sighed. "Coffee would make me incredibly happy," she pointed out. "I could probably live here indefinitely if there was coffee."
"You know what amazes me," he mused, mind going off on a tangent willy-nilly, "People survived without coffee for thousands of years. Until sometime in the 1600's there is no data about coffee. It just didn't exist, at least not in any form scholars can recognize today. Can you imagine? That's pretty recent when you think about it...and even then, it wasn't something the masses had or knew of, it was just in the Arabian penninsula. There was tea of course, that's much older, but it has much less caffiene than coffee," hsi tone was sort of dreamy, he missed coffee terribly. And tea.
Coop puffed up her cheeks and let the breath out with a sigh. "Doesn't make it any harder to live without now." What could she say? Coop was the instant gratification type. History had never been her strong suit in school. She'd probably only spent a handful of hours in a library in her entire life. "Maybe we'll luck out and find a magical plant that leaks some sort of coffee flavored and caffiene laced sap." Her words could have been sarcastic and bitter if not for the fact that she'd already experienced plant pods that leaked handsoap and little brush-like weeds that tasted like mint. "It just seems like Wonderland more and more, doesn't it? Did you hear that the lumberjacks found a brand new axe yesterday? What are the odds?" She gave him an incredulous look.
"Really?" he hadn't heard that no, but then, he had retired early the night before to take care of Kenneth. "That'll be a bonus," he was already imaginging what could be done with an axe, other than just chopping trees. The blade on it could be useful for lots of things. "I guess they're the same odds that found another shotgun or a canoe," he scratched his head for a moment, "This place is strange. More and more, I think this is some sort of experiment or test, just to see. With these...aliens or whomever giving us rewards or something every so often," it was a disturbing thought. "Or punishments."
Coop just didn't know what to say to that. She blinked at Baz a couple of times before dropping her gaze down to where her fingers folded around the clay mug. She didn't know anything about aliens. She'd driven through the desert hundreds of times, hell, she'd disappeared from earth right outside of Roswell, New Mexico, but she still wasn't sure she could swallow that idea. "I've been thinking maybe Tripper and I died in the truck," she confessed without looking up. "Like, from heat stroke or something." For some reason the idea that she'd been shuffled into some sort of afterlife seemed much more feasible to young woman than abduction did. Especially without any sightings of lights in the sky and ufos. Not even any earth shaking horns and light patterns like Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
"Um...maybe?" he didn't really think he was dead, "That sounds like a question for the priest, but I don't feel very dead. Maybe I am? I just think that if this is hell, Father Alex wouldn't be here," he was too nice of a guy. And didn't priests go to heaven by default? Unless he had done something in his life to make him go to hell...that idea was not a good one and he shuddered, "Maybe you're dead. I'm not."
Coop cocked her head slightly to the side, a curious sparkle to her eyes. "I never said anything about heaven or hell." That was a very Christian definitions but she supposed she couldn't fault him for that. It's what most people would leap to, especially in North America. Coop didn't follow any particular spiritual path, though if she had to choose one, it'd be one of a more natural bent. She looked out through a break in the lean-tos to where the rising sun sparkled on the water. "This place isn't really all that hellish," she said. "Tough, sure. Dangerous, yeah. But I've seen Helena and Cross look at each other. They never knew each other before coming here. So love or something like it can exist here. And I've met a couple of people I think I could really be friends with. So friendship. And the sunrises and sunsets are so beautiful." She shook her head. "No, I don't think this place could possibly be hell."
"Agreed," Bazzer murmured, thinking of Kenneth. "I don't know. Maybe we're both wrong, maybe it's something else entirely. It's sort of cleansing though, realizing just how much you can do without and be happy still. And realizing how strong you are as a person...you might not want to be, but given the choice between survival and death, I choose survival. This place...it's not hell, but I don't think it's heaven," while he wasn't religious, all he had to go on was the Judeo-Christian belief systems that he had learned as a child. He was aware of others and read about them, but they weren't a part of his life really and he hadn't felt that they were more right or more pertinent to his life than any other so he had read about them just as he had read about anything else - curiosity.
Coop shrugged. "Depends on your definition, I guess." She sucked in a deep breath laced with campfire smoke and let it out slowly. "My dad would have liked this place," she said a little bit distantly. "This would have been right up his alley. He never really liked civilization as it was when we left it." She indicated the 'we' with a gesture between herself and Bazzer. "Oh, he ran electricity and plumbing into the house eventually. I think he got some pressure from the local municipal government to do that." She shook her head gravely. "I remember hearing him argue about that, but he did it eventually. If he'd had his way though, he'd have lived off the grid forever. He hunted just fine and made decent money for anything we didn't grow or make at home, being a foreman in the local mine." She shrugged. "He put me and my brothers to bed at night with stories about, well, the world after life. Spirit worlds and lands of mystery." She gave Bazzer a grin. "This sort of fits the bill, right?"
"Wow...you grew up without plumbing or electricity?" Bazzer had trouble believing that someone would willingly live like that. Then again, he supposed it took all kinds. That was so far removed from what he knew and the life he had led before coming here though, he couldn't even fathom it, "That's...I mean, you did it willingly?" he understood doing it because there was no money or anything, like right now, but just because? Unheard of. It went again all of modernity. Then again...it probably came in handy here. "This is definitely a land of mystery," he nodded, pushing his glasses back up on his face with a finger, "Makes me think of prehistoric man, you know? Unsure what was over the next mountain...and unsure if they wanted to find out or not."
"Oh, well," Coop flushed all the way up her neck and to the tip of her ears. Neither her nor her brothers liked to talk about how things had been when they were kids. "My mom is a total hippy and all about, you know, living off the land and stuff. And uh, she also traveled a lot when we were kids so she didn't have to stay put at the cabin for long." She issued a nervous chuckle even talking about it. "My dad is the great nephew of the Seneca people's Grand Cheiftess." She gave Bazzer a shy smile at the auspicious sounding family relation. "Great Aunt Odina, is what I always called her. So even though the Senecas are very modern and stuff, my dad's family were always really into the way things used to be ages ago. Sort of like...cultural refreshment. He really tried to stick to it for as long as he could. We were always perfectly safe, had lots to do and all of that." Coop shrugged her narrow shoulders. "And by the time I was twelve the cabin was pretty modernized." Coop cocked her head slightly and gave him another smile. "I'm pretty curious about the mountains, actually. They look really cool with their....blueness."
"Sorry," he said, realizing that the topic made her uncomfortable, "Nothing wrong with living like that, I just never knew that people still did willingly in places like Canada or the US. Guess I'm sheltered in that respect," he'd grown up with all the modern conveniences, though he hadn't been spoiled either. It was a fine line sometimes, "I like the mountains. I really like the sunsets though. All the colours...it's just amazing. This entire place is beautiful, even if some of its beauty might try to eat you if you aren't looking."
Coop chuckled and nodded. "It's ok. It was something me and my brothers got teased about in grade school." She shook her head, dismissing her discomfort. "Doesn't matter now. I guess living like that has made it a little easier to live like this. I wish I had more useful memories to impart." Especially when it came to the skins. She knew her father used to deliver buckskin to the nearby reservation but she never saw him cure it. She'd never really asked how the Natives on the rez did it either. All she ever saw was the end product, never paying attention to the process.
Yeah, that was something he knew a little about, "Kids can be cruel," he noted, with a knowing voice, "I did too, but not about that. Most of my childhood trauma can be categorized as 'high school,' which I guess means I'm not really a unique snowflake like I thought," he smiled and stretched, then got up, "I guess I can't roll over and pretend like today hasn't begun now," he said, he had peed, eaten, had a conversation. That pretty much meant he was up around here, "What're your plans for today?"
Coop shook her head. "Not too sure. I'll probably stick close to camp today, help keep the food in steady supply. I think Rowan and Sophie have enough flour pounded out that we can start to experiment with breadmaking. If not, well I'll help them pound some flour, I guess." She offered up another smile. High school hadn't been so bad for the Cooper kids. Shale and Forrest were only a grade apart and they got a name for themselves pretty early on for having each other's back and being pretty near fearless. They never backed down out of a fight and were fully willing to pull death defying stunts to garner a little bit of the popular vote. Coop, well she had been just as friendly and cute and full of life as she was now. It was almost like she never even laid eyes on an awkward phase. Never one of those girls who were cursed with an inopportune pimple. She'd had brothers, though, so no one ever got the chance to take advantage. Rye had been the quietest but he'd loved sports. He made the team every year for any sport he went out for, most especially the ones he could play outdoors.
"Variety in our food, definitely the beginnings of improvement," he waved as he headed towards the tannery. He'd have some skins ready soon. It was exciting. Every day it seemed that progress was made, little steps here and there, but there was definite forward momentum and that was good. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither will their little camp, but it will be built eventually. He was excited to see how far they could come, what their modern ingenuity could come up with in his primitive place, though he knew they were working with some advantages, they didn't have to discover fire or reinvent the wheel. "I'll see you later," he called, leaving.