Katja, Dave,
Mike, and Duffy at the State Dock, Lake Cumberland
Dear George,
One insight I’ve garnered
from camping is how much happier couples are in the forest than in the city or
the suburbs. When you see married
couples at the mall or the Olive Garden, usually they either look estranged or
ready to holler at one another. On
the campground, in contrast, it’s all smiles and giggles. Partly, people may be elated by the
beauties of nature. And I’m sure
they enjoy the peace and quiet and opportunities to commune. Most importantly, though, I think it’s
a consequence of roughing it – shedding one’s reliance on modern conveniences,
coping with the elements, getting back in touch with one’s primal pioneer
spirit. Nothing brings couples
together more than dealing with challenging circumstances in the wilds. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that
camping rejuvenates emotional bonds more than intensive therapy, but I’m sure
it comes pretty close.
Usually I go camping by
myself with the sheepdogs, so my wife Katja hasn’t had as much opportunity to
observe all these wonderful effects.
A center-city Philadelphia girl, she thinks of herself as someone who
prefers a life of comfort and luxury.
However, I’m convinced this is a form of false self-consciousness,
probably due to something her mother told her at an impressionable age. In my view, Katja has an untapped
“inner camper” to her nature that’s waiting to blossom forth under the right
conditions.
Remarkably, the heavens
aligned last week when the workers began laying hardwood floors on our second
floor, making sleeping at home difficult.
Much to my amazement, Katja suggested that we take the week off and go
camping at Lake Cumberland, about two hundred miles south of us near the
Kentucky-Tennessee border. I’m not usually disposed to traveling that far in
our gas-guzzling SUV, but it was hard to pass by such an opportunity. I packed up our gear, and we set out on
the Monday before Labor Day weekend.
Our SUV, packed
to the gills with important stuff
It was 91 degrees out when we
arrived at the state park in mid-afternoon, and there was practically nobody
else on the campground. We have a
large, 8-person tent which accommodates the two of us and the sheepdogs with
room to spare. I don’t take it
when camping by myself because it takes two people to set it up. The tent is held up by four 21-foot
poles. Each pole is broken down
into a bunch of smaller segments which were originally held together as a unit
by an elastic band running through their centers (such that the whole pole
popped together when you straightened out the various segments). Unfortunately all the elastic bands are
now broken, and we have to assemble each pole manually, link by link. This makes erecting our voluminous tent
more challenging. Each time we
tried to insert one pole in the tent sleeve, all the other poles fell apart,
the pieces getting mixed up with one another and requiring that we sort them
out and start over from the beginning.
It made for a frustrating task, the sort of thing that might be used at
a weekend retreat to explore how couples deal with insanity. I remarked that this was an enjoyable
challenge, but Katja wasn’t enthused.
We did get the tent up after 90 minutes of struggle and pain. I said that, because of our practice,
our task would be much easier on our next trip. Katja, however, said we should buy a new pop-up tent that
would set itself up.
Our tent,
finally assembled and looking good
I gathered some firewood from
the forest, and Katja started making corned beef hash for dinner. She hadn’t gotten very far before a
swarm of flies descended on our table.
I wasn’t accustomed to this because parks in Ohio secretly spray their
campgrounds with insecticide and there are no flies. Kentucky, however, is more ecologically correct, and there’s
no spraying. My impression was
that most of the bugs from Ohio had migrated to Kentucky. Further, because we were the only
campers in our wing of the park, all the local flies had come over to have
dinner with us. We got through the
meal by my waving a dish towel frantically over our plates with my left hand
while eating with my right. It wasn’t
a fully satisfying dining experience.
Here’s a picture of our cutting board which I took about 90 seconds
after slicing a tomato on it.
Flies on the
cutting board
Just by luck I’d bought a new
screened dining canopy which had been on sale at our neighborhood drugstore at
the end of last summer, and I set this up first thing the next morning. Certain that this would eliminate our
fly problems, I began cooking French toast and bacon for our breakfast. Much to my dismay, the dining canopy
didn’t work as advertised. The
canopy had no floor, and the walls were an inch or two above the ground,
enabling the more clever and enterprising flies to gain ready access after a
quick search. The screened walls,
moreover, kept them in there so that by the time that Katja arrived our new
dining space was like a gigantic fly auditorium. Again I used the old waving dish towel technique while we
quickly gobbled up breakfast.
Katja relaxes
in our dining canopy with the door open to let out the flies
Afterward I went to the
Country Store to discuss the fly situation with local experts. No one had a quick fix, though a
grizzled old customer said fly paper might help some. The Country Store was out of fly paper, so I drove into town
and got some “fly ribbons” at the supermarket. These came in little spools that you pull out and unwind
into thirty-inch hanging strips. I
didn’t unroll the strip properly the first time, and I tried to unwind and
straighten out the paper manually with my fingers. That was a horrible mistake. Fly paper has to be the stickiest substance in the history
of mankind. It was more messy than
manipulating paper soaked in Super Glue.
I had to scrub for five minutes at the rest room sink to get my fingers
unglued. I checked the fly paper
strips an hour later, but no flies had yet been captured. Two hours, no flies. After four hours, still nothing. By mid-afternoon, though, I had
captured one large fly (see photo below).
After three days about a dozen flies, yellow jackets, and miscellaneous
small bugs were stuck to the paper, at a cost of about 35 cents per insect. The
remarkable thing is that the flies did seem to become steadily less frequent in
our dining canopy. I think flies
are basically intelligent creatures, and they would prefer not to hang around a
space that’s decorated with fly paper and insect corpses.
Our first fly
captive
By Wednesday we still hadn’t
seen Lake Cumberland, and I figured out from the park map that we could take a
one-mile hike from the park lodge and view it from an overlook. Katja is still recovering from knee
replacement surgery, but she gamely said she would give it a try. We set out with the dogs at
mid-morning. It was a fairly
strenuous hike with lots of rocks and roots and up-and-down climbs. I thought the trail was very pretty,
with ravines, sandstone cliffs, dried up rocky creeks, and mature oaks, beech
trees, and evergreens. Katja isn’t
as keen on nature though, and, two-thirds of the way through our journey, she
decided all the forest views looked the same and she didn’t want to go any
further. I suggested she sit down
and wait for us, but she wanted to go back, so I gave her my car keys. Katja headed back while the dogs and I
proceeded to the overlook. It was
pleasant enough, though the lake views were obstructed by lots of trees, and the dogs were ready to
return after a few seconds.
Lake Cumberland
from the Overlook
Heading back, I started
worrying about Katja returning alone on the trail. She didn’t have a cell phone, and her gait is still a little
unsteady. My anxiety was
intensified when I came across a fork on the trail where one branch headed
uphill, the other down into a ravine.
I hadn’t the vaguest idea which way we’d come from. I tried the ravine alternative, but,
when I got down to a rocky creekbed, I realized I’d never seen that before, and
so I headed back up. Which way had
Katja gone, I wondered? I’d lost
one of the dogs in the forest the day before, and now I was imagining that
Katja was lost in the depths of the forest too. I stepped up our pace and was very relieved when I got back
to find Katja sitting in our car, enjoying the air conditioning and listening
to NPR. We headed back to our
campsite.
Katja and the
dogs on the Lake Bluff Trail
I returned to the Country
Store, seeking new advice from the staff.
A different young woman and man were behind the counter. This time I explained that my wife was getting
tired of the campground, and I wondered if there were some place resorty where
she could browse in little shops.
The woman said that nearby Jaymestown had a Dollar General, but there
wasn’t much else of interest, and the next town over, Wessell Springs, had a
few more stores plus a McDonald’s and a Wendy’s. But it wasn’t very interesting either. However, she said, it was about a
thirty-minute trip to Elveron and that Elveron was a fabulous town to
visit. It had tons of antique stores,
gift shops, and fun things to see and do.
Elveron would be very exciting, the best town in the entire region. I couldn’t wait to tell Katja. We set out the next morning. The trip through the hilly countryside
was pretty, and we passed by Wolf Creek Dam which had created the 101-mile long
Lake Cumberland when it was built in 1950.
Wolf Creek Dam
Elveron’s a little town of
about 2000 people. We cruised
around the small downtown area, but we couldn’t find any of the attractions I’d
been told about. The most interesting-looking
store was simply labelled “Consignment Store”. It was closed and completely empty. Betty Sue’s Boutique and Resale Shop
was open, but Katja didn’t want to try it. She suggested we turn around and head back to the
campground. That seemed unduly
pessimistic. I pulled over at the
two-pump downtown gas station. A
gray-haired man in overalls was filling his gas tank. I explained that my wife and I had come to Elveron to visit
the antique district, and I wondered where it was. The man looked warily at me and said there wasn’t any
antique district. There’d been an
antique store once, but it had gone out of business a long time ago. I asked what other shops in town Katja
might enjoy. He said there wasn’t
anything of interest in Elveron.
His own wife hated it here.
He noted that there were 14 empty storefronts in town, practically the
entire downtown. He said, if we
wanted to go to a really good town, we should go back to Wessell Springs, the
town with the McDonald’s and Wendy’s near our campground. I thanked him, and we headed back. I couldn’t imagine why the Country
Store clerk had told me what she did.
Either she had pretty limited judgment, or perhaps she just decided to
be malicious because we city folk were more interested in gift shops than in fishing
and hiking trails. In any case,
Wessell Springs did turn out to be bigger than Elveron, though it specialized
mainly in secondhand junk shops, most of them a step down St. Vincent de
Paul’s. We did find one small
antique mall that occupied Katja’s interest for a short while. On the way home we stopped at a
roadside ice cream parlor. Their
sundae machine was broken, but we enjoyed double scoops of chocolate ice
cream.
Some of the
attractive merchandise in the Wessell Springs Olde Trading Post
All in all, our camping trip
was well above average in terms of generating adversity and testing our
resilience. Katja was pretty
miserable, but I was proud of her for hanging in there. She was covered in bug bites by the end
of the trip. I never understand
why that happens because nothing ever bites me. However, I did manage to come down with a healthy case of
poison ivy, and we jointly used up three bottles of anti-itch spray on our
return. At the same time, not
everything during our stay was difficult.
The most relaxing periods were the end of the day, after eating supper
and washing the evening dishes.
Katja and I would sit down by the campfire, and, unlike normal evenings
at home where we retreat to the computer and the TV respectively, we sat around
and reminisced about the past, our parents, our families, and our life together
over the years. Then we’d take the
dogs into our cozy tent where we’d chat a bit more before nodding off. Duffy would climb onto Katja’s air
mattress, and Mike would lay by her side with his head on her pillow. We all slept really well.
The campfire
Anticipating the rainy
aftermath of Hurricane Isaac, we packed most of our gear on Thursday night and
set out for home early Friday morning.
We stopped at Berea on the way back, where Katja enjoyed the upscale
shops and I gave the dogs a tour of the college campus. Back in the car I diplomatically asked
Katja what she would change about our trip if she could. She said the heat, the flies, and
having interesting places to go. I
agreed, and Katja said we should should pick another destination if we go
camping again, probably closer to home.
As we approached the city, Katja said she was very sad being away from
home so long, and I said I was very sad leaving the campground. That proves my point. Having a shared emotional experience of
being sad together shows why camping is so therapeutic. Last night I’d just drifted off at
12:30 when I heard Katja ask, “Would you like to talk?” I said no, that I was asleep. Katja said that if we were around the campfire,
we’d be having a talk. I didn’t
say anything, but I secretly thought to myself that perhaps Katja would want to
try out more campfires in the future.
Love,
Dave
G-mail Comments
-Donna D (9-8):
sounds awful. you can get build a fire at home in the hibachi on your
front porch surrounded by bushes and trees, gather round it with blankets, and
talk. donna
-David L (9-9): Good advice. I'd need to bring the dogs and the tent out to the porch too. I'll bring this up with Katja as soon as she's recovered.
