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elfs
Sunrise!
My attention span is still shot. Right now I have two books open, I'm writing in my journal, and I'm carefully pacing the coffee so that its warmth lasts against the chill of a morning in the mountains. I don't need the national weather service to tell me it's 58℉ and partly cloudy, with the smoke of distant wildfires making the air "unhealthy for sensitive persons" at 85ppm. It's hard to stay reliably warm, especially my hands, under these conditions. And I've concluded, looking at these notes, that I'll never have a beautiful pen hand.
I'm having a morning of nostalgia and melancholy. As I look over at the grilling grid, now pressed into service to dry our dishes overnight, I realized that the four cups, bowls and plates used to be "Me, Omaha, Kouryou-chan and Yamaraashi-chan." Now they're "Me and Omaha, dinner and breakfast." It's little things like that that touch me these days, the realization that the "turn helpless infants into full-blown human beings" phase of my life is in the past and, barring some miracle, will never come again.
It's beautiful at Clear Creek. The toneless white roar of the river, low and rocky now in the latter days of summer. I feel a bin manic this morning; maybe without my ADHD meds in the morning and a glass of wine at night, this is who I am, and the hypergraphia has returned. I've read that the mere presence of a cell phone reduces your cognitive capacity due to its ability to stoke and then relieve FOMO in a nasty dopamine cycle.
The latrine at Clear Lake is worth noting, because it's actually clean and the people using it actually honor the protocol. I swear the next time I go camping I'm bringing a fat black magic marker and writing on the inside of every toilet lid "Close the lid to reduce smell and flies!" And I'm going to learn how to write it in Spanish and German, as I've heard both on the trails this week. (That's another thing about the current administration: these forests bring in millions in tourists dollars, but for some reason our political
I'd like to talk about the stars I saw last night, but I can't; the woodsmoke from the wildfires makes the sky a uniform hazy reddish-brown. I made the ultimate sacrifice this morning: drank my coffee black to make sure Omaha has enough milk for cereal when she rises. Everything is sticky, and everything will have to be washed when we get home. It's circumstances like these that make you grateful for clean underclothes, shirts, and socks every morning!
Omaha and I broke camp and went for a walk along the Sauk River, where we skipped stones and admired a bird that seemed impossible to drown, and we talked about our aging bodies and being in love and the melancholy of seeing the last child head out into the world.
We drove into the town of Darrington, where Omaha talked to the ranger while I guiltily checked my cell phone. There was only one critical issue to deal with— a co-worker who had left shorty before I did hadn't received her paperwork, and wanted to know if I had. I replied that I had. We then bought milk and ice and drove back up Mountain Loop, which past Clear Creek was a gravel road capable of safely sustaining only 20MPH at best.
At one point we were stopped by a construction team fixing a culvert. Three men operated machinery: a digger, a dump truck, and a roller. The protocol was as familiar as it is anywhere else, only without a flagger. There were two guys observing the work for the machine operators, and I would frankly have been terrified to be standing there with my back to the roller while observing the digger's maw clawing at the dirt. It took a while until the dump truck pulled away and we were free to go through. Those men work in a place with no Internet and no phone; unlike you and I they can't call their loved ones anytime they like. It felt... odd... despite knowing that even twenty years ago that was the way we all lived.
The road was never better than gravel for the easternmost part of the loop, and often just packed dirt. We stopped at Omaha's desired campground, Bedal, only to be warned of a "problem bear" in the area. We made it out of the pass and down the southern slope and onto asphalt again, and the campsites were terrible: all too civilized, with lots of RVs, loud families, and yappy little dogs. We ate a lovely lunch at a picnic site, and Omaha convinced me to head back to Bedal.
Bedal is one of the highest campsites in that area, and the alpine afternoon weather was brutal. We made a new campsite and I napped again. What is with me and all the napping? It was 93℉. And much buggier. We went to the river and used that fabulous gravity filter to fill up our water bucket (I can't tell you how amazing that filter is; for years we were restricted to campsites with running water, and now we're not).
Then it was Omaha's turn to nap.
For dinner we roasted hot dogs on sticks, and had store-bought macaroni salad, and ate marshmallows, and played more Boss Monster. I finished a fun little space opera erotica novel by Jo Graham titled Cythera. It was a fun story but the worldbuilding needed a lot of help; the religions were generic syncretisms and the space travel a bit of borrowed furniture with some terrible features to it (like: these are ship-to-ship combat battleships, yet they waste megatons of cubage on landing gear. Because shuttlecraft aren't a thing?). Anyway, good sex and okay characters all trying to do the right thing, so a simple pleasure without too much pain.
For that, I'm diving back into Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War next. (Why do people love Winter's Tale so much? Soldier is so much a better book.)
Omaha scattered the fire and put it out and we were in bed by ten again. A good habit to keep.
