Day 7: The Healing

For those of you who think chiropractors are quacks, you obviously have never walked into a doctor’s office, listing to the left, walked back out still listing but with a prescription in your pocket for muscle relaxants and a week’s bedrest, then walked right across the street into a chiropractors office to come back out 30 min later standing up straight and able to go back to work. If your objective is to get off work for a few days, take your ailing back to the former. If you have stuff to do, go to the latter.

I sat down at the picnic table at 8:30 a.m. with a phone book supplied by the campsite office. My body is a temple; it is the only one I get in this life, so I choose my medical care with rigorous standards. I opened the yellow pages and picked out the three largest and most attractive display ads, and I gave them a ring.

One of them wasn’t open on Thursdays. Another wasn’t open until Thursday afternoon. The third opened at 9:00 a.m., so I sipped my coffee with the girls to wait. At 8:55, my cell phone rang. A chiropractor was on the other end of the line; said she had just gotten in the office and saw this number on her caller ID. Hmm. I’ve never had a medical professional call me back without leaving at least two messages of increasing urgency, and this time, I hadn’t left any. Guess business is slow.

I programmed her office address into the GPS (MAN, is that thing handy!), got help getting on the bike, and set off immediately. I crawled into her office, and she called to see how much my insurance would cover. She said I had a ten dollar copay after fulfilling an annual $200 medical deductable, of which, let’s see, I had so far used, um, zero. She looked up. “You don’t go to the doctor often, do you?”

“No, really I don’t. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I’m ridiculously healthy.” She looked at me. I was tilting toward starboard. “’Except for this,” I added quickly.

She adjusted this, popped that, cracked the other thing, and if not a new woman, I was at least no longer a completely broken one. I went back to camp with a little hope in my heart.

We took the entire day easy and then decided to go out to dinner together. I believe I have mentioned that S was our consummate trip planner. She also put a great deal of thought into our evening meals. It is too expensive to eat at restaurants every night, and it also takes a great deal of time. Cooking at camp requires dishes and cleanup, and after being on the road for 10 hours, no one feels like cooking. Backpackers carry dehydrated meals that only require you to add boiling water to a pouch of food, seal it up for 10 minutes, then eat right out of the bag so your only dishes to wash are the spoons. This is the perfect option in that it also light and easy to pack 21 days worth of dinners in our trailers. The problem is that the backpacker meals you buy in outdoor recreation stores are pretty expensive.

S did some research. She found a website, trailcooking.com, where a woman made up a bunch of recipes so you could make backpacker meals yourself in Ziploc freezer bags that would hold up to the boiling water. They are surprising good, very economical, and indeed, after a long day, it is the only thing we had the energy to make.

After a week of dining on various chicken and rice combos out of a freezer bag, and we were looking forward to a real restaurant. We all ordered different dishes and then laid into the basket of fresh bread and butter brought to the table as if we had just gotten out of prison. When the entrees arrived, we practically applauded. Every plate looked like the finest meal on earth. We tried everything from each other’s plates, family style. It was pathetic, our sublime joy over a little well-plated cuisine. North Bay Grille in Kalispell Montana. Tell ‘em the grungy biker girls sent ya. If you dare.