Sea Monkey Hill

We were camping one year at a public campgrounds, I think it was Hoffmaster State Park, near Muskegon. Brian and I were heavily invested in a tree climbing hobby at the time, and, although there were no good climbing trees, we found a huge set of cliffs that looked dangerous, steep, and very scary.

In other words, they had to be scaled.

We didn't know the first thing about repelling, and our gear was homemade. But we had something better: ignorance. Neither of us had any real experience with horrible permanent injuries in real life. And we didn't even know what "C2 complete tetraplegia" was. So we had no idea what could have awaited us if we slipped.

There was an annoying red-haired boy there, who seemed to be devoid of any sort of parental supervision. He hounded us relentlessly, following us everywhere, even into the bathroom. We just couldn't lose him. He was all over us like a cheap suit. The cliffs were a sort of remote escape, hopefully he wouldn't find out about them.

We decided to name the cliffs we intended to scale. We gave them names based on what rewards we would give ourselves if we succeeded in climbing them. This is the story of "Sea Monkey Hill".

Everyone who is over the age of 30 remembers the ads for Sea Monkeys in the backs of comic books. They were depicted as tiny trident-wielding watery elves, complete with tools, societies, heck, even a king and queen. So they must be amazing creatures, we thought, perhaps capable of anything. The very informative advertisement said they could even be trained! We tried to imagine what a Sea Monkey training regimen would look like.

Sea Monkey Hill was difficult to climb, to say the least. We were pretty much on the verge of falling the whole time. Like leaning back on a chair and just catching yourself before you fall over backwards. Worse, our red-haired nemesis found us and started pestering us again. In fact, he tried to scale Sea Monkey Hill behind us. This slap-in-the-face gesture could not stand, clearly. We don't share Sea Monkey glories.

The details are a bit fuzzy, but Brian and I were standing atop the cliff watching "Red" climb, and just as he got a hand on the surface of the ground above the cliff, one or more of us may have casually stood on it. Accidentally, of course. Entirely the fault of gravity, therefore, Red fell and took quite a beating from the cruel terrain. We didn't see much of Red after that. Such is the way of childhood for boys. It's not something we are proud of, but it could have been much worse. It could have been us plummeting down the gravelly chasm to an uncertain future.

Anyhow, we made it up. So the reward was ours to clip, send, and receive. We ordered them as soon as we got home from the trip.

After an agonizing and unreasonable processing delay, we finally got our Sea Monkeys. There was a small tank, the Sea Monkey packet (don't eat it! You'll get Monkeys), a food packet, and even a small spoon to feed them with. Things were getting exciting! We followed the directions and, after a few days of almost inhuman anticipation, our Sea Monkeys finally appeared in the water.

Talk about false advertising. Sea Monkeys aren't really monkeys at all. In fact, being in reality a small species of salt-flat brine shrimp, they don't even come from the sea. There are no tridents, no crowns, no castles. No accouterments of any kind, as far as I could tell. There was no Sea Monkey language, and no discernible culture. Training, sadly, would prove to be impossible. On top of that, they smelled terrible.

So, we climbed a dangerous mountain and waited 6-8 weeks for delivery of a small colony of fish food that we had to grow ourselves, nearly killing an annoying but otherwise innocent little boy in the process.

Ahhh, but we'll always have Sea Monkey Hill.