Endless Days...And Nights

Sleeping in the little tent trailer is an art. There are enough beds to sleep at least seven very close friends. Mr. Zee, Auntie Bucksnort, the three dogs and I only make six, so there should be plenty of room--especially if the dogs acted like dogs and slept on the floor. Not our little doggy pirate band!

Bucksnort, for reasons best not enumerated here, got the two double beds to herself. The queen-sized bed (sounds spacious, doesn't it?) ended up with the other five of us rolling around and competing for sleeping space. Captain Emma likes the lookout position, which just happens to be the place where my feet would go, if they were ever allowed to assume a natural position. Little Weets likes to be right in the middle, under the covers. When disturbed, she lets the world know why one of her nicknames is Tiny Cujo. Her bared-teeth snarling sounds reduce us all to helpless giggles but no one has ever dared to touch her when she is doing her Cujo thing. Leny, the biggest of the pirates, prefers the inside edge of the bed, and Mr. Zee is quite happy on the window side. The problem is that the two of them sleep like wonky parentheses, forming this shape: ) (. My spot would be in the middle of those.

You will notice that the available space in between the wrong-facing parentheses is shaped like an hourglass. Now, if you have read this far (and I can't imagine why you would have done so) and if you know me at all, you will have to acknowledge that my shape is anything but an hourglass and never has been. Just keep that in mind when picturing our night under the stars.

In retrospect, I'd have to recommend against any kind of camping just two weeks after knee replacement surgery. I've been making a wonderful recovery, but night time is the most difficult because it is so hard to find a comfortable position. So there I was, shifting carefully in my allotted hourglass space, trying to position a pillow under the bad knee, then finding that I needed to do it all over again after fifteen minutes or so.

And then the snoring started.

Leny snores in what can best be described as harmonics. I hope that I am using the term correctly. What I mean is that she harmonizes with herself, kind of snoring in multiple voices, as it were. Then Mr. Zee would begin with a little counterpoint from the other side and both of them would gain in volume until I was shaking with laughter. And get this--every time I raised up my head to peer across to Bucksnort's quarters, no matter what the time of night, her eyes were wide open, which made me laugh even harder.

At some point I must have finally dozed off, only to waken at the earliest light to find Leny's tail section on my pillow (the one where my head was, not the knee pillow) and my head firmly clenched in Mr. Zee's armpit, which frightened us all very badly.

Next: The pretty parts of the trip

The Bacon's on the Bed, Dear

Well, we had our first camping trip in our new little covered wagon (tent trailer) out on the prairie at Ute Lake this past weekend. Mistakes were made. I'm not ready to talk about how the fishing gear got packed and the fishing licenses got left behind. I don't really care to discuss what it's like to set up a tent trailer for the first time in the dark. I'll probably never tell you what happened when my emergency porta-potty (an empty yogurt container) sprung a leak. I'm also not ready to chat about trying to make coffee on a Saturday morning when you haven't had anything to eat the previous night because you were too tired from setting up the trailer and you discover that the "full" propane tank isn't.

On the other hand, I can't even begin to describe the night sky out there, where sky is mostly what there is. We watched the stars and moon come out (okay, they already came out while we were involved in our monumental struggles with the camper door once it was too dark to read the manual). We watched falling stars and the Milky Way, while in another part of the sky the lightning danced around in a faraway storm. Our wonderful campground host lent us a full propane tank ("that fella in town that fills 'em is only there between 7:30 and 8:00 on alternate mornings and you just missed him") and refused to take any payment at the end of the weekend. I learned to cook full meals without sideboards. It's easy, you just put the plate of bacon over on the bed while you use the big pan on the tiny burner to cook the eggs. We had steaks cooked over a wood fire. We slept with the prairie breezes blowing through our hair, secure in the knowledge that any snakes out doing some nocturnal exploration were probably unable to climb up and join us. We got to listen to Merle Haggard, Billy Ray Cyrus, and Creedence Clearwater Revival simultaneously thanks to our neighbors, together with the soundtrack from Rush Hour 17 (or so), compliments of the guy with the dish on his RV.

In the old, pre-arthritis days, we were purist campers. We were backpackers with serious boots and lightweight tents and infinitely thin foam mattresses. We had tiny backpacker stoves. We only ate what we carried and we packaged up little servings of oatmeal and trail mix. We were strong and we knew how to do camping the right way. Now we drink beer and sit in lawn chairs getting cricks in our necks looking up at the night sky, while marveling at the way that country music and vintage rock can start to blend quite nicely after a bit.

We were too busy with our camping experience to take any photos, although I had carefully packed extra batteries for the camera this time. I've asked the nice folks at the New Mexico State Police web site for permission to use one of their pictures of Ute Lake. I'll post it here if I hear back from them.