Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 57

Shortchanging Oklahoma

Yes, I am in Oklahoma! And yes, I feel like I should be singing. I wonder how many other people have that reaction? While I was driving, I was thinking about everything I know about Oklahoma (short version: almost nothing) and how strange it was to be in a national forest that I truly had never heard of before. Ouachita National Forest. Spell check doesn’t like that, so maybe I’ve spelled it wrong, but I think spell check is actually just as ignorant as I am.

My plan was to stay at Beavers Bend, a state park recommended by a reader (hi, Kyla!) through the weekend, at a primitive camping site — no water or electric. But when I got there, the park was bustling. So many people! So many cars! I drove slowly through the park, or maybe part of it, trying to figure out how to register for a camping site, but there was no parking anywhere and much traffic. I wound up heading back out the same way I came in, still looking for the camping headquarters, and when I got to the end of the road, I pulled into a forest service parking lot and started looking for a different campground. It really did look like a great location — there was a sandwich shop at the end of the road that had a sign up reading “organic, gluten-free” and I still can’t believe I didn’t take advantage, but even that parking lot was totally full. I’m guessing Oklahoma has spring break this week.

Reserve America had a walk-ins only campground listed that looked a reasonable driving distance away, so I got back on the road and headed north again. My bigger plan was to drive the scenic Talimena Highway into Arkansas when I’d spent a few days in Oklahoma. Imagine my surprise when I drove right by said highway on my way to my campground. Oops. Yep, I am geographically challenged. I hadn’t realized I was as close as I was to my intended final Oklahoma destination. Too long spent living in Florida and California, I guess, where halfway up the state is a long, long drive, and not enough perspective on the bits of map I was looking at.

But I kept going and made it to Cedar Lake. I drove slowly through the campground, again looking for the ranger station, the place where usually someone is waiting to take your money. I didn’t find the ranger station (it doesn’t exist) but wow, there are a ton of horses here. One loop is an equestrian campground and there are probably 30 sites occupied by people with horse trailers and horses. I really love the idea of people taking their horses on vacation with them — it just seems so friendly — but I’m guessing that there must be some horse event this weekend somewhere nearby. If I had internet, I’d try to find out, but I wouldn’t even know how to start the search.

I finally figured out that there was a fee station, where you fill out your info and put your money in an envelope and leave it for someone to collect. But this campground is also pretty full. I wound up in a spot that is just big enough for Serenity and sloped. If I had a tent, it would be perfect, because it’s a really nice tent spot. View of the water and everything. But the parking area (as opposed to the tent area) is not level enough to be an ideal camper spot.

And the weather… well, it’s not spring yet. I wish I could stay for two weeks, because it will be spring in two weeks, the hints of it are everywhere. There are violets growing in amongst the trees and the occasional pink flowering tree in full flower. But far more of the branches are barren and gray still, and the sky is overcast and gloomy and I… I am just sick of the rain.

So I only paid for one night here and my new revised plan is to head out tomorrow, drive the scenic Talimena Highway and wind up in Arkansas. A lower elevation is likely to be a little more spring-like, I think, so instead of a few days in the hills of Oklahoma — (Seriously, the hills of Oklahoma? I had no idea, my mental image of Oklahoma is entirely oil fields and plains and scenes from the musical) — I’ll have a week to spend in Arkansas.

And hopefully it will at least be nice enough tomorrow to make my scenic drive a little scenic. Today was so cloudy that at points I was driving through dense fog. Super gray, misty, beautifully spooky, but no visibility at all. If tomorrow is the same, my scenic drive will be scenic only in my imagination. It was fun driving through the fog — I like spooky in most circumstances — but I’d like to actually get to see some of Oklahoma before I leave it.

 

 

Sanders Cove

On Sunday, I was chatting with R and he asked me how I was doing. For some reason, maybe because it was R, maybe because he sounded genuinely interested, maybe just because of the space I was in, I opened my mouth to answer, “Great,” and instead, “I’m really getting tired of camping,” slipped out.

There was a pause. And then he said, ever so politely, “How unfortunate.”

I laughed.

Yes, it is unfortunate to get tired of camping when one lives in a camper. I wrote to a friend recently that I’m one of those sensible campers who, when it gets too uncomfortable, says, “Okay, it’s time to go home now.” Ah, yes, home. That would be right where I am, right? Which at the time was a crowded campground in the dreary rain.

Fortunately, yesterday I left said campground and headed north. I was a little worried about the drive: I’ve been aiming for two hours between destinations but yesterday was five. I shouldn’t have worried. Five hours is actually better than two, I think, because somewhere past two hours but before three, I hit the fun driving zone where being on the road started to feel like an adventure again. I was driving through cute little Texas towns — Athens, Paris — and along roads with real ranches. Also roadkill galore — dead deer, skunks, armadillos. Younger R used to get upset about the roadkill in Florida, but northern Texas has Florida beat by a mile. Or maybe their vultures aren’t as efficient. And so many places with lawn statues for sale! Bugs on bicycles, giant dinosaurs, all kinds of fun stuff. I drove through a town called Canton that obviously has an incredible flea market (on the first weekend of the month), with probably a mile of road that felt like an event waiting to happen. A ghost flea market.

In Paris, I stopped for groceries.  Google let me know that I had a choice between two local stores or Walmart, so of course I went to one of the local stores. Wrong choice, I guess, but at least I didn’t need much. The dog food was $16.99 (instead of the $12.99 I usually pay); the only granola that was gluten-free was actually Chex Mix; and I should have read the label on the yogurt before I bought it because I took one bite this morning, and only then discovered that the second ingredient is sugar. Oh, well. They did have these mega packs of meat that I wavered over for a while: $19.95 for four or five packages of different things — pork, chicken, ground beef. If I had a bigger freezer, I might have gone for it. Generally speaking, though, it was not a grocery store conducive to the shopping habits of a single person on a restrictive diet. I bought myself some spice gum drops as a consolation prize and even they were a disappointment. (I can’t remember if I mentioned this before but HEB, another local Texas store, has the best spice gumdrops I have ever tested. They might have spoiled me for all other versions.) It was still fun, though. In the past month, I’ve been to Trader Joe’s, CostCo, and Walmart, because they had things that I needed/wanted. But they’re all alike. Trader Joe’s in Texas might as well be Trader Joe’s in Florida or in California. Wandering around someplace different was good for me.

Post grocery store, I continued north to my campground. It’s my first Army Corps of Engineers campground and what a pleasant surprise. I’m not particularly good at researching my campground destinations. It takes a ton of time, it uses up my precious internet data at an appalling rate, and I haven’t figured out my priorities yet. Does a good view beat a level spot? Sometimes. Is proximity to the showers good or bad? It depends. Most everything feels like “it depends” to me, except space between campers (the more the better) and access to nature. I would never have figured out how nice this campground was from the internet because one of its advantages is that it’s really hilly. The sites are terraced up the hill, so that they all get a wonderful view of the lake. And it’s still winter here! Unlike southern Texas, the trees are mostly bare, with the occasional exception of a white flowering tree that might be a sweet olive. I can’t say for sure, because I haven’t gotten close enough to smell them and it is so cold — 37 degrees when I was walking Zelda this morning — that the smell isn’t carrying on the breeze. Or maybe I’m just too congested to tell.

But my window looks directly west, over the lake. Last night, my neighbors down the hill from me were sitting out around their table, chatting with one another. I felt sort of silly as I kept opening the window to take picture after picture of the scene behind them, because they were looking toward me. But I also wanted to call down to them, “turn around, turn around, look at what’s behind you.” It was the most beautiful sunset I’ve seen in weeks.

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No filter, no enhancement. It was really that beautiful.

Last night, I left all the windows in the van uncovered. In most campgrounds, it feels… vulnerable, I guess, to be sitting in the camper with the darkness all around me. When it gets dark, I put the covers over the windshield and front windows, close the blinds on the kitchen window, pull down the shades over the side windows, hang up a magnetic curtain over the sliding door window, and pull the shower curtain in the back. It’s part of the evening routine, usually done before washing all the dishes and taking the trash out. But I didn’t bother last night. Instead I went to sleep looking at the stars in the black sky, between the bare branches of trees.

So this morning — ridiculously early — I woke up when it got light. Not light because of the sunrise, light because of the full moon. Zelda thought it was probably time to get up and it took me a while to convince her that no, we were not going outside in the not-quite-freezing cold to walk. I wanted to say “walk in the dark” but it really wasn’t dark. The light wasn’t warm, it was a cool blue light, but it was definitely bright enough that we could have wandered around the campground without worrying about tripping or running into things.

When we finally did get up, at sunrise instead of moonrise, the moon was still in the sky. So were huge flocks of birds. I have no idea what the birds were, but hundreds of them flew overhead, close enough that I could hear the beating of their wings, like taffeta rustling. They were sort of quacky birds, not cheeping or trilling, but I don’t think they were ducks. As I’m writing, another huge flock is floating down the river. They’re white — sea gulls, maybe? Geese? I’m going to have to try to get a closer look, because I really can’t tell. They’re just white dots drifting along the blue water. The flock this morning was the typical dark spots against the sky, definitely not geese because they were much too small.

Between the sunset, the stars, the moon, the birds, the water — well, and most likely, the fact that it did not rain yesterday and might not today either! — I am, at least for today, no longer tired of camping.

Lake Conroe, Willis, Texas

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iPhoto wanted to enhance this photo by making the sky blue: it wasn’t. Just shades of gray.

If I had six kids, some tents, bikes, a boat, some fishing gear, coolers of food and a barbecue grill, I would really like this campground. Actually, maybe even just the boat would do it: I bet it would be fun to motor around the lake for a while, despite the rain and chilly air. (I wanted to say that it was cold — it was in the 40s this morning — but for people still having real winter, 47 probably does not feel cold. It did to me.)

That said, I strongly suspect that five years from now, if someone were to ask me whether I’d stayed here, I will not be able to pull up a single memory of the place. There are basketball courts with basketballs, tennis courts, shuffleboard courts, ping-pong tables, a fitness room, a swimming pool… but walking the dog feels like walking through, at best, a tiny home community. At worst, a reasonably nice trailer park. People are friendly, as they always seem to be at Thousand Trails campgrounds, but admiring the scenery while I walk the dog is mostly a matter of considering what lawn ornaments I like best; pink flamingos, garden gnomes, or other. One house had the exact same rabbit my mom used to have as a planter on the kitchen counter, so it’s pretty much won the contest for now, but I’ve got another day here, so I might find still find some competition. Hmm, that makes me want to go back out with the camera and take some photos of lawn ornaments to put at the top of this post. But it’s cold and wet and I have a dog sleeping at my feet, so that’s not going to happen.

I would love to understand why it’s so easy for me to walk miles on a beach where the scenery is technically pretty much all the same — endless ocean, endless sand, occasional birds — and so hard to do the same in a neighborhood. I was hitting a daily 10K steps in Galveston, and walked at least 2 miles before breakfast every morning, but this morning I walked less than a mile and it felt like plenty. I don’t want to break my streak, so I’m going to be aiming for another 2.5 miles today but it feels like a chore instead of pleasure. The rain, of course, doesn’t help — beach rain is exhilarating but neighborhood rain is just tedious.

I’m hitting the point where I have to start planning my trip home to Florida. It’s strange that it feels so much like a “have to,” though. I’m going home for two main reasons: to be with family on my 50th birthday and to go to Universal with my niece and brother. I’m also looking forward to having dinner with my writing group and seeing my friend C. So this is not a “have to” sort of event. Good things will be happening in Florida in April. Good things will be happening in May, too, and also June, and also July, so I think that my “have to” feeling is mostly that my time no longer feels so flexible. And I’m going to have to make some decisions: a few long driving days interspersed with no movement days or many short driving days. What I really want to do is spend a few weeks wandering around Oklahoma and then the same in Arkansas, but I’m not going to have the time for that. No regrets, though — my extra beach days in Galveston were absolutely worth it to me. The weather was typical of this Texas adventure — rain, rain, more rain — but I would live in that campground if I could.

I just looked at the clock and argh, how have I wasted so much time this morning? Ans: daylight savings time, of course. Time to get to work…

Yogurt and mushrooms

[image error]I bought a new brand of yogurt at the grocery store the other day — I always like trying new things — but when I ate it with my breakfast granola, I didn’t like it nearly as much as the incredibly good Greek yogurt I’ve been eating. It was really good yogurt, though, just not what I wanted for breakfast. So yesterday I made up yogurt recipes.

Early in the day, I made salad dressing: some yogurt, some olive oil, some finely chopped garlic, the juice of half a lime, a teaspoon or so of honey, and several chopped-up mint leaves. I let it sit in the fridge for a few hours so the flavors would mix, then had it on a salad of green leaf lettuce, thinly sliced cucumbers, radish and red onion. I was expecting it to feel Greek — because of  the mint and cucumber, I expect — but I think the lime and the honey made it different. It was delicious, though.

Then for dinner, I made a mushroom sauce to go over steak. I used to hate mushrooms — really, full-bore hatred. I thought they were disgusting slimy things and the feel of them in my mouth made me gag. Even now, I can get a visceral reaction of disgust when I think about them. But I discovered about ten years ago that I liked the flavor, just not the feel, and when I started AIP, my diet was so limited that I really started experimenting with any food that I was allowed to eat. Including mushrooms.

Eventually–maybe about six months ago–they became something I liked playing with. First, I mostly hid them — a tiny bit of finely chopped, sautéed mushroom in scrambled eggs, for example, or a few of them thrown into a stew. Just for the flavor, with no danger of encountering their texture. Then I started trying them raw, in salads. Or in my sandwich substitutes. For example, a thick slice of turkey, spread with pesto, topped with chopped mushrooms, and rolled up. Yum. And finally I graduated to eating them cooked and alone. Earlier this week, I chopped some in half and grilled them with a hamburger. With a little blue cheese dressing, they were very tasty.

Which brings me back to yesterday’s sauce. I sautéed a mix of mushrooms and some chopped up garlic in butter, then added room temperature yogurt, green onion, a little dijon mustard, some dried green herbs (a mix that I think includes parsley and oregano), and a sprinkle of salt, and let it simmer. I let it simmer for too long — as you can see in the picture, it wound up not quite a sauce anymore. But it was crazy delicious. I wanted to lick the pan when I was done. I ate every bite and I wished I had a lot more of them.

I think next time I will skip the steak. Well, and not simmer the mushrooms for quite so long. It would have been absolutely delicious as a creamy sauce over pasta or, since I have yet to find a gluten-free pasta that I appreciate, brown rice.

If you had told me as little as a year ago that I was going to consider eating mushroom sauce over brown rice… well, I suspect I would have laughed at you. I certainly wouldn’t have believed you.

I’ve decided that three nights, four max, is the right amount of time to stay in one place. That gives me two days to enjoy my campsite without needing to think about moving. When I go longer than that, I wind up with a situation like the one I’m in today: lots of cooking => lots of washing dishes => a full gray tank that needs to be dumped. I need to pack up today so that I can go dump the tank, and then come right back here for one more night. It’s not a big deal, really, but it’s a hassle.

And less time than that is really disruptive. In my fantasies of this life, I spent less time planning where I was going to spend the night and more time planning what I was writing. Finding the balance between those two things has been so much harder than I anticipated.

And given that today is going to be disrupted by needing to dump the tanks and tomorrow is going to be a relocation day — possibly with a trip to Trader Joe’s along the way — I should get back to the real writing. So far my grand fantasies of making it through Akira’s return have not worked out, but who knows, today might be the day that it all falls into place.

Galveston Beach

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Dead things

It’s a measure of my mood yesterday that I walked along the beach thinking about how beaches are really just big cemeteries. Sand? Just the decayed and crumbled skeletons of sea creatures. Shells? Leftover body parts. Dying jellyfish? Well, you know, dying jellyfish.

I was sort of glad that I’d already read online that there’s no point in trying to save the jellyfish because otherwise I might have felt I should try. But a) they might sting you and b) the conditions that caused them to wash up on shore still exist, so they’ll be back onshore soon even if you do manage to get them into the ocean, so no point. And c) there were far too many of them. I know if I’d managed to save one that it might have appreciated it, but I would have felt overwhelmed by the futility. And probably stung, too.

On the other hand, look — gorgeous beach! Beautiful dying jellyfish in iridescent greens and blues. Big shells — the brown one was the biggest shell I’d ever found on a beach, and the white one was probably second. And the weather’s been crap — I swear, Texas might be the wettest state I have ever spent time in — but the sun came out twice, once at sunset last night, and then this morning for about an hour, just long enough for Zelda and I to have a really nice walk. It’s gone now and might not be back while I’m here, but at least I got to appreciate the sunny ocean for a little while.

My mood has been shaded by the mice. I’m not even sure I can explain how oppressive I find it to be living with something I’m trying to kill. Or to find mouse turds scattered across my kitchen counter. To not know whether mice are running across my bed while I’m sleeping. To never know when I open a cabinet whether there’ll be a mouse inside. To wonder whether my congestion is allergies or the first symptoms of a virus that might kill or bankrupt me. I know, total over-reaction. But Serenity is such a small space. It’s not like sharing hundreds of square feet with rodents. I’ve lived in houses with rats before and it hasn’t bothered me this much. I wonder how much the extremely high-pitched whine of the ultrasonic repeller, just at the edge of my hearing, is getting to me? Maybe a lot. But I’m not ready to give up on them, since the mice appear to be laughing at my traps.

I’ve also been probably out of proportion upset by the loss of Zelda’s duck. For ten years — literally, ten years, since the Christmas when she was not quite two — she’s had one toy that she loves. Every night, she licks it for a while before going to sleep. When people came over to visit, she would find her duck and bring it to them. One year we went on vacation in my dad’s RV and didn’t bring the duck. Every night she searched for it, then stared at me plaintively, asking for my help. We were both so glad to get home to it. It was battered and worn and gross, the fur licked off in places. But it was her lovey.

And it’s gone.

I have no idea how. I imagine a horde of mice carrying it away in revenge for the murder of their leader, but that’s pretty unlikely. I did laundry, so maybe it got caught up in the clothes? But how would I not have seen it in the laundry room? Most likely, I suppose, is that Zelda carried it outside at our last campsite and I didn’t notice. I called the campground — not that anyone would ever have turned it in to a lost-and-found, it would have looked like trash. The guy on the phone was super nice about it and promised to look, but he didn’t call back, so I’m sure he didn’t find it. I am not surprised. But oh, watching Zelda roam the camper, trying to find her duck, just breaks my heart. I feel like such a bad mom. I keep coming up with implausible places that I haven’t checked — like, maybe I put it in the microwave when I was stuffing all the food the mice might want in there. No, I didn’t. A) Why would I? and b) there’s not even enough room for the food in there. Maybe she carried it outside at this campground and it’s under the van! No, it’s not.

It’s stupid, I know. In a world where desperate refugees are trying to keep their children warm, worrying about a dog’s lovey is just ridiculously privileged. But she doesn’t understand why it’s gone and why I won’t find it for her and I… well, I am really sad about it. I understand, I suppose, that I’m projecting all my fears of losing Zelda, that anticipated pain, into her experience of loss now, but intellectualizing the emotion isn’t helping me feel better about it.

On Matagorda Bay, this weekend, we were on the beach when it started to rain. Zelda was off-leash and she started to run. She disappeared into the dunes and I had a long minute of thinking of all the possible things that could happen if she didn’t stop running — would she get lost? Would she run out into the road and get hit by a car? Would she step on a snake? And then she popped out again, cocking her head to the side, like she was saying, “Mom? Could you hurry it up here? We’re getting WET!” I hope that if she could choose, she would choose our adventures of the past seven, going on eight, months over keeping her duck safe at home. And I can’t know if she would, but I know that I would, and that does help me feel better.

Time to write more Grace. Akira’s finally coming home. I have never gotten farther than this part — this is where I’ve turned back and started over again from the beginning several times — so it’ll be interesting to see what today brings. *fingers crossed for new words,  not self-doubt.

 

Brazos Bend

[image error]I spent one night at Brazos Bend. I’m starting to believe that one night is not enough for any park, but it’s especially not enough for one as big as Brazos Bend. So many trails there! So many things to see! An observatory and a windmill and multiple lakes. I’m not even sure what I might have missed. Well, except for the alligators–based on the warnings, I should definitely have seen some alligator activity there, but our one morning there was cold so there was no sign of them. I don’t actually mind that, ha.

We did see vultures. Lots and lots of vultures. Zelda and I actually startled about a dozen of them while we were out walking. They’d been hidden in the brush and I hadn’t noticed them, but we were so close that the sound of their wings beating the air as they leaped into flight was incredibly loud, like a motor suddenly starting right next to you. I ducked, heart abruptly racing. Zelda was totally nonchalant, of course, but vultures are quite big when you’re only a few feet away from them.

The above plants were really loud, too. The wind blowing through them was a steady rustle, like… I don’t know what. Maybe I don’t have a comparison. They sort of sounded papery, but loud papery–like dozens of people all reading newspapers at once, making no other sounds, no clearing of breath or shifting weight, just shuffling their papers around. I’m not musical enough to be sure, but I bet there’s some musical instrument that could replicate the sound. It was so loud and steady that I’m fairly sure I’d never heard anything like it before, though.

Traveling like this is really making me feel incredibly ignorant. About so many things! Musical instruments at the moment, but birds, of course. Plant life. I have no idea what the above plants are, or the names of any of the wildflowers I’ve been admiring. The stars are an almost complete mystery, after I’ve found Orion’s Belt and hunted for the Little Dipper.

Then there’s geography. Having moved on from Brazos Bend (and back to Matagorda Bay), I’m currently sitting on the banks of the Colorado River. In Texas. This was completely mystifying to me until I finally googled and discovered that Texas’ Colorado River is not the same river as the Colorado River that runs through the Grand Canyon. (And, random new fact, Colorado means “red” in Spanish. I had no idea.)

And the proper way to murder mice. At this point, I’ve captured and released one, killed another, and spent about $45 in anti-mice devices. I have ultrasonic repellers plugged into three different outlets, traps baited with “mouse attractor” in two locations, peppermint oil sprayed along the floor, dryer sheets in the drawers, and the whole van smells like Christmas from the FreshCab mouse repellent in the kitchen. Seriously, I feel like I should be putting up lights and baking cookies. Meanwhile, there were still little mouse droppings on the kitchen counter this morning, so my unwelcome guests have not been sufficiently repelled yet. I haven’t braced myself to do the glue traps yet. They seem so unkind. But that’s next, I guess.

I’m a carnivore, so I really shouldn’t feel guilty about killing mice. I eat cows and pigs and chickens and fish, the death of a mouse should be trivial. But I really hate this. It makes me simultaneously sad and jumpy, paranoid that every sound is a mouse getting near my bed and that every sniffle is the first symptom of a mouse-born virus.

And Bartleby is so allergic to springtime that he is chewing himself raw, which is frustrating both of us. Me, as I try to stop him from chewing, and him, as he tries to soothe his own itching. That reminds me, though, that I have anti-itch shampoo for him–new goal for today, give the dog a bath!

 

Palmetto State Park

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Wildflowers at sunrise

At the Onion River Campground in Vermont, I walked Zelda through fields of high, dry weeds with scattered faded flowers, surrounded by deep green grass and trees with leaves that were just starting to hint at autumn, and felt like we were in the essence of late summer. I think it’s why I remember that place with so much pleasure.

At Palmetto State Park in Texas, we are in the essence of spring. It is pure spring, all around us. Trees with soft green leaves unfurling, growing so fast that it feels like if you look away for an instant they will have changed when you look back. Wildflowers — yellow and white and purple and pink — some tiny, hiding in the grass, others standing tall and proud. A robin sitting on the branch outside my window as I write. White-tailed deer leaping through the trees at sunrise. Sweet olive trees covered in white flowers, their fragrance drifting on the breeze. One of the sweet olive trees — the biggest one I have ever seen — hummed as I approached it, mysterious until I realized it was the hum of a thousand happy bees. (I then cautiously moved away because, okay, humming tree, fascinating and cool; hundreds upon hundreds of bees, totally scary.)

My day here yesterday was… I want to say spectacular, but it was spectacular in a really quiet way. Zelda and I walked the San Marcos River Trail a little after sunrise. It was beautiful and lovely. We saw the site of the old mud boils, quiet now, but still noted with a sign. (Otherwise I wouldn’t have known what I was looking at). The trail was smooth, well-maintained, shockingly litter-free, and starts about twenty steps away from our campsite. It was a perfect morning walk, chilly enough to need a jacket, overcast, but not raining, a good length, interesting things to look at.

I did some work, including updating my work blog, texted with some friends, did some knitting, made myself a delicious lunch — scrambled eggs with chorizo, brown rice, goat Gouda, avocado, mushroom, and green onion (as posted on Instagram), and ate it sitting outside looking at the view. The sky was clearing, and the air was warming.

Then Z and I went for another walk, in a different direction. We crossed the river at a low point, which for her meant wading and for me meant hopping along the stones at the edges of the paved walkway, the rest of which had water flowing across it. I felt slightly ridiculous and yet also had that little kid thrill of knowing that if I fell, I would splash.

Back at the camper, I wrote. Good words. On Grace! First time in a long while that I didn’t feel like I was trying to fix something broken, but just letting the characters be who they were. We went for another walk. I sat outside on my new camp chair ($6 at Walmart and so much more comfortable than the $50 backpacking chair that I started out with) in the sunshine, warm enough to not need my jacket, and tried to write some more. Then Z wanted to be on my lap, so instead I snuggled her and felt so grateful to be in that moment, in that chair, with my dog licking my face. At sunset, we went for another walk. We ate dinner. I wrote some more.

Then I heard a rustling and caught a mouse in my trash can. Yes! A mouse. Serenity has mice. I can’t even…* I realized Tuesday that I had a mouse problem and it really ruined that day for me. Yesterday I let it go–nothing to do about it until I get on the road again–until one of them fell into the trash can. I carried it outside and released it, telling it to watch out for owls. Unfortunately, it was either not the only mouse or it came right back inside, because there was one after my granola this morning. Gah. So today I will be buying traps and repellent while I’m on my way to my next park.

But I didn’t let the mice stress me out yesterday. Yesterday, I enjoyed a perfect spring day. And not just a perfect spring day. My day, the day that I wanted.

A year ago, I was just starting to think about this adventure. I hadn’t decided to do it yet. I could still look around my house and think, wait, this is the home that I worked so hard for, the place where I wanted to live forever, my fantasy house. The window seat with its cushion made from material my mom and I found at a garage sale, the French doors, the bougainvillea, the neighborhood with its ponds and birds, the kitchen that is exactly right… was I really going to let it all go?

Yesterday was the day for which I let it go.

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This sunset is worth a mouse or two.

*”I can’t even…” feels like a complete statement to me, but it sure looks odd when written down. So, you know, envision it with the head shake and wince of pain and hands spread wide that it needs in order to make sense. 

Edited to add: OMG, the showers–so much water pressure, so hot! Not new and fancy, your basic rundown campground shower, but the best shower I’ve had in months.

Best of February 2017

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My site at Lake Medina at sunset

Unlike last month, the moment I’m in is not the best moment of the month. Purely practically, that’s because I’m doing laundry and let’s face it, laundry is not intrinsically a peak moment. Not that it won’t be very nice to have clean clothes and sheets — laundry nights are pretty much my favorite nights of the month, because I really do like having clean sheets — but still… it’s laundry. Not fascinating. shrug

So February included one lovely day in Alabama, several days in Mississippi, two different state parks in Louisiana, and five different locations in Texas — Galveston, Matagorda Bay, Goose Island, Choke Canyon, and Lake Medina.

Lake Medina, where I am right now, is, I think, the most unexpectedly nice spot. I came here out of expedience: it’s a Thousand Trails campground so an easy and inexpensive few days while I figured out my next few weeks. But the campground is big and empty. I had my choice of spots when I arrived, including some with full hookups, including sewer, conveniently close to the laundry room. Of course, I chose the one down by the water, no full hook-up, and not at all close to the laundry room, and it’s been lovely. People have been very friendly, as they often seem to be at the Thousand Trails campgrounds, but it’s also a beautiful place. I suspect I would like it much less if it were more crowded, but I have appreciated it very much like this.

I’ve liked everywhere else, too, though. Not so much my day flailing around Corpus Christi, I suppose, but Choke Canyon was lovely. Not the best place of the month, though. No, I think that was Matagorda Bay. Also somewhat unexpected! Matagorda was where I had to pull out my gloom ammunition (gluten-free brownies) because it was so rainy.

But it’s the only place we’ve been where Z was allowed off-leash on the beach. At other places I’ve thought, “If I weren’t so rule abiding…” In Dauphin Island, we were alone on the beach most mornings. Would it have mattered if I let Zelda run? But rules are rules, and I tend to obey them, so she’s only gotten to roam at Matagorda Bay. She loved it and so did I. We walked for miles every morning and would have walked longer if I hadn’t felt guilty about poor B waiting for his breakfast back in the van.

Other highlights: Wading on the beach in Galveston, after getting my shoes covered in mud. The incredible sunrises in Mississippi–the sky there was so colorful, the water so still. And on Goose Island, a fishing boat came in with fish and with it, an entire flock of pelicans.

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A flight of pelicans should have some special name, I think, but I don’t know what it would be. 

Lake Medina

[image error]I’m thinking of trying to find a telephoto lens for my phone. I seem to be taking a lot of pictures where the thing I wanted a picture of is just a dark blur in the distance, mostly of birds, of course. When I was at Dauphin Island, another visitor to the bird sanctuary pointed out a peregrine falcon to me. I have now learned enough to know how cool that was — they’re rare — but in my photo, the falcon is just a brown blur at the top of a tree, not discernible as a bird.

This morning, Zelda and I set off on our walk. We’re at Lake Medina, at a Thousand Trails campground, and I was headed up through the campground. There’s a nature trail that I was headed to, but I wasn’t sure how far away it was. But we were barely down our own block when I spotted a deer. I gasped, holding my breath with delight and surprise. And then I fumbled for my phone — fumbled, because Zelda was very interested and tugging at her leash — but before I could get it out, the deer bounded away.

I sighed with disappointment, but then shrugged, resigned. It’s not like the picture would have turned out, anyway. The deer would have been a brown blur against trees. Zooming just makes it blurry. I kept walking. And then gasped again. Two deer! So cool!! And then I opened my eyes a lot wider — way, way more than two deer. There were six. No, eight. No, ten.

I’d never seen so many deer in one place (outside of a zoo) in my life. So I took some pictures of blurry brown spots and we kept walking. More deer. More walking. More deer. More walking. More deer! At one point, I could see fifteen of them, all females of different sizes. At another point, I could see three males, all with small antlers. Zelda and I wandered for a couple of miles, up to the top of the campground and back down again. We never did go on the nature trail, but then, the nature was right there, so we didn’t really need it.

I’m parked by the side of the lake and the view in front of me is dusty ochre rocks and scrub for probably five hundred feet, then blue lake, then in the distance low dark green hills. The day is gray and cool, possibly going up to 68, pretty clearly so overcast that the sun is not going to shine. And my weather app just let me know that it’s raining within ten miles of me. Not a surprise. I have to say, Texas is really just a lot wetter than I ever imagined it would be. Of course, if I wanted sun and heat, I could have stayed home in Florida, so that’s not complaining, it’s just… noticing.

Yesterday I broke my fiction-writing streak. For 12 weeks, I managed to write 1000 words a day, six days a week. 74 days total of writing. But this week I missed two days. And on a third day, I really didn’t make 1000 — I was more like 850 when I finally gave up. There’s a part of me that wants to write 3000 words today and count them retroactively but I don’t know, it seems like lying to myself, and why bother? I’ve written 74,000 words in the past three months and I’d like to give myself credit for that, without making myself feel like a failure for not having written 76,000.

I can’t remember if I’ve written about goals vs systems here yet  — well, I know I have written about it, more than once, but I can’t remember if I’ve posted anything about it — but it feels like keeping a streak going is more of a goal than a system. In other words, a negative approach to life instead of a positive one. In my positive, system-based approach to life, the system is to write 1000 words a day and I can be successful today without caring about whether I met yesterday’s goal. That feels much healthier.

I’m still going to continue using Streaks, because tracking my activity is helping me push to do more. When I started, one of my “tasks” was to walk 3000 steps a day. That’s not a lot of steps — about a mile and a half — and I often walked twice that. But sometimes I walked less, too. Since I started using Streaks, 83 days ago, I’ve walked at least 3000 steps every day, gradually upping the task to 4K, then 5K, and now 6K. This past week, I broke 10,000 (4.3 miles) three times. I’m pleased, of course, that my streak is 83 days strong, but I’m more pleased that I’m steadily going farther distances, and tracking lets me see that improvement. Of course, now that I’m considering this, it’s possible that my multiple long walks had something to do with the early bedtimes that interfered with my writing and that’s not a good trade-off. But whatever, I’m not giving up on Streaks. I’m just acknowledging that I broke my writing streak and I’m going to start a new one. Today.

Right now, in fact.

Choke Canyon State Park

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All the trees are gorgeously spring green.

On my day of no destination, I decided that it was time to get out of nature for a while. I looked up things to do in Corpus Christi and found a nice art museum, so after taking my time packing up and cleaning, I headed that way.

Nature had other plans.

It was 89 degrees by the time I got there. I parked the van and stared at the temperature display and thought bad words and the temperature display ticked over to 90.

90! In February! When the weather apps had promised temperatures in the 70s!

Obviously, Serenity has a generator that allows me to run the air-conditioning without being plugged into electricity, so I can keep the van cool(ish) when it’s hot. And I have a temperature monitor that uses wi-fi to send me a text message to let me know if the interior temp goes past 80. But that’s five things to rely on: the generator, the air-conditioner, the temperature monitor, the wi-fi router and my cell phone connection. If it’s hot enough that the dogs could die, I don’t rely on those things.

Which means I don’t go to art museums.

So I hung out in a parking lot for a while and thought about what to do. I’d been tentatively considering going down to Padre Island National Seashore, but I really didn’t want to go there on a February weekend. I like empty beaches, not crowded beaches. And even more, I didn’t want to go there on a really hot weekend. I would need to run the generator to keep the dogs cool, it would be loud and hot and sandy and sweaty… It just didn’t sound like fun.

So I drove around Corpus Christi for a while—some very pretty houses around the waterfront, some very run-down houses away from it—and ate some lunch and considered my options and finally I said, ugh, I hate how hot it is, I’m heading north.

North wound up being Choke Canyon State Park.

I’m in a tent site, not a camper site, so I’m basically in a parking spot, with a picnic table within hailing distance, but oh, it was so perfectly what I needed and wanted. Still hot, but spring-green everywhere, and lovely. I was the only person in the tent area when I arrived and the solitude was bliss. After dark, a bunch of other cars showed up, so it was noisier and less peaceful in the night. Lots of flashlights waving around outside which stressed Zelda out. She kept doing that low dog growl of warning and I kept telling her to go back to sleep.

But the sunrise this morning was beautiful. We had a peaceful solitary walk down a dirt path through trees. I wanted to call them woods, but honestly, the trees just feel too short to me to be woods or forest. Maybe a grove? And I definitely don’t want to call it wilderness — it’s doesn’t feel wild enough for that. Just nature, maybe. Lots of bird noises — nature really does sound like a video game, sometimes, or maybe that should be vice versa. I was seriously jolted awake when we startled some birds though — a whole flock of them shot forth from the brush right next to us, so loud that the whirr of their wings almost sounded like a motor starting up.

And I had my bird app out trying to identify the swooping predator birds. I was fairly sure they weren’t vultures — they weren’t flying together, the way vultures do, or circling, and they were a little on the small side, plus the coloring seemed wrong. The app offered northern harrier as an option, which seemed to fit best, but I’m honestly not sure. They were beautiful, though. And they flew really close to the treetops, which was cool. The trees are short, so that meant they were remarkably near to the ground for swooping predators.

Because there weren’t any camper sites available and I’m technically not supposed to be in the tent sites, I’m headed north again this morning. This time with a reservation. As it turns out, while I like serendipity and while I approve of flexibility, I also don’t want to waste my days feeling uncertain and driving around aimlessly. I will miss some things if I only stick to places that take reservations (Padre Island doesn’t, for example, it’s first-come, first-served), and I definitely don’t want to make plans too far out into the future. But knowing where I’m going to spend the night is less stressful for me. Yesterday I seriously considered staying in a Walmart parking lot — I even asked if it was okay, and was told that it was fine — but I hated the thought of waking up there and having our morning walk be around cars and blacktop. I’m so glad this morning that I moved on!