A Ninja in his Natural Habitat - Part I

Blogger is acting weird. Downloaded picture but then I get 4 lines of data instead of seeing the picture UNTIL I hit publish post. Oh well...

So this weekend, I spent 22 hours with Ninja at his place. His place is hard to describe, but I'm going to go with rustic. It's 100 miles from where I live, it's almost in the middle of nowhere and it does not even consist of a house. For some reason, the word compound springs to mind. Various structures, most of them once mobile, dotted the landscape and the electricity results when he runs his generator. There's a land line phone, but I think he said he would have to hook it up. He always teases me that when I went camping w/ Offspring at the Girl Scouts Camp that I was by no means roughing it and I agree...especially now! This was closer, definitely.
The thing that struck me most, was how quiet it was. No traffic noises, no TV, no phones ringing, no other people. The occasional sound of something falling from a tree or a bird or a cow (they belong to his neighbor) and even less frequent, a cat meowing...there are a few running around but I only met Leroy. But the quiet was very peaceful and very serene and Ninja was kind enough to order up some beautiful weather (not rain but still very mild and pleasant). The trailer we stayed in had been pretty stacked up for a number of years, so while he did some readjusting, I walked around a little, talked to him, helped a little with the hauling and managed to clear the land of all the spiderwebs using only my face. (There were a lot of them and I think I walked into all of them, but hey...rustic ain't cheap!) :)
At one point, he was showing me a light he uses when it gets dark. It's a bright head light kind of thing that is attached to a piece of black rubber and it goes around his head...sort of like a miner's hat without the hat part. A miners head band, really. I teased him about it relentlessly and finally got a couple playful swats for my trouble. :)
But it really was a very nice time. We talked, we laughed, I kept nagging him to focus on getting a place cleared for sleeping because he kept getting distracted (okay, he kept kissing me!) Then it got dark. We sat in this trailer, with no one around, maybe for miles, listening to a classic rock station on the radio, eating cold lasagna I had brought (he could have warmed it up in his microwave but that was in another part of the "compound" and it was getting late...it tasted fine cold) and then we had some fruit, we played Scrabble, not keeping score, making up words and running the words off the board more than once, and having a really good time. He told me that some women he has met have been very put off by his "compound"...some even put off by the description having never seen it! I guess I went in thinking it was an adventure (and he promised we would head back to town and get a room if I was unhappy with the place) and in the end I ended up feeling like I was able to let go of a lot of stress and enjoy.
Later when we went to bed, it was in the back corner of the trailer and something about that also appealed to me. I guess I'm a city person (technically a suburb person!) but I was born in the country. We left when I was about 5, but I spent a lot of summers down there and now, when I drive back there to see my mom or my dad, what always jumps out at me are the houses along this long stretch of single lane highway you have to drive to get to this small town. Some of them stand alone, in the middle of a piece of land, with nothing else around. If you drive 35 miles in 1 direction, you are in a town with pretty much everything you need (Walmart is everywhere!). If you drive 60 miles past that, you are in an actual metropolitan city, so it certainly isn't like you are completely cut off from all civilization. But I always liked these houses and how you really could make yourself believe that you were out in the middle of nowhere. My dad's house is on a few acres and while his closest neighbor is probably 1/8 of a mile away, you can't see them. It really does give the impression of just being by yourself. I always thought it would be nice living in a place like that, so sleeping in the back corner of this little trailer, at what seemed like the edge of the world, next to him, on a really nice, cool evening, felt very good.
Tomorrow...the good stuff!!!! :)