Season's greetings, but not for the "right" season

Resslin' Around, by Casey Ressler

Christmas comes at the most inopportune time for those who enjoy everything summer in Alaska has to offer, the kind of people like myself who derive small amounts of enjoyment from the winter months but count down the minutes until the ice clears the lakes and gives way to good trout fishing.

Christmas is nothing more than a giant tease, with great new toys that you can't use for months. Thanks to some loving relatives, a generous wife and the power of REI gift certificates, I scored a new tent this holiday season, right after Christmas. When it arrived, I warned my wife that I would be setting it up in the garage and sleeping in it, just to make sure everything was, well, "right." Every kid wants to play with their new toys, and the tent is a toy I've been after since the middle of last year. You can bet I was going to play with it.

"I don't care what you do. If you want to sleep in that tent when your warm bed is a few feet from it, go ahead," she said.

"Thanks. I just thought you'd want to know since your Durango will be outside the garage tonight to make room for the tent and my truck," I said, which seemed innocent enough to me but somehow managed to touch off a small world war.

The same day the tent arrived in the mail, a fancy-schmancy new GPS I ordered also arrived, which turned out to be perfect timing. This dealie connects to my computer, so I can plot routes and download them onto the GPS, or vice versa, which sounds extremely cool but turns out to be just complicated enough to be over my totally untechnological head. Instead of the new GPS, I'm going to have to rely on bread crumbs to find my way home, until that mail-in Ph.D. in engineering arrives in the same post office box.

Since the thermometer read 13 degrees below zero, I opted not to back the truck out and set the tent up in the garage.

The living room was close enough, however, to replicating the conditions of a float trip in the middle of June, so I pitched the tent right there. I even left the light on, just to really make it feel like June, when the sun doesn't set, and turned on the faucet to simulate the flowing of water. It wasn't exactly Willow Creek, but I was just as happy.

I fired up the GPS, and my readings were astounding. I whipped out the cell phone to call my wife and let her know my exact position.

"Tell me you aren't calling me on your cell phone inside that tent," my wife said in stereo, or at least that's how it sounded because I heard her both her voice in the phone and also her actual voice across the room, coming from outside the tent as she tried to watch Law and Order.

"You are never going to believe this, hun," I said. "Our bedroom is exactly 12 feet from this very spot on the living room floor. Now 200 bucks doesn't seem so bad for this GPS, does it? If you were 12 feet from dying in the woods, this baby could lead you directly to our refrigerator, but only if you are packing our desktop computer with you."

At that point, she confiscated all the Christmas presents and put them in a trust until I turn 29 1/2 years old, which is roughly in April, the same time the weather starts warming, Christmas is a distant memory and thoughts of summer camping trips are really born.

So much for Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Come late April, however, I'll really be ready for the five-month holiday season known as summer.

Casey Ressler (valleylife@frontiersman.com) is the Valley Life editor. He can pitch his new tent in eight seconds, now that he's done it several hundred times in the last week.