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elfs
Ready to hit the trails!
I awoke around 8:00am. I've been struggling with a difficult melancholy for the past couple of weeks, a combination of the job I had had for five years and the burnout that had come with it, the neverending onslaught of political shennanigans that paralyzed my country, the smoke from wildfires that has blanketed my state with a lung-endangering haze of particulate matter that colors the sun and moon orange and blood. It's easy to see why ancient peoples were so terrified of eclipses; this unbreathable reddish cloud seems to harbor apocalyptic doom at every moment.
Toward the end of the job, I was drinking nightly. One drink a night, a beer or a glass of wine, but it was more than I had ever done before, and it was a bit worrying. I was developing the adult habit of coffee in the morning to turn my brain on, and sedatives at night to turn it off, and I think that sort of punishing routine also contributed. Time in the woods where the strongest chemicals available to me were ibuprofen and ceterizine (an allergy medication), I hoped, would do me good.
On the other hand, our here I have the attention span of a flea, flickering back and forth between writing my journal (this thing), reading from my e-reader, and checking out the illustrations in a drawing book I brought with me that, unfortunately, turned out to be two levels higher than I'd planned.
Beaver Lake South
Omaha awoke half an hour later than I did. We had oatmeal fro breakfast, which was truly lovely, and then headed out for our first hike: Beaver Lake. We saw beaver hutches, true, but no beavers. The largest wildlife we saw the entire trip was a rabbit. The trail was only two miles long and had no elevation of note, but it definitely let us stretch our legs and gave Omaha a chance to calibrate how much walking stressed her bad knee.
On the way back, we both brushed against something that felt to me like a shallow knife across my calf. I suspect it was poison sumac. The burn faded away after about an hour, but it was a painful reminder that the woods are not always to be taken lightly.
We drove to the next trail, the Old Sauk, stopped at the picnic table at the trailhead for lunch (tuna fish sandwiches), and then headed in.
This walk was harder. It wasn't her knee, but her ankle that really started to bother her. We were almost to the end of the trail when she said that there was no way she was going to be able to make it back. Fortunately, the end of the trail wound up near a road, so I hiked back to the car then drove up to the trail point where I could meet her, and she had made it to the end without a problem.
Beaver Lake North
Back at the camp, I took another nap. This is becoming a thing with me.
When I awoke, we drove into town for more wood. Another thing we had forgotten: potato chips. Back at the camp, we made Pizza Loaf, which is basically french bread stuffed with butter, garlic, marinara sauce and mozarella cheese wrapped in foil and warmed to melting over the campfire. We played Give Me The Brain, and concluded that we needed more two-person games; GMtB is best played with three or more people. We were in bed by ten.
