Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 44

Natural Falls State Park, Oklahoma

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When I first started wandering, I met a number of people who’d given themselves goals in their journeys: to visit all fifty states, or all the national parks, or all the major baseball stadiums. (That last was a nice guy in Maine — I don’t think his wife was quite as enthusiastic about the plan as he was.) I thought about it for a while, but I couldn’t come up with a goal of my own. But I like the idea of visiting each state’s best waterfall. This one is Oklahoma’s. As waterfalls go, it’s not huge, but it was certainly very pretty.

As to why I’m in Oklahoma — that would be a boring story, so I’ll skip the details. Short version, Arkansas has no CostCos. And Eureka Springs had a lot going on this upcoming weekend, which meant the campground — the lovely, lovely, beautiful, wonderful campground — was filling up with pink slip reservations. I decided that was reason enough to wander on. Before I leave it entirely behind, though…

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I’ve noticed before that Army Corps of Engineer parks seem to pay attention to views more than most campgrounds. One of the most beautiful sunsets of the past two years was at an ACE campground on a hill, where the campsites were terraced so that everyone had a view. At Dam Site Lake, my view was lovely, but if I ever go back, I want one of the sites that face east-west instead of north-south so that I can watch both sunrise and sunset from inside the van. For my own future reference, site 24 is the one that I want.

That said, if I ever go back, I’ll make sure I’m prepared to be really dirty while I’m there — the showers were my least favorite style, the ones where you push a button, with no control over the water temp, pressure, time, or angle. Plus, I’m pretty sure the shower house was unheated. And since the sites didn’t have water or sewer hook-ups… well, being a permanent camper means embracing the dirt. It’s just easier to do that in summer, I guess.

The other day I was on the phone when a stranger came walking around the side of the van, well into my site. I promptly got up and went to the door to see what he wanted. He, somewhat apologetically, said, “Your dog was stuck.” She’d wrapped her tie-out cord around a post on the other side of the van and couldn’t move, and he was helping her untangle herself. Nice guy. She’d never been tied up before we started camping, and almost two years into it, she still doesn’t get the concept.

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Zelda, two minutes after I let her out, completely unable to understand why she can’t move.

I’m at a point in Grace where I have two conflicting desires. I can’t see how to make two scenes fit together: it feels like one or the other can happen, but not both. It’s left me feeling very stuck, because I want both of them. But I had two goals in the last, start-all-over-from-the-very-beginning revision, one of which was to remember that it’s Grace’s story. It’s never going to feel entirely like Grace’s story — the drama is Dillon’s, mostly — but when I look at these two scenes, one belongs to Grace and one belongs to Sophia, and the Grace scene should win. Such a pity that the Sophia scene is better. But now that I’ve thought that out, I should probably get back to it. On my drive today, I kept trying to talk myself into figuring out where I was going with Grace, but instead, my thoughts kept drifting to Fen. I know the first word of Book 2, and I know some of what happens in it, but I’m still trying to figure out what exactly a magic competition would look like for the Sia Mara. It’s fun to think about, but it sure doesn’t help me solve my Grace issues. Still, I’m getting closer every day, I think.

27 Degrees

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27 degrees.

27 DEGREES! Yesterday, I was walking Z, bundled up in leggings and long socks and blue jeans, with a long-sleeved shirt, two hooded sweatshirts, and my windbreaker, my gloves and scarf, and white flakes were falling out of the sky on me.

It was April 15th.

I feel that’s simply crazy. I would like to speak to the weather police and report Arkansas.

However, my campground is lovely.

And I really shouldn’t complain too much about the weather, because it could have been so much worse. On Friday, when I needed to decide whether to stay at Toad Suck or if I was going, where I should go, Zelda helped make the decision for me in the strangest way. She peed on the bed. And not trivially. It soaked all the way through the memory foam mattress topper and into the couch cushions below.

It was so odd! She seemed totally oblivious to it, too, so much so that I spent about ten minutes trying to figure out where this liquid could have come from if not her bladder. But it was definitely urine and since my clothes were dry while the sheets were sopping, it had to be hers. Not that I really thought I’d wet the bed completely without noticing, but she was so… not guilty, I guess?, that at least I considered the idea.

I googled, of course, in total worry, and discovered that middle-aged female dogs who have been spayed sometimes suffer from hormone-related urinary incontinence and that if it happens again, there are drugs that might help. I’m obviously keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn’t happen again — living with an obliviously incontinent dog in a van sounds like a nightmare. If it turns into a real problem, I want tile floors, a washing machine, and a bed with one of those liquid-resistant covers. But I will cross that bridge when I come to it, and meanwhile, Friday turned into an urgent laundry day, which meant a) I was leaving Toad Suck and b) I wasn’t going too far away.

Fortunately for me, that meant I didn’t try to make it to Devil’s Den State Park, which was high on my list of places to visit. As a result, I didn’t drive straight into the tornadoes that hit Arkansas Friday afternoon. I call that the positive side of spending two hours cleaning up dog pee.

A rolling stone…

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Toad Suck is awesome.

I like it in every way, except maybe for the shower quality. But my site is beautiful, the view is amazing, the sunrises have been lovely, the walking is pleasant, the weather has been perfect… I like it so much that I’ve been struggling today to decide whether to stay longer or to move on. Struggling for an excessively long time, in fact! I’m actually quite annoyed with myself for how much time I’ve wasted trying to make this decision.

My routine — to the extent that I can be said to have one — has been to move every four or five days. Because I seldom get a site with sewer hookups, that’s about the perfect length of time to let me freely use water while I’m at a site, mostly for washing dishes, and then dump the tanks when I move. It’s also generally a pretty good time to hit up a grocery store. I can certainly last longer than four days on risottos and quinoa bowls, but I usually feel like I need something from a store about then.

But when I’ve found a really nice place, I’m often torn between moving on and staying. In favor of moving: maybe the next place will be even better. Against moving: why not appreciate what I have for a while longer?

This morning, I sighed and thought, “Well, a rolling stone gathers no moss.”

And then I thought, “But is that good or bad? Do I want moss or don’t I?”

I don’t know the answer, but I was pretty amused to discover that no one else does either.

It hasn’t helped me make a decision. But Eureka Springs is only about three hours away…

Toad Suck

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My view

Every once in a while I get into a conversation with someone in a campground where the longer we speak, the more I sense them becoming convinced that I’m kind of a flake. Not in the special-snowflake sense, but in the… hmm. You know, some internet research has now convinced me that “flake” is the wrong word. Eccentric is much closer to what I mean. It’s not that I think they begin to believe me unreliable or selfish or scatterbrained, more that I can see the confusion growing in their eyes. In today’s example, it was a conversation at the campground office about my reasons for being here.

I’m not here because I am on my way somewhere. I’m not here because I have family in the area. I’m not here because I am a hiker or a biker or a water sports enthusiast. Nope. It’s just because the place has a really good name: Toad Suck

I think that’s a perfectly sensible reason to visit a place, but the nice older gentleman I was speaking to found it mystifying, I believe. Fortunately for me, it’s also a lovely campground and I have an extremely nice spot in it. I’m right on the river, facing the water.

My usual routine when I get to a new campground is to plug in to the electricity, connect to the water, and then putter around the van for a little while. I check my internet connection, check my email, see what kind of music is within range, get out some of the things that are put away from travel but pleasant to have out, like my essential oil diffuser and my induction cooktop. Maybe I rest for a while from my drive, maybe I take the dog for a walk. At Toad Suck, I immediately got my chair out, set it up under the tree shown at the edge of the picture, and sat and admired the river for a bit while Zelda tried to sniff every blade of grass. I’m hoping that this is going to be a peaceful place to get some writing done.

Also, hoping, I have to admit, for some steady sunshine and warmer temperatures. The more time I spend outside Florida, the more I realize that it’s called the Sunshine State for a reason and that I have been profoundly spoiled by living there for so long. Also, that I like sunshine. Also, that part of the purpose of this extended journey was to figure out where I was going to settle long-term and the longer I’m on the road, the more I like Florida.

Not that I don’t love Arkansas! I definitely do. It’s such a pretty state. My drives have been lovely, and the campgrounds are spoiling me for other states’ parks. Even the grocery store sushi was good (Kroger). But the more cold days I spend in the van — not cool days, but days where the temps go below 35, so COLD days — the more I know that the van is not a cold-weather lifestyle, at least not for me.

In interesting timing, (related to thinking about settling down again), I received an email message about a job possibility today. It’s for a position that I would define as a realistic job, one for which I’m well-qualified (or for which I would have been very well-qualified seven years ago and for which I’m still reasonably well-qualified). Given that I’ve been thinking for several months that I should consider getting a job, I should probably jump on it. But since even the thought makes me want to pull the covers over my head and spend the rest of my life asleep, that will not be happening.

Which means it’s time to write more Grace. Back to work!

A tale of two campgrounds

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My site at Gulpha Gorge

If I was on vacation, with company and lots of time to play, I think that Gulpha Gorge would have been a very fun place to be camping. Like all of the national parks (in my experience, anyway) it was crowded and busy and beautiful. There were hikes that looked terrific and it was reasonably close — walking distance even — to the town of Hot Springs, which is adorable and historic and touristy, but not in a bad way.

As it was, though, I was kind of grouchy about being there. I’d been writing really well at Lake Chicot and the busy-ness of Gulpha Gorge was distracting and unsettling. Not unsettling in a spooky way, but unsettling meaning that I just couldn’t settle into writing. People wandered by the van, both in front and in back, and cars drove by on the road, and I paid more attention to my surroundings than I did to my computer. Part of me wanted to accept that, to appreciate the moment and be present where I was. To be mindful.

But mostly I was grouchy instead. I didn’t want interruptions and people; I wanted a better view — one with no people passing by, unless they were in boats — and to be living in my imagination. Fortunately, I’d been skeptical from first glance, so I only had a couple nights there, and yesterday, I headed out to my current park.

Along the way, I stopped at Quapaw Baths and, well, had a bath. Actually, not literally — a private bath would have cost $35 – $40 and I was too cheap for that. I shouldn’t have been. More than once I’ve considered getting a hotel room for the night purely to take a bath, and it’s my birthday week so I should have been willing to treat myself. Funnily enough, I think my reticence was because Gulpha Gorge didn’t have showers, so I was feeling pretty dirty. I know, isn’t that ridiculous? I was feeling too dirty to take a bath. But I wanted a hot shower, and the thermal baths — four giant hot tubs of varying temperatures — required guests to shower first. So I spent $20 for the thermal baths. I did it the classic way, moving from the coolest bath up the line until I was in the hottest bath, sitting under a waterfall of 104 degree water, and then working my way back down again. It was absolutely lovely, and bookended by clean hot showers. Totally worth the $20. Possibly worth driving back to Hot Springs before I leave Arkansas and doing it again.

Bath complete, I headed north to Petit St Jean State Park. It’s a campground that I knew I didn’t want to miss, because it was rated the best park in Arkansas in a 2017 survey. High praise! But I’d really wish I’d waited to pick a site instead of choosing one at random online. There are 127 campsites and some of them are terrific. Mine is not one of the terrific ones. It backs up to the road; it’s on a slight slope; the water and electricity are on different sides of the site so Serenity can’t be connected to both at once; and my view is limited to trees. Still, trees are better than neighbors’ sewer lines and it’s quiet enough that even the traffic on the road probably won’t bother me too much.

And the weather… well. It’s 11AM and I have turned the van into Cozy Nest Van, closing all the blinds and curtains and turning the lights on even though it’s daytime. That’s because it’s raining and cold and dark outside. There’s a freeze warning in effect for tonight and I actually had to think for a moment to recognize the symbol on the weather app for tomorrow. Literally, I have not seen that symbol in… well, maybe never in relation to a place where I was!

I was thinking about driving into the nearest town tomorrow for a free Starbucks treat and maybe a sushi lunch to celebrate another year passing, but nope, I won’t be driving. And honestly, I’m not sure how I’m feeling about that symbol. But I can promise you that the blinds will not be down tomorrow while I wait to see if white fluffy stuff starts falling from the sky!

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My site at Petit St Jean, yesterday. It’s much wetter today!

Not quite a parking lot

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My current “campground”. If you look real hard, Serenity’s a tiny speck in the background.

I woke up this morning in a field in Arkansas. It’s not a campground, it’s not a parking lot, it’s a field. I’m not the only person camping here. There’s a tent that I can see without moving my head, an Airstream trailer and truck combo that I can see when I turn my head, and off in the distance a run-down Class C RV that holds a family having an amazing adventure. I know the latter because I drove by them last night — at least three kids aged 7 and under, with hippie parents, and everyone was smiling. That might have been because Z was sitting in the passenger seat, playing co-pilot, which she does sometimes, and I was driving by very slowly, so giving them plenty of time to point her out and admire her cuteness.

Yesterday I screwed up. But I’ll start at the beginning: I left Lake Chicot with enormous regret. After my electricity travails, I wound up in a perfect spot there, so nice that I was seriously tempted to go back to the office and extend my stay for as long as they would let me. Water view, glorious sunsets, lovely long walks, what more could anyone want?

Alas, clean clothes. I was as close to being entirely out of clean clothes as I’ve gotten since I was in college, I suspect. And I did consider the virtues of hand-washing socks and underwear in the sink, but really, everything was dirty. It was time for clean pants and clean sweaters and clean sheets, too. And the town around Lake Chicot didn’t appear to have a laundromat, or at least Google wouldn’t find one for me. Google liked a place called Pine Bluff for laundromats. So I packed up and headed to Pine Bluff.

Google lied.

The first laundromat I tried to find didn’t exist. I drove around in circles at the spot on the map, trying to locate it, finally pulled over right where it should be, and it simply was not there. No big deal. I found the next closest laundromat and headed to it. Nope, not a laundromat. Laundry, yes, but it was a dry-cleaner and professional laundry place, one of those running big machines with trucks loading out front, not the kind where people sit and watch the dryers spin. On to the next one. It was closed. Very closed, very dead looking. It still had the washers and dryers inside, but it looked like no one had used it in years, forlorn and abandoned. Fine. I was not liking Pine Bluff much by this time, but fine. Off I went to laundromat #4. It didn’t exist. Again, I drove around in circles until I could find a spot to pull over and check the map location against the physical reality and they simply did not match. There was no laundromat there and no sign that there ever had been one there.

Oh, Google. Why were you failing me? Or maybe it was the town to blame, but either way, I was feeling pretty frustrated. Driving the van in circles in an unfamiliar city — albeit a small city, with reasonable traffic — is really not my idea of a fun way to spend an hour.

But it wasn’t like I had any better ideas for how I was going to solve my clean clothes issue. So off I headed to laundromat #5 and when, on the way, I spotted a “laundry, 24 hours” sign, I did not hesitate. It wasn’t listed on Google maps, but I swung right in with a sigh of relief. Two hours, two loads of clean clothes, and some friendly conversations later, I got back on the road.

It was later than I wanted it to be, already after 1, and I made a key mistake — I didn’t eat lunch. I was headed to Hot Springs National Park and a campground that doesn’t take reservations, Gulpha Gorge. In my (limited) experience, the national campgrounds are perennially busy places, so I wanted to get there as close to noon as possible, to catch people as they were leaving, for my best chance of finding a good site. I was over an hour and a half away, so I was already later than I liked. And I needed to stop at a grocery store on the way.

Why did I need to stop at a store? I have no idea. None. I knew I did, but I got to the store, started wandering around, and — Oh! Drat. Gluten-free oats, that was why I wanted a store. Sigh. I’m out of granola. Alas, Alexa didn’t work while I was at Lake Chicot because I had no T-Mobile connection, so I was relying on my own memory instead of a grocery list and my own memory totally failed me. Instead I wandered the store buying things that I absolutely did not need — spice gum drops, potato chips, dip, sugar water, sushi — the stuff that you buy when it’s 3PM and you didn’t eat lunch and you’re in a grocery store and can’t remember what you’re looking for. In my defense, also pot roast, mushrooms, some healthy noodle bowl thing and eggs, so not a totally useless, nutrition-free visit. But pretty close.

And then, finally, I headed to the campground. I got there and felt a little dubious. The campsites were close together, a few neat rows of them. There were some empty spots, but they were sloped or right next to the bathrooms, so heavy traffic flow spots. I like quiet campgrounds, peaceful places, and this didn’t look like that kind of place. But there was a site on the end of a row that was open so I noted its number and went back to register.

The registration was by computer — first time I’ve seen that. Like a parking spot computer in a parking garage, you put your number in and the days you wanted to stay, fed it your credit card, and it printed out a little slip for you, your receipt, to clip on the camp site’s number post. I wasn’t feeling overly thrilled by the campground, but I’d read great reviews about its nice trails and I’m resolved not to move so often that I don’t get any writing done, so I decided to stay three nights, moving on Thursday. I got my receipt and went back to set up.

Except, when I got back there, there was already a receipt on the post. The site was already taken. I couldn’t figure out how I’d missed seeing it. Had someone been just slightly ahead of me at the registration kiosk? But no, it was just the angle of the van and a branch from a bush — the receipt had been hidden by leaves. And the campers hadn’t left anything in the site, so they were probably van campers like me.

I went to the registration window, wondering what to do, and there was a big sign on the door — No Refunds. Bah humbug. I’d just spent $97 for a site I couldn’t use. I putzed around the campground for a while, trying to decide what to do. Pay for another campsite? Go find a less expensive, less crowded campground? I parked in another site and took Z for a quick walk, still pondering. We didn’t walk far, because I didn’t want to get a ticket, but I decided that the trails were nice enough that I did want to explore.

When we got back, I took a closer look at the receipt and realized that the people in the site were leaving today, the 3rd. I’d paid for the site through the 5th, so if I got there before someone else in the morning, I could maybe save two nights of my stay. But I really didn’t want to spend another $30 for a different site in the campground. Long story short (well, less long than it already has been), I waited at the site until its previous occupants returned around 7PM, told them what had happened, asked if I could leave my receipt there so no one took the site the next day, and then headed off in the growing dark to find myself a free spot to park for the night. My options were a nearby Walmart or a county park that was described as having unofficial camping. Since it wasn’t totally dark, I decided to try the county park. And thus, my field.

It wound up being a long day and it felt quite wasted while I was engaged in it. Driving in circles, shopping for sugar, sitting in a campsite, poised to depart at a moment’s notice, while waiting for its real owners to get home… I didn’t feel good about the day. But I liked waking up in my field this morning, and all my clothes are clean, and when I finally do get into my campsite, I’ll plug in the instant-pot and make myself some pot roast for dinner. Things could definitely be much, much worse.

Best of March 2018

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Sunset over Lake Chicot

For quite a while this month, I thought the best day would be the first day. It wasn’t that there weren’t many other nice days, interesting places, and good people along the way, but on the first day of the month, I picked up my friend E at the airport and we sat on what used to be her back porch and talked for hours. I don’t get to see E very often, so it was simultaneously extremely nostalgic of another time in my life and really nice in the moment. I probably made us some food and it was probably salad of some sort, and I’m quite sure we drank kombucha.

It set a high bar for the rest of the month.

Various other moments along the way gave it some competition: I had a lovely afternoon in St. Augustine with C; I had a day in Reed Bingham State Park in Georgia that I described as “joyful, exuberant, grateful,” which is a pretty nice day to have; and I loved wandering the dirt bike trails with Z in in Trace State Park in Tennessee, which is where I found my blue jay feathers.

But as the month came to a close, it looked like my Best Of was still going to be Day One.

Until yesterday.

It started yesterday morning when, after days of rain, the sun rose into a clear blue sky. The temperature was about 50 degrees, so it was chilly, but spring was just exploding all over the place. All the trees are shooting out leaves, so fast that they look different from one day to the next, but they’re still in the stage where the leaves are tiny and elegant and beautiful. Feathery fragile leaves, instead of an indistinguishable mass of green.

I took Z for a good walk and we finally found the nature trail. For obvious reasons (rain, rain, more rain), I hadn’t looked for it too hard earlier in the week, but it was such an incredibly beautiful spring day yesterday that we kept walking until we found it. Of course, I shouldn’t have been remotely surprised to discover that it was mud central. The whole point of a nature trail is dirt and all the dirt in this campground was sopping wet. Despite the mud, we started down the trail, into the woods, and within fifty steps, I knew we wouldn’t be going much farther. White dog, black mud, limited access to water and laundry machines… I wanted to explore but I did not want to spend the next hour trying to get Z clean before she jumped onto the bed.

So I was just about to turn around, with my eyes focused on the muddy ground, when we startled a herd of white-tailed deer. Not a huge herd — maybe six of them? Maybe eight? They went bounding off through the trees, splashing into the puddles, toward the east, into the rising sun, with the light reflecting off the water and the green all around them… It was surreally lovely. It was like a scene in a movie that you know has been filtered and faked and never really existed like that. Except there it was, existing like that, so incredibly purely gorgeous that I just stood there in the mud and blinked.

I thought fleetingly of grabbing my phone to try to take a picture, but it would never have worked. I wouldn’t have captured it — not without also somehow capturing the chill in the air and the bird sounds that completely surrounded us and the smells of spring and the movement of the deer and even the way my heart was pounding a little from the surprise of discovering that we weren’t totally alone in our little wilderness.

Later in the day, I met a kid in the road. I use the term “met” loosely. I passed a kid in the road. I smiled and nodded and said, “Hi,” and he smiled back at me and said, “I like your dog.” I wanted to clap my hand over my heart and swoon and say, “YES!” The kids who said “I like your dog” were one of my favorite parts of Arkansas last year. I’m so glad that’s just a thing here. I find them so endearing.

And then still later in the day, well… the sun set. See above.

Along the way, it was a delightful day. I did good writing, including writing sprints with friends online, which I always love. I ate good food. I defrosted the freezer and cleaned out the fridge. I washed dishes. I wrote some more good words. I worked on a project that’s exciting and a little bit scary that I will tell you more about later. It was a good day, bookended by incredible beauty.

Today I woke up to the sight of the full moon shining on the water. I’ve read books where moonlight makes a path on the water. I’ve probably even seen pictures. But seeing it in real life was almost as startling as the deer. This picture doesn’t do it justice, because it looked huge in reality and the colors were much more vibrant. The path of yellow looked solid and bright, instead of just a trace on the water.

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And so, Lake Chicot State Park and the very last days of the month (I’ll hope for the best for the rest of today!) become my Best Of for March 2018.

The wisdom of a feather

I started counting the number of birds I could see from my window — like, right outside the window, fifteen feet away — and then something startled them and they swooped away and I realized that all the things I thought were dark leaves on the ground were actually small birds. I’m going to say — 200? 300? Not a countable number, that’s for sure. Sadly, they’ve now all moved on, but that’s probably a good thing for my productivity, since I find watching a flock of birds to be surprisingly compelling.

The last time I was in Arkansas, I got the very last space at an absolutely packed campground, Lake Catherine State Park. It was lovely, but it was spring break and it was crowded. Since this is Easter weekend, I decided that this time I’d be a little more proactive and I made a reservation at Lake Chicot State Park for five nights, taking me safely through Easter.

Ha.

I’m going to say that last year, lots of Arkansians looked at the weather, decided it was a glorious time to go camping, and headed for the park. It was a glorious time to go camping. This year, those same Arkansians looked at the weather and decided it was a fine time to hunker down in their houses. It so is.

The campground is pretty close to deserted and also pretty close to drowned. The puddles are like lakes. The lake is not overflowing its banks, fortunately, but there are a lot of semi-underwater trees. Even Zelda, who doesn’t usually mind getting wet, stood at the open door of the van this morning and then decided against her walk.

Fortunately, my deserted rainy underwater campground is also very green and pretty. Loads of trees, all in early-spring mode instead of tail-end of winter mode. Light green leaves and life bursting out all over the place. So I’m not finding it spooky, I’m finding it charming. I’m helped just a little in this by the fact that I checked out the bathrooms this morning and they are terrific. I might have to take a shower every day just because the bathrooms are so clean and nice and new.

I’m slightly less enthusiastic about the fact that even though I paid for a full hook-up site — not a thing I do very often, so in the nature of a pleasant luxury for a holiday weekend — the separate pieces (water, electric, sewer) are positioned poorly for Serenity. Technically I have all three, but I have to choose which one I want to be connected to at any given moment. My hose isn’t long enough to reach from the water outlet to the van intake while the power is plugged into both the van and the power outlet, and ditto the sewer. So it goes, I guess. At least I have access to all three if I need them.

And I’m feeling pretty fortunate on at least one of those three. When I got here yesterday, I couldn’t get the electricity to work. I called the campground host, who sent someone down to take a look, but it was raining and he couldn’t figure it out. They moved me to a different site, and then a third site, so it started to look like the problem was Serenity, not the campground. I was not so happy. I can live without power for a while if I have propane, but because I expected to have power, I hadn’t refilled the propane tank. Frustration!

And then, for no reason I could see, the electricity started working. Based on the symptoms, the smart people in the Travato Owners FB group suspect that I might have a problem with my Automatic Transfer Switch — maybe a loose connection? — but it’s working now, so I’m just counting my blessings and hoping for the best.

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Speaking of blessings, did you know that it is illegal to own most bird feathers? It still feels magical to find them, though, especially when they are truly beautiful. It would never have occurred to me that picking up a feather could be a crime, but after I’d picked up the above, I was remembering the park ethos — take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints — and so I left them behind. Well, first I googled to find out whether something in nature would use leftover bird feathers — was I leaving them behind to simply decay and rot? — and that’s how I found out that feather possession is a crime. They probably will simply decay and rot, but I’m glad I got to appreciate them first.

Along the way, I stumbled across all the many spiritual meanings of blue jay feathers. I suspect the spiritual meaning of feathers is sort of a choose-your-own adventure spirituality, because wow, people sure have found a lot of deep significance in some poor bird having a misadventure. But I was pretty amused by one site that told me the meaning was to “Choose a couple of the many projects on your plate and complete them.” How perfect is that?

Time to listen to the wisdom of the feather!

Cozy days

I woke up yesterday to a gray, rainy, chilly day and thought, “I have got to get out of here.”

I woke up today to a gray, rainy, mildly chilly day and thought, “Oh, what a good day to snuggle down into my cozy nest and write a lot.”

I’m really not sure what the difference is. I had a nice lake view yesterday and you’d think that would have satisfied me. I’m speculating, though, that green is the color that matters. Yesterday’s campground was gravel and dirt, gray tree trunks, dead brown leaves, slate water, overcast sky. Today’s campground is some of the above (although not the water), but also spring green grass and forest green pine trees. Plenty of brown in view, too, but it doesn’t feel Gothic.

Another difference might be technological. I had no Internet connection and no cell service at yesterday’s campground. I’ve actually quite enjoyed being without internet at points in my travels — it pushes me to be present, to appreciate where I am, instead of mindlessly browsing FB or reading news stories that I instantly forget. But only, I suppose, in places where I feel safe. In general, I like knowing that if I need help, it’s a phone call away.

So, yes, today’s cozy nest includes internet browsing and probably some texting with friends. It also includes some cooking. I picked up chicken breast on sale at the grocery store yesterday, and I’ve already got my sous vide churning away. Two experiments: one with lime juice, yogurt, and mint, and the other with parsley, cilantro, garlic and olive oil. The danger with sous vide chicken is having the flavors be too strong, so I’m a little worried about the garlic version, but if I hate it, Zelda will be very happy to have my leftovers.

As soon as I finish cooking the chicken, I’ve got some corn-on-the-cob ready to go in. I’m quite excited to try it. I thought the sous vide corn I cooked last summer was close to the best corn I’d ever eaten, and it was late summer corn. This is, I hope, very early summer corn, nice and fresh, so it ought to be even better. I’ll see, I guess!

I’m also debating a scallop soup. I’ve got bay scallops in the freezer that need to be used up, but so far I can’t decide between a spicy ginger-lime scallop soup — maybe with rice noodles? — or a chowder-style soup with coconut milk and maybe some curry. But I bought a mix of gluten-free cheese biscuits at Aldi a few weeks back and I think the soup winner might be whatever would go best with the biscuits. The nicest part of mildly chilly days is that using the oven doesn’t cook us, too.

So, yep, cozy day in Mississippi ahead of me. And with some good words on Grace to go, too!

Anthropomorphizing birds. Or just projecting.

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I woke up to the sound of Canadian geese complaining. Then I spent the next several minutes sleepily castigating myself for negatively anthropomorphizing birds. Surely they were honking or calling or murmuring. Then I woke up a little more and realized that it was still the middle of the night and those birds were definitely complaining. Not sure what they were complaining about — were they drifting in the water? Was some raccoon disturbing their slumber? But they stopped their complaining and I went back to sleep and eventually, when I woke up again, their noises were much more like daybreak murmurings.

I’m in Tennessee, currently at a Thousand Trails campground on the Natchez Trace. I was driving yesterday and remembering the last time I was in Tennessee. I thought then that the state would probably be really pretty in about two more weeks, in spring, but that at that moment, it was bleak and grey, trees all ugly spires of bare trunk with dead, hanging leaves that should have dropped months ago. When I reached my destination, I looked up the date I was last here — coincidentally, but not surprisingly, it was March 24th of last year. The exact same day.

And yeah, I think this state will probably be really pretty in two more weeks, but today, it is the epitome of March showers. Overcast, mildly foggy, everything looking gray. Not pretty, but lovely in a very Goth sort of way. The kind of lonely beauty that makes cups of tea seem highly desirable.

I was planning on spending more time here, but I think instead, I’m going to drift my way south. Or maybe west. But first things first: Z wants her walk.

And later.

I walked Zelda, got back to the van, and instead of making myself some coffee and starting the day, I packed up the van and got on the road. The campground was probably a perfectly nice place. But it’s the kind where people have annual memberships and leave their trailers at their sites year round. Stuff accumulates outside the trailers. Not necessarily bad stuff — potted plants and lights and chairs, golf carts and grills, holiday decorations and signs. But time and weather and entropy combine so quickly to turn pleasant vacation gear into shabby, run-down debris. It didn’t just feel like a trailer park, it felt like an abandoned trailer park. Half depressing and half spooky.

(The bathrooms, however, were excellent — clean and shiny new — and the view was terrific. I had a waterfront site with a lovely lake view. If the weather had been nicer, it might have been a perfectly nice place.)

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So I got on the road and headed south, along the Natchez Trace. It’s a scenic highway along what was once a trail used by bison, Native Americans, and early settlers. At 8AM on a Sunday morning, I was pretty much alone on it and it was lovely. Absolutely peaceful and beautiful. I took a couple breaks along the way, went to a grocery store in Tupelo, Mississippi, and then found myself a campsite at Trace State Park.

I picked the park based on the fact that I like state parks, that I didn’t want to keep driving, and that the sun was showing through the clouds when I walked out of the grocery store. All excellent reasons, but it turns out that somewhere within this park is the birthplace of Davy Crockett. I’m sure there are reasons to disapprove of Davy Crockett these days, but the Disney song is running through my head. And I just read the wikipedia entry on him and he was the only representative from Tennessee to vote against the Indian Removal Act (aka Trail of Tears) and was thanked for it by a Cherokee chief, so yay. I will continue humming cheerfully.

And even though the sky has clouded up again, I feel much happier here. The lake is currently gone — undergoing renovations apparently — so my waterfront spot is really just a “looking out onto a grassy pit” spot, but it is peaceful and quiet. I remember — again from last year — sitting in a campground somewhere in the south and realizing that there are places where those noisy birdsong relaxation medleys that always sound so fake are actually real. This is one of those places. If it weren’t for the hum of the computer, the only sound I’d be able to hear would be the birds chirping and squeaking and whirring and making all those different mysterious sounds they make. Not complaining, though. They sound quite happy! (I could be projecting, though.