This hole in the wall is just around the corner from Jan’s in Arabi.
Jan says to cut the bamboo everyday. It’s been raining, so I have to cut it twice a day or it will grow too thick and strong to cut with anything less than a saw. I’m saving the petrified bamboo poles, but I don’t know why. “I’ll give them to the boys,” I say to no one.
The mosquitoes are eating me alive in this bamboo forest, but I don’t mind. I’m thinking of other bamboo forests I’ve stomped through in Japan and ‘Nam and, oddly enough, in El Toro, California. They don’t call it “El Toro” anymore. Apparently, “Lake Forest” is more appropriate. I don’t know why.
Right now, if I stepped through this wall and came out the other end in a bamboo forest, I might not find it odd at all.