Sage Webb's Blog, page 2

My Larder Shows Signs of Lack, But Your Ebook Shelves Need Not: Venturi Effect Ebook Free Thru 3/17

The Bosun returns to me, RV Dog, and Traveler this week. Then we will all head south. The freeze fallout in Texas lingers (water systems take a while to fix), but heck, I’m grateful for a bucket here. Plus The Bosun will fix up Traveler’s water pump, and we will be good as new. (We may stay in her for a while once we get home.)

The Bosun’s return also eases my worries about a 30-minute to hour-long wait for an Uber/Lyft (they don’t seem popular up here) or of the presumption of trying to bum a ride with a college girl I’ve somewhat come to befriend. Without his imminent arrival, I would face these transportation issues in an effort to go to the grocery store—because my little pantry looks kinda sad at this point. Yes, we’ve come to the point in our story where I’m out of almost everything. And I’m making instant oatmeal with sparkling grape juice heated in the microwave because I don’t feel like going out in the snow to get water. (N.B.: the oats are actually pretty delicious this way.) I’ve consumed something like sixteen servings of reconstituted potato soup. And horror of horrors! I’m down to my last few chocolate truffles (I think I’m even out of the coconut ones). My Epicurean boat friends from the dock back home would likely mutter and shake their heads and wonder how a once, at least partially, civilized person reaches such a state of depravity.

But fear not! Help lies just over the horizon in the form of The Bosun’s return. I have a last packet of fettuccini alfredo and a carton of tomato soup to pull me across the finish line. Outside, the snow has returned (RV Dog has expressed his resentment). Inside, it’s really hard to keep an RV floor clean when it’s snowy, slushy, and muddy out ... and a dog holds court.

I’m shooting a lot! A 30 mph headwind and hail will not stop me from walking to the lonely archery lane and flinging some arrows in solitude. I’m also reading a lot, working, and writing—because when you have far fewer companions, a dog who wants nothing to do with the disagreeable weather conditions, no TV, and wonky WIFI, you can enjoy a lot of great chapters.

(Looking for a new read? Just FYI: The Venturi Effect is free as an ebook now through tomorrow on Amazon! Check it out for a little sailing adventure, a lot of courtroom drama, and some old romantic secrets.)

Remembering My Shower Sandals ... and the Women Who Lived Here Before Space Heaters

Or this post might be called “A Bucket ... and a Book About Brothels.” Because over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve gained a new appreciation and gratitude for buckets ... and a new realization of the hardships faced by nineteenth-century soiled doves trying to make a go of it in America’s wild western environs.

Yes, it’s been a few weeks since my last post. Almost a month? We camped in the deep freeze. (The holding tank is STILL pretty frozen [I can’t resist: I have to snicker “poo-cicle”], which adds a certain flare to the challenge of addressing the sewer system right now; and the water pump, or a piece around it, suffered serious damage in the freeze, but more on that in a second). I’ve shot A LOT of arrows (and put up scores with which I’m kinda happy). Texas made it through the winter chaos, though we suffered a *bit* of boat damage (I can’t go into it—too bothersome and even sad).

(No need for a freezer when it’s way below 0 out.)

(It can get expensive, with having to buy new arrows, but “Robin Hooding” an arrow and blowing its back off always feels good ... a bit of precision ....)

(He did not appreciate his Iditarod training.)

The Bosun left me and headed south to deal with the freeze fallout (and to return to work). I stayed in the RV to shoot, file insurance claims, mourn some “boat loss,” and have running water (that remains an issue “deep in the heart of Texas”). Except that the RV’s water pump is out of commission because of freeze damage, so I don’t even have running water. I’d planned to walk into town to buy a bucket to put into service, but for real ... this happened:

RV Dog and I went for a stroll in the woods. We encountered a bit of trash, seemingly a trove the coyotes had gotten into and strewn about. And we encountered a bucket! Right there. In the fields and trees behind the campground. Not a four-mile-away walk into town in the cold! A miracle!

So now I fill my bucket morning and night and bring water into Traveler, feeling a certain parallel with the ladies who carted water into their pioneering camps on the way to the nineteenth-century gold rush in the Black Hills, west of here. Having camped in South Dakota in -26 below, I appreciate even more the heartiness of these adventurous lasses.

The stories of some of these ladies come to light-handed, compassionate life in

Michael Rutter’s Boudoirs to Brothels: The Intimate World of Wild West Women, a layered peek into the world of the Victorian-era, Old West, pioneering bawdy girl. While Rutter’s prose doesn’t quite sparkle, the ladies’ stories themselves leap off the page, and gave me a good read while wiling away in the snow. These women were creative, tough, resourceful, and spirited. Some built empires, dying with sprawling businesses and fortunes. Some served their communities as philanthropists, putting their “ill-gotten gains” toward meals for the hungry and succor for the afflicted. And some died in obscurity ... perhaps intentionally, like Etta Place, who disappeared from history after a crime spree in South America with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Since it hasn’t been that long since Traveler took us through Tombstone, Arizona, Rutter’s vignettes about Sadie Marcus (“Mrs.” Wyatt Earp) and Big Nose Kate (Doc Holliday’s paramour), and their adventures around Tombstone’s Bird Cage Theater and Oriental Saloon, felt real indeed. Now being up in the Dakotas, I also have a gritty sense of the rugged world in which Madam Dora Dufran and Calamity Jane lived up to tall tales.

Sure, I realize that carting a bucket twenty feet to the trailer, and having to dash back out into the cold from the bathhouse to retrieve my shower sandals when I forget them in the RV, hardly put me in the pioneering category. But maybe that’s the point: I’ve got space heaters, and a faucet not far away that sprays potable water, and Gor-Tex, a pantry full of vegetarian chicken substitute, and sparkling fruit juices, and it’s still not “easy”! So hats off to those girls gone by.

(A quick note regarding the “spectrum” of Traveler’s travels in less than a year: she’s gone from 120 degrees F in Big Bend to -26 F in South Dakota ... and the only breakdown has been a water pump!)

When It’s Been a Long Time, and No Time, at the Same Time

Camping in -4 F cold constitutes a feat. It means juggling multiple space heaters on the RV’s electrical outlets in a coordinated attempt not to blow breakers. It means water hardening up in waterlines that somehow escape the heaters’ efforts, hardening up into ice cubes that block all water flow. It means running to the campground’s bathhouse for facilities, since even the heated hose to the city water spigot won’t keep a water feed from freezing. (The bathhouse is clean, neat, and warm, so that’s something!)

And it means Boat Dog does not want to do his business at all.

It’s just too cold.

But in Yankton, South Dakota, this winter, it also means an opportunity to stay right next to an archery venue, re-animate an old archery friendship, get coaching, and try my luck against some of the country’s top shooters.

It means standing on a shooting line and looking down a pipeline of twenty-plus years since I’ve done this ... this shooting ... this archery competing ... this keeping my head and emotions and mind and thoughts so very, very steady. They have to be steady.

And they were steady today. Despite years of bad decisions (and good ones) swimming up into view. Despite awkward, warm, hopeful laughs with that old friend I mentioned—laughs of catching up and long-ago false starts and maybe-regrets and the happy ending I’ve found in my life now.

I was nervous walking into the sprawling archery venue this afternoon, nervous about how I’d shoot and about how I’d feel truly returning to something I left so very long ago. But I shot well, and I realized that “long ago” and “closure” and time unfurling in ribbons and streamers and torn-up shreds is okay—is just part of being human.

I’m not nervous about tomorrow. I’m not nervous about competing. I’m not concerned about the cold.

And I’m not looking back and wondering what parts of the film I’d leave on the cutting-room floor of my life. His arm around me today, the Bosun gave that simple answer we all know: If you take out one piece, you alter the whole thing ... you alter the ultimate ending. So you have to leave it all in, whole cloth, if you want to keep the ending you have. And I love the ending I have now—though it’s not an ending, of course. So whole cloth it is. Embraced. And steadily I shall shoot tomorrow.

The Logistics of Imprudent Camping

We have left this:

In favor of this:

Oh, we haven’t pointed Traveler north to pursue snow drifts, sub-zero temperatures, and explorations of ... well ... historical exploration (think Lewis and Clark or at least the pioneering of the gold rush to Deadwood, South Dakota) per se. Rather, the reason we have loaded Traveler with piles of anti-freeze-up-everything gear lies in the quality of the archery in the environs of ice.

(When I say anti-freeze-up gear, I’m talking insulated heating water hoses, piles of space heaters, heat-emitting shop lights to warm the “basement” storage on the chassis’s underside, and vats of anti-freeze.)

Yankton, South Dakota, hosts the headquarters of the National Field Archery Association ... and beckons great archers from around the country ... and great archery coaches. So north we go—toward one of America’s great coaches and a chance to train and get my bad self whipped into actual shooting shape.

And to camp.

In the snow.

As we pass along Interstate 35, through northern Texas, into Oklahoma, the temperature gauge reads 31. From his driver’s perch, the Bosun calls back to me, “Honey, would you run the water from the faucets in the galley and the bathroom?”

“Sure.” I get up from the dinette where I’ve been working, my laptop happily sucking away at my phone’s hotspot as the RV rolls down the road. “Like just to cycle the system?”

“Yeah,” the Bosun calls back, eyes on the road. “To keep stuff from freezing.”

Boat/RV Dog sits watching me, bundled in his little coat.

I run the water at both sinks, then drop back down in front of the computer screen.

“Did you do the toilet?” the Bosun calls.

Oh. Oops. I get up and return to the bathroom to flush the toilet and run its water for several seconds.

The temperature hasn’t even hit the 20s yet. And the high in Yankton one day is gonna be -1?!

On Perfect Nights ... and the Particulars of this Perfect Night

This blog has featured a few perfect nights. They seem to come up often enough.

Some of these perfect nights have descended all warm and forgiving and have felt perfect and soft for no particular reason.

But tonight isn’t like that.

Tonight sits warm and forgiving, the harbor still and perfectly flat, the world quiet and suspended in something like a vibration of happiness. But tonight is not this way “for no particular reason.” No. A stairway of reasons account for tonight.

It’s warm.

I shot well and solidly today. I didn’t win today’s archery tournament, but I finished high (placements should be released tomorrow—then I’ll know for sure where I finished). I shot calmly, unemotionally. And there lies the victory.

Aboard our little boat, I have a husband who packs me snacks to eat during breaks in the competition, who rubs my back and carries my bow and makes sure I have diluted Body Armour to drink (because when I take it neat, it’s too sweet). I also have a little dog who wants nothing in the world more than to snuggle, to borrow under a blanket and watch me read.

We just finished watching a BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, the Bosun seeming to even enjoy it a little, though I know it was on only for my sake.

Earlier, we walked around the harbor, walked past people laughing on their boats, walked past people celebrating something with drinks and conversation that sounded content.

The Bosun had a glass of wine, and I had a sharp ginger beer. Now, I have a good book open.

So tonight does not feel perfect for no particular reason. It feels perfect for so many, but still very particular, reasons.

This Week Has Provided Me with the Psychic Freedom of Limited Options (& It’s Given Me a Good Read)

Next week, we will point the RV north and head the “wrong way” for a winter roadtrip, to push into the land of snow and ice for a large archery tournament. We will use our Harvest Hosts membership for overnight stops along the way (I’m hoping for an alpaca-farm stop somewhere in Oklahoma ), but I haven’t had the time to plan this adventure as well as I’d like.

Because the last couple weeks have involved:

Work,

Archery,

A quick read to get me ready for bed,

and

Sleep.

❌Not time for planning roadtrips and picking out RV-friendly alpaca farms.

Basically, work has been swamping the little boat that is me, and I’ve spent my time “bailing,” rather than enjoying any yoga, walks, social interaction, or real meals. (Or planning roadtrips.)

The Bosun and I simply haven’t had a chance to sit down and chart paths to neat camping options. But that’s okay. In many ways, I actually enjoy the simplicity. Life has three goals right now: produce work product, shoot decently, sleep well. Wash-rinse-repeat daily. Pretty easy.

Sure, if I had more time for social media, I might feel like I’d nothing of note to share because each day feels a lot like the last. But from a focus perspective, my psychic energy is flowing down a pretty defined channel, allowing me to pour myself fully into the limited tasks at hand. Kinda cool.

On the road next week, I’ll have to work diligently while the Bosun drives. I may feel like I’m missing a bit of the experience if we do luck out and spend a night at an alpaca farm and the Bosun and Boat/RV Dog get to wander while I sit chained to a laptop and hotspot, but heck, that kind of thing is part of its own experience. At least I’ll be on the road. At least I’ll be doing what I love on multiple levels: investing myself in my work ... and exploring....

Whatever creative freedom I need, I’m grabbing from my bits of nightly reading. An English friend recommended Evelyn Waugh, and I picked up Vile Bodies (I think I mentioned the book last week). Boy, it delivers this cocktail of bitters (with acerbic social commentary), over a base of feisty, satisfying prose, all shaken up in a canister of skeptical, sensational, “spherical,” “symmetrical” storytelling. It smacks a bit of Ship of Fools from the ‘60s and of the ending of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. It asks for no mercy and takes no prisoners as it drives through post-WWI England. A literary pickmeup indeed, not from the content (which is satirical—and good satire makes me overthink and get a little down) but from the depth of the execution.

Now the big question for next week’s trip:

Which books should come along?

The RV’s Stairs Malfunction ... Just Like My Archery Abilities

The RV has a set of stairs that slide down automatically when one opens the cabin door to step inside the motorhome. A little magnetic device makes the steps work: when one opens the door to enter the cabin, the magnet switches the steps on and they drop down. The mechanism prevents the stairs from coming to an untimely and tragic end should a wayward driver fail to secure them in the “up” position before driving off. Essentially, the magnet takes care of them, pulling the steps up automatically before the rig gets driven off.

In camp, though, a switch in the galley allows a person to disconnect the magnet mechanism until the key is put in the RV’s ignition. So normally, the stairs don’t go up-down, up-down every time the door opens and closes when one has parked their rolling home and settled in.

Normally....

For some reason (mysterious, indeed), this helpful little galley switch’s electrical powers took a leave of absence Friday night after we made camp at the very lovely Northlake RV Resort (excellent amenities, friendly staff, great location in Spring, Texas). For reasons unknown, the stairs marched up and down with every move of the door ... until they finally didn’t and settled back down in regular, quiet working order.

Oddly, my archery powers took a similar unsanctioned leave. Despite having put up a couple happy scores at two recent local tournaments, despite two first-place finishes to my name at these tournaments, despite feeling quite excited about my rediscovered archery prospects, everything went to pot this weekend, and my shots, like the stairs, went up and down of their own volition and contrary to proper working order.

Alas.

I was happy simply to get through this tournament. I lost. By one point. Oh, well. I got the bad juju out of my system. This coming weekend, I shall shoot much better. (And the RV’s stairs have returned to performing properly.)

(Otherwise, this shakedown cruise with the “dinghy” towing gear went swimmingly. Unlike the steps and myself, the towing rig performed perfectly.)

Riding (and Reading) Posh: an RV Shakedown Trip with an Old Book and a Bow in Back

Tonight, I will shoot the first round of a large-ish regional archery tournament at a venue north of Houston. Not terribly far north, but north enough that the Bosun and I decided we should use this weekend as a shakedown for Traveler’s new towing rig. So I scrambled to complete a surprise last-minute work project, loaded my bow and bag up, hauled Boat Dog aboard, and fell prey to the old beef-instead-of-bean switch-a-roo at the mini-mart when I tried to get a vegetarian snack for the ride. But here we are, rolling north in our RV home.

(Boat Dog has actually abandoned his watch station there at this point and clambered into my lap.)

The Chevy Spark is toddling along behind us, visible in the back-up camera. I’ve got some coconut-flavored something to drink and Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (with its faint whiff of the vinegar in Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and John le Carre’s A Perfect Spy and their social commentary). So basically, I’m feeling a bit Queen of the Nile, riding high above everyone else, Houston swimming past....

A Taqueria Most Magnificent, an Archery Tournament, and a Piped-In Haggis

If you enjoy Tex-Mex, imagine, if you will, a vast tiled expanse of bespoke-taco fixings, potato tortas, and conchas in pink and yellow and dun. A line of men bound for the chemical plants sprawling across Houston’s northeast shoulder (rubbing against the San Jacinto River and the shipping courses of the channels and bayous that feed the world’s desire for polypropylene fleeces and plastic dolls, for sterile syringes and catheters, and for those weird foam forms for painting toenails) winds around this shop of culinary treasures, no one speaking English.

The Bosun believes the breakfast of champions starts here, starts with a potato cake fit for Philoctetes himself (an archer who was a way better shot than Achilles or Hector or even Penthesilea). So here we be ... before we set out for my second archery tournament of this odd comeback.

(With a slice of cake from the taqueria, I “meditate” before I shoot.)

In the end, the day will produce a globetrot of feasting. I will shoot well ... to win my division and inch up in the state standings. We will supp afterward with a clan of new archery friends, the others swimming in meats and barbecue sauce as I shame myself with my vegetarian creamed corn (weep not for me, brothers and sisters: the banana pudding was fit for the gods).

And then we will fall to a righteous Burns Supper, replete with piped-in haggis and neeps and tatties. Robert Burns, born January 25, 1759, hailed from Scotland and ascended to immortality in writing of things like “[t]he best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men.” Now, across the globe, around January 25, adherents toast the scribe (and the lassies), pipe in a haggis (literally—with bagpipe music serenading the haggis as it enters the dining room), and partake of those beverages for which Scotland has a reputation.

A man of many loves (evidenced in part by the varying levels of legitimacy of his myriad children), Burns’s verse often betrays his appreciation of the gentle sex.

As he wrote:

O my Luve's like a red, red rose,

That's newly sprung in June:

O my Luve's like the melodie,

That's sweetly play'd in tune.

Burns died at the age of thirty-seven in part from his “dissolute lifestyle.”

In many ways, it feels like Robbie Burns would likely have cottoned to our dock’s motley crew. Burns even had a never-realized dream of sailing off to the West Indies with one of his loves (she died before the couple could depart).

Something in his work makes me fancy he knew that these days ... the days right at hand ... each day we live right now ... represent the “good old days,” and maybe I’m not so far off since he did write:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And auld lang syne!

Traveler Prepares Herself for the Next Adventure, I’m Still Shooting, and a Book About Robin Hood

As archery continues to eat my brain, the Bosun spent this past weekend completing the installation of towing equipment on Traveler. (We also spent some time cleaning her because it seems that every time we work on her—outside—she gets pretty dirty—inside.) As of now, we are set to hop aboard her and hit the road any time, with our little Chevy Spark in tow. (It seems that manual-tranny Chevy Sparks make ideal tow vehicles, so my love of unfancy stick shifts has fortuitously brought the perfect tow vehicle into our lives. What luck! With no planning!)

Towing gear will just give us so many more options for exploring when we are on the road. Uber and Lyft have their limits (though they were perfect when I was at Louisiana’s Bayou Segnette State Park and needed a ride into NOLA’s French Quarter). And one certainly doesn’t go randomly frolicking about town in a 32’ class A—or at least random frolics come more arduously in a class A!

Right now, a sparkly, bubbly, mirage-y little plan seems to be forming in our boat/household: we will drive the RV north to South Dakota next month for a large archery tournament, after which I may be able to get some coaching from an old friend who lives up there. Then we will return to those northern environs this summer (a far more rational time to venture to the land of Lewis and Clark) for me to get some more coaching.

In other news, I’m on this Robin Hood kick to complement the archery. Exploring the roots of the legend with J.C. Holt’s scholarly Robin Hood, I see a theme I’ve seen many times before: women have a long history with competitive archery. From medieval women with longbows, to eighteenth-century ladies of fashion displaying their talents at tournaments, to Queenie Newall taking home a gold medal for Great Britain (at the age of 53!) during the 1908 Olympics, the gentle sex has long rocked the range.

(Also on the topic of books, I talked about Mary Doria Russell’s Doc during our Wild West ramblings this past summer. I finally posted a review of the book on Goodreads and “Bookstagram,” so I thought I’d share it here as well, for anyone looking for a literary jaunt back in time, with a couple Dodge City Boot Hill shots, too:

Russell's well-researched, bittersweet story of Doc Holliday in Dodge City offers tenderness against an Old West tableau of rough muddy streets, wounded fancy women, drunken gun slingers, and dog-tired Old World priests. She gives readers the Earps and Holliday, and the women who loved them, in a new light, a human hue. While the book hardly hurries, the prose often dances, and the ending reverberates like the report of a six-shooter.)

Anyway, I shot tonight (but not a six-shooter). And I’ll be shooting tomorrow night. And the night after. And.... Kinda fun to be obsessed again.