My Intro to Camping
About a week after a really tough July stumbling through summer camp with sciatica, trying my best not to grouse at the students, I decided I needed a vacation.
I started out with a visit to the Iowa State Fair with my parents and an aunt; we were the recipients of a Century Farm Award for a farm that has been in the family since the late 1800s. While at the fair, I also ate Iowa cornfed beef, rode the double ferris wheel, and wandered around filling out a questionnaire that allowed me to enter a drawing to win a really cool mountain bike. I didn't win the bike, though, only a free T-shirt, so I had to buy my own bike at a later date.
I drove out of Des Moines around 2:00 that day and got as far as Kearney, Nebraska, where I camped at a state recreation area. It was cheap, and there were showers, and you stopped noticing the smell of cattle after a while. Unfortunately, the ground proved to be rocky, and I had a brand new tent and no hammer. I pounded away at the stakes for 5 or 10 minutes, tried to put the tent up without stakes, and finally gave up. I had to move the tent to softer ground and try a second time to pound in the tent stakes, using a stainless steel padlock from my trunk. I did get all the stakes into the ground, although in the process I bent one steel stake and broke off a piece of bone in my right pinky, which has since interfered a lot with my ability to stir things. I had to beg help from a passing elderly couple to get the tent fully erected before dark, because one pole would not behave. Without a second person, I would have been forced to take the whole tent down to fix the pole.
By the time the tent was up, my back was too tired for me to put up the rain flap, so I decided that if it rained hard in the night, I would throw the tent into the car and drive on. It did rain, but not hard enough for me to give up and leave.
The next morning I took off, making one necessary stop in Sterling, Colorado, to buy a tent mallet, a tool box, and a White Stripes c.d. Then I continued through Denver and Colorado Springs to scenic highway 115, where my aunt says it looks like God crumpled up the land in His cosmic fist and tossed it down in piles, all scrunched up in balls. I picked up highway 50 in Canon City and drove through the Arkansas River canyon to my friends' house, which is just shy of Salida. The canyon was a magnificent array of multitudinous shades of red stone, with a merry river playing and lunging through it. The Arkansas River is happy in itself; it's not that the river is benevolent or anything like that, it really doesn't care one way or the other about humanity, it's just having a jolly old time on its own. You can hear it happily resting for a while in the deep areas, then frolicking through the rapids.
I spent five days visiting my friends Elantu, Harold, and Mike, who make and sell wonderful Celtic artwork together (www.ghostraven.net). Elantu also writes books about ways to cook and eat what you can find in the woods--anyone for Hot Hunan Stir-Fried Field Mouse?--and about rednecks she has known.
I started out with a visit to the Iowa State Fair with my parents and an aunt; we were the recipients of a Century Farm Award for a farm that has been in the family since the late 1800s. While at the fair, I also ate Iowa cornfed beef, rode the double ferris wheel, and wandered around filling out a questionnaire that allowed me to enter a drawing to win a really cool mountain bike. I didn't win the bike, though, only a free T-shirt, so I had to buy my own bike at a later date.
I drove out of Des Moines around 2:00 that day and got as far as Kearney, Nebraska, where I camped at a state recreation area. It was cheap, and there were showers, and you stopped noticing the smell of cattle after a while. Unfortunately, the ground proved to be rocky, and I had a brand new tent and no hammer. I pounded away at the stakes for 5 or 10 minutes, tried to put the tent up without stakes, and finally gave up. I had to move the tent to softer ground and try a second time to pound in the tent stakes, using a stainless steel padlock from my trunk. I did get all the stakes into the ground, although in the process I bent one steel stake and broke off a piece of bone in my right pinky, which has since interfered a lot with my ability to stir things. I had to beg help from a passing elderly couple to get the tent fully erected before dark, because one pole would not behave. Without a second person, I would have been forced to take the whole tent down to fix the pole.
By the time the tent was up, my back was too tired for me to put up the rain flap, so I decided that if it rained hard in the night, I would throw the tent into the car and drive on. It did rain, but not hard enough for me to give up and leave.
The next morning I took off, making one necessary stop in Sterling, Colorado, to buy a tent mallet, a tool box, and a White Stripes c.d. Then I continued through Denver and Colorado Springs to scenic highway 115, where my aunt says it looks like God crumpled up the land in His cosmic fist and tossed it down in piles, all scrunched up in balls. I picked up highway 50 in Canon City and drove through the Arkansas River canyon to my friends' house, which is just shy of Salida. The canyon was a magnificent array of multitudinous shades of red stone, with a merry river playing and lunging through it. The Arkansas River is happy in itself; it's not that the river is benevolent or anything like that, it really doesn't care one way or the other about humanity, it's just having a jolly old time on its own. You can hear it happily resting for a while in the deep areas, then frolicking through the rapids.
I spent five days visiting my friends Elantu, Harold, and Mike, who make and sell wonderful Celtic artwork together (www.ghostraven.net). Elantu also writes books about ways to cook and eat what you can find in the woods--anyone for Hot Hunan Stir-Fried Field Mouse?--and about rednecks she has known.
Labels: travel
posted by Margo at 5:03 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home