Sage Webb's Blog

The Misadventures of a Pirate-Captain Cat

So before heading to Vegas (yes, we dashed out to Vegas for the world’s largest [in non-Covid years] indoor archery tournament), we left the RV and ran down to the boat to make sure she remained snug in her slip.

She looked quite fancy and flashy, all aglow in the spring afternoon. But the dock around her appeared to be undergoing renovations, with boards loose and screws out ... which put me in mind of a fairly memorable evening a few years back:

When I first moved to Texas, I basically threw everything I had into my ’06 Suzuki Reno, tied the windsurfer onto the little hatchback’s roof, trundled a kitty-litter box into the footwell of the car’s passenger seat, and pointed the whole mess south—with a majestic feline captain riding shotgun. When we hit Galveston Bay, we rooted through the marinas and boat brokerages in search of the perfect vessel to call home, and eventually moved aboard a mid-’80s Pearson sloop that had a wicked leak in the aft part of the cabin. The Dredd Pirate Captain Miss Jingles spent many an evening leaving wet paw prints all over and meowing her complaints about the vessel’s less-than-water-tight state.

The Captain also learned to swim. Or simply innately knew how. I really don’t understand the whole magic of her talents. But one night, while sitting below, reading Gandhi’s autobiography, I heard a splash. I jumped on deck to see only darkness and to fear my boat companion had suffered some mishap ... only to have the cat meow as she hopped up onto the swimstep on the stern of a neighboring boat.

From that night on, the Captain would often leap off the stern of our boat for an evening exercise. Did I love the situation? No! Marina water is not clean. It contains diesel and gas, “discharge” from boats (use your imagination), and other grimy stuff. And in Texas, it often hosts gators! When I could, I’d stop Ms. Kitty from aquatically roaming ... but again: if I could! This wily feline would usually find a way through my obstacles and efforts. Regardless, I’d always wash her down afterward, frequently suffering claw wounds as the price for forcing my standards of hygiene onto this true pirate.

One night, the Captain’s nocturnal plunges achieved a new level of disconcerting. She sprang off our boat just as I reached out to stop her, striking off as though preparing to swim the English Channel. I watched, to try to keep an eye on her, but upon her return toward the boat, she clambered up on the pontoons beneath the floating dock and proceeded to cry her head off, as though she couldn’t figure out how to get out from beneath the dock, swim to the neighbor’s swimstep, and return home as usual.

Phooey.

Mind you: it was getting on toward midnight at this point (both the Captain and I were late-night creatures before the morning-person Bosun came into our lives and upset our internal clocks). I launched my little rowing dinghy, finding I could deflate it a bit, lay in it, and squash myself beneath the floating dock enough to assess the feline situation.

There perched my Captain, still howling. Reaching ... reaching ... fingers almost touching fur ... reaching .... Just as I thought I might be able to grab her and get her into the dinghy and home, she darted away.

Agh!!!

I wriggled out from beneath the dock and returned to the slip, getting out of the dinghy and onto the dock to see what I could do from above. And there it came to me: the screws! I could unscrew the dock, pull up a plank or two, and pull out ... from the darkness beneath ... my kitty companion.

Well, at midnight, with a mobile feline target, this is easier said than done. But many, many planks later, I finally succeeded and retrieved my Captain. In the shower washing her, I received a deep scratch across the belly for my troubles.

Some time later, the incident inspired a short story about a burned-out attorney at a yacht-club party, who dives off a dock and seeks refuge from the noise of life in the space underneath the planks. The story ended up shortlisted for a Texas-fiction prize. Still not sure any story was worth that scratching though (though my Captain certainly was)!

A Weekend at the Campground

This past weekend provided the lovely sort of slow peace that makes RVs so positively charming. Who doesn’t want to wake up late, walk the dog in bright springtime sunshine, shoot a little archery, and make a picnic of Sunday lunch?

The “less” of RV life means less stuff to keep up with ... worry about. There’s no lawn to mow but plenty of grass and flowers and birdhouses to enjoy. There isn’t much space to scrub and vacuum but plenty of room for kicking back with a book or napping ... and just enough counter space to make meatless meatballs and tortellini (and the Bosun got out his special outdoor griller gadget to do real meatballs al fresco to avoid making Traveler’s interior too carnivorously pungent).

One might have to carry a trash bag across the campground to the dumpster, but there’s no hauling plastic trash carts down to the curb on trash day. And “staying in” on Friday night hardly feels dull when the whole neighborhood is circling the campground pond in festively lit golf carts, with adult beverages, little dogs, and lots of laughter. (And everybody but me has a veritable light show going outside their units, with rope lighting, dancing-light flagpoles, and tiki torches.)

“Keeping up with the Joneses” is minimal, though one can’t resist checking out the new neighbors as they move in and set up camp. (In our case, the new neighbors put out their awning, which did spark envy in me. We have yet to unfurl Traveler’s awning, and now I think I have a new task for the Bosun.)

(New neighbors pulled in, so I pulled up the blinds for a peek.)

I do catch the Bosun surfing his “RV porn,” mostly ogling Allegro buses by Tiffin and now the “super Cs,” the righteously mighty class C units, with their commercial-truck chassis and their sprawling sleeping/storage spaces over the driver and passenger seats up front. I remind him that Traveler reigns unsurpassable, but boys will be boys, I suppose, and his eyes wander.

An outing to the archery range might provide the sole reason for taking a shower. (Except, as I mentioned in my last post, the showers onboard are wonderfully hot and rejuvenating, so really, they are kind of a high point on their own.) Some leisurely shooting at the range just down the road from the campground affirms how cool it is to be able to move your home to chase your hobbies. A trip to Vegas this week for a huge archery tournament means things are gonna speed up a lot, but this past weekend offered the absolute slowness that marks RV life in Texas in the spring as completely marvelous.

Hashtag: RV Life

One of our super-cool dockmates at the marina curates a hashtag-boat-life Facebook group for sharing the less glamorous, less sought-after moments of boat ownership and living aboard. And it’s great! Too many people see only sunsets and sundowners when they think boats ... and end up pretty disappointed after purchasing their “paradise.”

The same phenomenon happens with RVs, but honestly, RVs entail less work, less to-the-death [of the problem] mechanical warfare. RV life, for us, at least, means simple, bright, and happy. (Okay, yeah, there was the whole water-pump/bucket thing in Yankton, but honestly, that stuff just adds to the adventure.) So here’s my reverse-reverse hashtag-RV-life post ... the one that sings the praises of a rolling world sans TV, to-dos, and too much:

RV-ing means leisurely reading for me. The TV doesn’t get much use. But the benches, gliders, and lounge-y seats of the campgrounds see lots of use for morning and evening reading time. Roadtripping also means bringing stories to life. I took the Pryde to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula last summer, did Mackinac Island, learned about Victorian-era author Constance Fenimore Woolson (a close friend of Henry James), read a collection of her short stories, visited a monument to her on the island, and recently finished a great bio on her. In a similar vein, we did so much Old West and Texas-history touring this past year, reading books like The Blood of Heroes (the Alamo), Empire of the Summer Moon (Quanah Parker and the Comanches), Libby Custer’s bio, and Three Roads to the Alamo. In South Dakota, it was a book that covered pioneer prostitutes in the Black Hills, and then Fred Bear’s bio and tale of bow hunting. RV-ing brings history and legends to life. I know I say this stuff all the time, but it’s too great not to repeat!

The world’s awesomest showers. For some reason, showers aboard RVs rock way harder than showers anywhere else! Maybe it’s the lack of a hot-water regulator. Maybe it’s the weird little skylight overhead. But in both the class As I’ve had, the showers have been amazing.

Walking. RV-ing, campgrounds, and state parks mean fantastic evening strolls, the kind of after-dinner passeggiata that rights everything that may have gone wrong during the day. Maybe a state-park trail beside a river beckons. Maybe the campground sits around a pretty pond and the other units sport interesting flags and decorations that make great conversation pieces. Maybe a line of fellow campers walking dogs means smiles and greetings exchanged. Whatever the setting, the walks rock.

Chores that aren’t. The “dirty work” of RV-ing, generally, isn’t that bad. RVs are way easier to maintain than boats. The everyday chores are easy, happen in the sunshine, and can become little rituals shared by the team. Sure, when we drove back from South Dakota, it rained so hard we wondered if the sky could run out of water. We had to set up power and water in an absolute downpour in Oklahoma. I had to take the dog out in a deluge to do his business. But afterward, we could dry off, snuggle in, and enjoy the coziness of the unit, all warm and settled. Even the tiny roof leak I discovered wasn’t that big a deal. Easy fix for the Bosun (uh, yes: it totally helps to have a husband who defines himself as “building things” and “improving things”).

History, history, history. This point dovetails with the reading. Life makes a little more sense when one understands the past. And the past makes a little more sense when one has gotten to “see” it. So hitting up places like the battlefield at Vicksburg, the Presidio La Bahia in Goliad, and Tombstone have have made the Civil War, the Texas Revolution, and the Old West come to life.

(⬆️⬇️Monuments at the Civil War battlefield at Vicksburg, Mississippi.)

(⬆️ Presidio La Bahia at Goliad. Site of significant massacre of Texian troops during Texas Revolution.)

(⬆️⬇️ Old Tombstone, Arizona, of OK Corral Fame, and the town’s Oriental Saloon, where Wyatt Earp owned a share of the gaming tables.)

Okay, I can think of a ton more points to add to this list, but I’ve got to spend more of this Saturday with the Bosun, not blogging! Happy adventuring this weekend!

A Throwback to Last Year ... and Even All the Way Back to the Alamo

With being in Wisconsin last week, and then returning to Texas this week, I’ve been thinking about the travels I was enjoying just before this time last year ... just before the whole “Covid crash.” For the anniversary of the fall of the Alamo (March 6) last year, I had headed out to Palmetto State Park to take in the historical sites around Gonzales, where the Texas Revolution kicked off in earnest in October 1835 when settlers in the area refused to relinquish to Mexican troops a small cannon the community had there . . . and famously told the troops to “come and take it.”

RV Dog and I were camping in the Pryde, the little teardrop trailer we had then (before getting Traveler from the Bosun’s awesome parents when they retired from RV-ing). Palmetto State Park offered us great trails to explore. The park has thick, lush foliage and felt quiet in the middle of the week, like RV Dog and I were in on a secret, enjoying something the rest of the world was missing.

On March 6, I drove into San Antonio at 0-dark-30 to get to the old mission/fort before dawn. I had to wrap myself up in multiple layers against the cold, but my blue nylon jacket and black ballcap gave me away as a tourist; many of the hundreds of people gathered in the dark in front of the fort sported varying iterations of “period” attire, Bowie knives (of course), and some pretty impressive headgear (I remember leather and furs that kinda made an impression).

The Bosun and I had recently finished James Donovan’s The Blood of Heroes, which provides a gripping account of the conflict leading up to the siege and final assault of the Alamo, and the players involved, including participants that sometimes don’t get the attention they deserve. The latter include Joe, who had been William Travis’s slave (and ultimately seems to have escaped slavery some time after the revolution), and Susanna Dickinson, who stayed in the fort with her husband Almeron Dickinson, who was killed in the battle.

While the history of the Texas Revolution (like most significant historical events) is complicated (more complicated than popular myths and retellings may suggest), a look back to the generation before the conflict provides critical insight into the role of Tejano vengeance in the war. Podcaster Brandon Seale (,www.brandonseale.com) has some really interesting material on the 1813 Battle of Medina, a clash that occurred near San Antonio between Spanish royalist forces and Mexican republicans before Mexico gained its independence from Spain. Who was on the side of the royalists back then, as a young lieutenant, when the Spanish forces murdered and raped their way through the city? Yep. Santa Anna. So the Texas Revolution some twenty-three years later had a pretty personal aspect for many San Antonio families.

When I visited the fort last year for this anniversary celebration, Covid had already started shutting things down, which meant I didn’t get a full Alamo experience during that visit. I didn’t get to see Lieutenant Colonel William B. Travis’s kind-of (at least for me) famous banded-agate ring. Travis went down in history with his cry of “Victory or Death,” but before all that, he was just a young lawyer in Stephen F. Austin’s colony on the Brazos: San Felipe de Austin.

A bit of a firebrand, he ran off to San Antonio in January 1836, when things really started heating up. But he didn’t go without romantic connections. He carried with him a ring his fiancée Rebecca Cumings, also of San Felipe de Austin, had given to him. Before he met his end at the Alamo on that other March 6, the one in 1836, Travis put that ring on a string and looped it around the neck of Susanna Dickinson’s baby, little Angelina Dickinson. Angelina went on to live a life worthy of Greek tragedy, but after a long road through Texas and the Civil War, and on to New Orleans, Travis’s ring found its way back to the Alamo in 1955.

As I stood in the chill at dawn, in front of the old fort last year, I did tear up. The ceremony commemorating the dead hit pretty hard. History is complicated, but the human side of it has so much to it, so many threads to sew us all together and altogether into the mismatched, many-colored, mixed-up, imperfect moment of today ... to sew us into the good, bad, indifferent ... horrifying, uplifting, frustrating ... of what we are now.

A Recipe for an Easter Lamb’s Cake

Ingredients:

A beautiful Midwestern spring Easter Sunday

‍♀️ A teenaged girl just finding her place in this imperfect (kinda pretty much mixed up and not terribly nice a lot of the time) world

Some butter and flour and sugar and stuff for the cake

Cream cheese and butter and sugar and goodies for the frosting

A giant mixer and mixing bowl

Chocolate morsels for the lamb’s eyes

Strawberries to garnish the lamb (and shim up its base when the cake tries to fall over)

Procedure:

1️⃣ Gather all the ingredients and spread them out on the kitchen counter. Soften the butter sticks in the microwave.

2️⃣ Accidentally witness an unremarkable, all-too-usual argument between a dad and his beautiful teenaged daughter over her eating habits and her refusal to eat much at all. (Dad just wants her to be healthy. Not a remarkable wish. But not a simple situation either.)

3️⃣ Remember being fourteen years old and priding yourself on being able to eat only a single chocolate-chip cookie all day ... for a total daily calorie count of 600 calories. Remember thinking that consuming anything over a thousand calories a day made you fat and undisciplined. Remember competing in rock climbing and knowing that you had to be thinner ... lighter ... always lighter.

4️⃣ Smile at the daughter when her parents run out for a while and leave you and her to bake the cake. Listen to her favorite tunes as she cues them up, one after another; let her tell you how great Taylor Swift is.

5️⃣ Gratefully accept the honor of getting to lick the dough off the beater from the mixer when the daughter finishes mixing the batter up. Laugh at yourself as she giggles with you.

6️⃣ Tell her how delicious the batter is. Remind her how talented she is: at school, at piano, at writing, at baking, at thinking critically. Don’t let her blush it away. Remind her to let herself glow, to never hide her flame.

7️⃣ Confess you know exactly how she feels, how hard it all is, how the world has so many messages it tries to foist on everyone. And assure her that there’s good here, too. Good ... and adventures ... and things to do and see and remember and celebrate.

8️⃣ Think back to “back then.” Wonder if you’ve lived up to all that that little 600-calorie girl could have become. Wonder what this bright teenager, baking this cake, will be in twenty-five years. Smile ... because of those good things you just told her about ... good things like this cake. Like this moment.

9️⃣ Eat a big, mixed-up Easter lunch of black-bean burger and doughy Wisconsin pretzel (with cheese sauce—be proud you made that cheese sauce). Take some of the neighborhood kids into the yard to shoot some arrows. Eat the lamb’s cake afterward. Enjoy it all.

Wisconsin, Wee Ones, and Wielding New Reads

No April Fool’s jokes today. (It was still April 1 when I prepared this post!) I thought about trying to do something, but the day flew by. It’s the kids! (My friend’s baby arrived, and everyone is back home, including the brothers of the girls I was watching; these little guys had been with their grandparents. I’m staying on for a few days yet to lend a hand while Mom and Dad settle back in.) All these little angels make time whirl ... they make everything whirl ... they whirl. With Easter nearing, today involved grocery shopping and securing treats for an Easter feast. You know you’re in Wisconsin when such treats involve:

The day also involved planning an archery outing for Saturday. I’m excited about taking the kids to shoot a little. In the past, I’ve enjoyed taking everyone to a nearby range to use their bows, and I’m hoping for some good times in that realm this weekend. In the book arena, the kids’ dad took us to a very cool local bookstore this afternoon (Mystery to Me on Monroe Street in Madison), and everyone got a book. While my selection may not appear as bright and cheerful as one little guy’s graphic novel or as the petite princess’s choice of a picture book about a girl codebreaker, I’m thinking it’s going to be a cool read:

Sure, I buy too many books. I know that. I think I’ve posted before about The Bosun’s accusations that my book stash makes the boat list [lean] to port [the left]. Books bring smiles, though. So I can’t help it.

Plus it’s the week leading up to Easter. Things feel so springtime-hopeful. A wee treat at a neat local bookstore never hurt anyone, right?

Around lunchtime, I did get a chance to take a walk. The temperature has dropped into the 30s and it’s been breezy, but I was bundled up and the sun was out ... and very little beats the Midwest on a clear, sunny, spring day. The trees haven’t put on their leafy best yet, and snow piles are still hiding here and there. But there’s this reified quality to days like today was: this clarity made tangible in the slightly muddy path, and in the leaves decaying over the tree roots, and in the absolute blue of the sky. Okay, never mind. That all sounds silly. But it was a day dense with color. Or maybe a day distilled to a silver breeze and a brown park and a turquoise sky.

Or maybe just a day of happy kids bickering over tee-ball, begging for jelly beans and honey-crisp apples, and getting new books as early treats for celebration of an old, old holiday.

Two Adventures, Both Alike in Dignity

The first adventure:

In fair Yankton, South Dakota, where we lay our scene, a middle-aged archer soaks in her sport for weeks on end. She works each day, does yoga, reads, walks her dog, and fills a bright-green bucket with fresh water from an outdoor spigot multiple times daily to have water for basic needs, since the RV she calls home has a broken water pump.

A fifteen-minute walk down the street or across a hay field lies an Easton-funded national archery center. One can shoot peacefully there each afternoon, virtually alone. Training manuals discuss the mental focus of the game, and our protagonist also enjoys coaching from an Olympic champion. So this protagonist can practice mental imagery and mindfulness, wrapping herself completely in each individual shot, letting each arrow expand to become her entire world for the duration of the nine-second process of “nocking” that arrow (loading it on the bow), drawing the bowstring, and firing. For that moment in time, the world includes only that individual shot. Beyond that moment, it includes only a bow, a laptop, a tiny shelf of books, an RV, and a brindle mutt.

When her time in Yankton comes to a close, our protagonist, her dog, and her returned husband drive the RV south, through Nebraska and Kansas and Oklahoma, to Texas, parking at a comfortable RV resort north of Houston to continue the RV-archery adventure. Our heroine’s husband vanquishes his holding-tank foe of a mystery quasi-plug, and our protagonist shoots an archery tournament in Houston (this past weekend), using those mental skills to finish strong and maintain focus, regardless of the score (which improves when ignored). The world has a quiet, peaceful feel, something like perfect....

The second adventure:

Our protagonist heads for Madison, Wisconsin, transforming from archer to “auntie” in order to take care of her close friend’s two daughters, while this friend goes to the hospital to have a baby. From ancient grudge with clothes and certain toys breaks new mutiny, where civil toy blood makes civil hands unclean, so little polka-dot dresses are shed and a tiny cherub throws herself into a bathtub and screams till “auntie” brings the “right” pirate ship for bath time. A mermaid’s hair must be braided, and when everyone is asleep, so the world is (of course) quite dull, the piano supplies the most entertainment for toddler hands.

The teenaged daughter asks our heroine hard questions about politics, relationships, and economics, questions that tear our dear “auntie” in two because a fine line may separate honesty from propriety in the context of a “tea party” with a wee one and a junior-high schooler. Regardless, it’s all above our girl’s pay grade. But Scrabble at night is fun and makes up somewhat for TV programming worse than any our protagonist knew existed (no more rock-star camps for kiddies, please). Late-night work in the cold of the basement keeps our girl on her toes, as does remembering the schedule for piano lessons, physics tutoring, and ... what was the last thing?

Oh, and yeah, lucky our “auntie” talked to her sister and got the skinny on sugar- and caffeine-checking for beverages because our “auntie” thought water suited for a dinner beverage, but apparently, it doesn’t ... and caffeine after 6:00 p.m. would have been a really bad idea. It’s mindfulness and laser focus at a whole new level up here.

What I Want to Be When I Grow Up

When I grow up, I want to be someone who walks with her husband at night ... around a fountain in the middle of a warm, southern campground (a fancy little place on the north side of Houston, because we have returned to the Lone Star State, but we’ve got to address some things before we move back on the boat). When I grow up and am walking like that, with my husband around the fountain, I want to be leading a little dog on a leash, ... and I want to be a person who looks up at the bright moon, at a large jet passing overhead, and thinks that the people on that jet, passing by that moon, heading off on their adventures, don’t have it quite so good as I do ... because I have an old motorhome that takes me places and lets me pass from the Great Plains, over Oklahoma’s red dirt, into Texas’s bluebonnets, without having to sleep in a bed that’s not mine. (In truth though, RV Dog can claim any soft spot as his own—as his bed—as his nest. And if he snuggles in next to me, this ability kinda rubs off.)

(We got back into the Houston area and reunited with the old Jeep and the stand-up paddle board!)

(The P.O. box had a ton of mail waiting for me, including a nice little “book haul.”)

When I grow up, I want to have stacks of books waiting to take me places: on adventures, into new ideas, back in time and forward in emotion. I want to be a person who puts work aside after lunch to go for a walk. It would be cool to grow up and watch Texas-history webinars after dinner, with a churlish husband who argues with the presenters’ sometimes too-sweeping generalizations or stubborn application of modern thought processes to historical conundrums (he wouldn’t say “modern mentalite,” but that’s what he would mean). Sure, as a grown up, I’d have to mutter about the $3.25 price tag to run the washing machine in the campground laundry room, but I think grown ups look for things to mutter about, so it might as well be the cost of laundry, rather than the neighbor’s _______ [fill in the blank with popular muttering topics]. Transience can’t solve all problems, but it can obviate issues with neighbors, since neighbors don’t remain such for very long.

Sure, I know that when I grow up, I’ll have to pay bills, and do accounting, and review work stuff late at night. It will feel like my phone is an email conveyor belt, rolling new issues onto the screen as quickly as I can address and delete the old issues. But my phone will also have happy texts and bright snippets of pictures from friends’ adventures: blue water and gray manatees; sunshine and faux pirate ships; northern forests just shaking off winter, glowing leafy green behind faces I haven’t seen in too long.

As a grown up, maybe my shoulder will hurt after shooting my bow ... because I’m older as a grown up (and maybe too because I don’t have the stoutest connective tissue). But hey, it’s not so bad, really. And as a grown up, I’ll be able to have Buc-ee’s cake balls, and those Buc-ee’s fake chicharrones (“puffed wheat snacks”), whenever I want (except with slower metabolism, “whenever I want” may not be a great idea). (Dear Reader, if you are not from Texas and know not the wonders of Buc-ee’s gas stations, then I hope that, when you grow up, you get to visit a Buc-ee’s and meet the patron beaver of all road trips—because these gas stations are giant and amazing and feature wonderfully tacky beaver statues out front ... and have really good snacks and truly clean “ladies’ lounges.”)

Right now, I’m not sure I can say exactly what the best part of growing up will be, but I’m guessing that one of the things that will be in the running is realizing that, really, there isn’t much to lose, so one might as well take that chance.

A Post Card to Some People Who Appreciated a Good Post-Archery “Party”

Dear Heroes Resting on the Elysian Fields,

I hope you have it this good.

I really do.

I hope you have hot showers, and hot water in which to wash dishes, thanks to a reinvigorated RV water system. (The Bosun wields tools like nobody’s business—you can always call him if your system breaks down.)

In the evenings, I hope the Shades rig up a big-screen TV for you for Jane Austen movie nights, with selections like the 1995 BBC version of Persuasion. After your funeral games (how’s that work down there?) and displays of archery excellence, I hope you grab bundles of firewood from the Styx Store, douse the stuff in “boy-scout water,” and grin at the flames jumping high as the sun starts to set and the breeze starts to lay down and the world starts to turn more slowly.

I hope Hades lets you fire up an old outdoor stereo with a tape deck (are these things antiques for you, too?). I hope he lets you scroll through the local FM stations till you find some classic country and blare it just loud enough to make Cerberus howl along a little.

Does Achilles bring the beer? Have he and Hector buried the hatchet? Does Agamemnon pull out coolers of M&M ice-cream sandwiches to pass around?

I hope so. Because all that stuff feels awfully, awfully good.

Sincerely,

A Girl Who Thinks Elysium Should Come With a Twenty-Year-Old RV, a Loyal Brindle Dog, and a Couple Twilights in a Place That Isn’t “Home”

The Bosun Returns‼️

The Bosun has returned to his land ship! RV Dog and I are overjoyed! Yankton, South Dakota, has put on her best spring weather. The world feels bright indeed. (And we’ve reprovisioned. The pantry is overstuffed.)

In celebration of The Bosun’s triumphant homecoming (because home is where you hang your dog’s harness), I played hooky from work stuff for a minute today and showed The Bosun the field-archery course behind the campground. Being The Bosun, though, he allowed very little tomfoolery and went right to work fixing the water pump. We almost have running water again. Just on our way to the hardware store right now to purchase one last part.

Having immersed myself in the quiet of the Great Plains for so many weeks, and having enjoyed a bit of an archery bubble while I was at it, I wanted to continue this wilderness-wildness-archery theme and extend my immersion a bit longer. So I dug into Fred Bear’s biography. (Born in 1902, Bear pioneered modern archery in America, writing, making early films, and producing equipment.) About a quarter through the book now, I am smiling because the story features so much of my once-home Mitten State, with lots of Michigan adventures recounted. (Bear explored the Upper Peninsula, waited for a ferry to take him across the Straits of Mackinac before they built the bridge from Lower to Upper Michigan, weathered the Depression in Detroit, and camped in places I’ve camped.) So that’s kinda fun.

I want to write more. I want to tell you an entertaining anecdote about a wander in the woods, about RV Dog making some fabulous discovery, about laughing at some mishap. But the only thing on my mind, the only thing my little head has room for at this moment is my wonderful Bosun’s arrival.

The crew is whole again.