We also went to Seattle on our trip, paying a little weekend visit to my cousin Michael, his wife Catherine, and their 14-month-ish old son. The boy appears to be a mild, happy, friendly child who gives them no out-of-the-ordinary trouble. They were about as prepared for Elijah as FEMA was for Hurricane Katrina.

By the time Michael took us on a hike in the mountains of Washington on Sunday, we'd managed to downgrade Elijah to a Tropical Storm. An hour or so up, we reached a picnic-perfect setting among a copse of trees. At this point, Elijah decided that Regina was sitting on his "favorite rock," which, of course, he'd never seen before and would never see again.

"It's my best place in the whole world and if I don't sit there I will be dead!" he said.

While Regina didn't actually give a crap about the rock in particular, she did give a crap about succumbing to the whims of a whiny child on the verge of his fourth birthday. She stood her ground. Elijah moaned, clawed at his face, and then, eventually, howled, filling the forest with his agony. The hurricane whipped up again.

"PLEASE, mama! I have to sit on that rock! Please, please, please?"

"No," she said.

"WHYYYYYYYYYYY?"

"Because I'm sitting here."

"NOOOOOOOOO!"

This went on for ten minutes, maybe more. Regina, a good Protestant girl, worried that we were disturbing the peace of the other hikers. I tried to imagine myself alone on a sandy beach, smoking a joint under partly cloudy 75-degree skies, and then alternately falling asleep and reading a good, pulpy novel.

"NOOOOOOOOO!" Elijah said.

Finally, the fever broke when Michael said, "Hey, Elijah."

"What?" Elijah sniffled.

"Let's take off our clothes and jump in the lake."

My cousin Michael is sophisticated and well-travelled. He builds his own boats and has patented some sort of revolutionary whale-tracking device. Still, it doesn't take much provocation to get him to skim down to his tidy-whities. Regina and I stayed at our picnic spot, proclaiming victory. Shortly, we heard this:

"WHAAAAAAAA!"

Elijah had suddenly turned gleeful. We hurried down. There he was, in Michael's arms, shivering and naked while getting whipped around a clear mountain lake.

"Are you cold?" Regina asked.

Elijah's teeth chattered.

"I ne-never g-g-get c-c-c-cold," he said.

After our hike, we went to a small-town burger-and-shake joint that Mike likes. His wife is a vegetarian, and he has few vices, so he gets naughty with beef. Elijah had a corn dog, which we let him take into the car. Michael sat in the back, with the boy. Unbeknownst to him, but knownst to us, he'd endeared himself to Elijah. The results of such an attachement can be mixed.

"I like corn dogs," Elijah said.

"You do?" said Michael.

"Uh-huh," Elijah replied. "And so does Hot Man."

"Really."

"Yes. He cooks them with his hot power and then he eats them in a dumpster that he keeps in a tree."

"I see."

"Dr. Boney likes corn dogs, too."

"Who's Dr. Boney?" Michael asked.

Now Elijah was really off.

"Dr. Boney is an old robot with blood all over his skin. He has two kids. Their names are Hoogie and Floogie. And he lives all over a mountain with Hill Man. Hill Man has two really long arms and he sucks people into the top of a mountain, and Hot Man tries to stop him, but sometimes Hot Man runs into Slimy Man and then he gets covered in slime which is really hot-dog poop..."

I'd heard this story, or variations on it, many times, and found myself drifting into a pleasant post-hike sleep. Twenty minutes later, I awoke to hear this.

"Now Hot Man is all over the corn dog, and he has to protect it from Mr. Dang and Tree Man, because we picked up Mr. Dang on the highway where he was eating dinner, and he's very hungry, and Tree Man likes popsicles and then he plays baseball in the garbage with squirrels."

"What the hell is going on?" I said to Regina.

"Elijah has these ketchup packets, and he's pretending that they're superheroes."

"They're not ketchup!" Elijah said. "They're Hot Man and his bad guys, and they only taste like ketchup."

He turned to Michael. "Now let's keep playing," he said.

Later, at home, Michael sat on the sofa, looking stunned.

"How'd it go?" his wife asked.

"Elijah never stops," Michael said.

Elijah ran into the room.

"Daddy!" he said. "Lamp Post Man is here, and he's very angry!"

"He never stops," my cousin said again.