Bastrop State Park

I was unhappy to learn over Labor Day weekend that much of Bastrop State Park has burned to the ground. The park is in Bastrop County, Texas, not far southeast of Austin. It isn't a large park, a little shy of 6,000 acres, but it is distinctive for its loblolly pines -- a patch of piney-green East Texas dropped into Central Texas.

I've been there more recently, but my fondest memories of Bastrop are of two camping trips to the park with high school friends in the spring and summer of 1979. If I pause for a moment, I can picture the campsite, the fire we tended late into the night, the sloping ground nearby blanketed by pine needles and rich in pine cones -- which we spent time throwing at each other. I can hear the voices of my friends, but not quite what we said during our many and varied conversations (we had no electronic entertainment, and were better for it). I can almost smell the pines, but I'd need to visit a stand of loblollies for the memory to return with any olfactory gusto.

Over the weekend, wildfires encouraged by the windy leftover of Hurricane Lee ravaged the drought-dried Bastrop SP and, unfortunately, hundreds of homes in the vicinity. I understand that loblolly pines grow back quickly, but still. It's a damned shame.

Encounters With Southern Fauna

Fireflies are flitting around yards here in suburban Chicago. A sure sign of high summer. Pretty little lights, but nothing like the streaky volume of light at Acadiana Park in Lafayette, Louisiana, last month, where a lot of fireflies lit up the dusk. Acadiana is a municipal park, 100 or more acres, and some of it is a campground, but more of it is as wilderness as you're going to get in the middle of a small city. I was practically the only camper there, certainly the only one at my end of the campground.

While I was pitching my tent, a raccoon emerged from the bushes. Not the fat raccoons I’ve seen near my house, but a wiry creature who spent a few moments on his hind legs – never seen a raccoon do that – probably assessing food opportunities from this new camper. I threw a stick at him. He didn’t return during my stay that I could see.

Otherwise I shared the place with aforementioned fireflies, hungry mosquitoes and countless more noisy bugs. After dark, inside the tent, I was treated to a bug symphony, turned up loud, rising from the lush Louisiana undergrowth. Illinois bug symphonies seem reedy and weak by comparison.

Throaty frogs, or some kind of amphibians, were part of a similar aural mix while camping in extreme northeastern Mississippi later in the trip, at Tishomingo State Park. (One of my favorite place names on the whole trip; let Tishomingo trip off the tongue.) In my part of the campground, there were no other people. Just insects and their burrs and chirps and buzzes, amphibians crying for their mates, and the occasional swish of larger animals out in the brush beyond the light.

I spent a fair amount of time driving the Natchez Trace Parkway on this trip, encountering some animal life there as well. Not far out of Natchez, I saw what I took to be a castoff tire tread on the road. Then it moved. Even inside a moving car, I started a little when I realized it was a large black snake. I don’t think I hit it. Elsewhere on the Trace, a sizable dark tortoise came into view on the road, inching across. The Trace doesn’t have tremendously heavy traffic, but it still seemed like dangerous business for him. I didn’t hit him, either.

At Shiloh, animals were fairly much in the background of my thoughts until suddenly at a turn in a road, a pair of wild turkeys darted by. Well, sure. Wild Turkey. No, that's Kentucky whiskey. Still, wild turkeys in Tennessee, except for the fact that they ran pretty close by, were no surprise.

But several places in Mississippi, on US highways or state roads, I saw armadillos. I didn’t know they ranged that far east, but I am ignorant in these matters. I suppose they've been expanding their habitat because their only natural enemies are vehicles. I didn't see any smashed ones, though, which are common enough in Texas. The ones I saw were all alive and scuttering across the roads.

Wapiti &c.

“You are now in a bear habitat,” a number of signs posted at Wapiti campground, a couple of miles from Jasper Townsite, said in English and below that in French. Also included were stern bilingual warnings about staying clear of bears, not feeding bears, etc., with the unwritten message being, don’t be a moron who mistakes real bears for Yogi and Boo-Boo.

We didn’t see any bears at Wapiti, though there were plenty of elk, which could also clean your clock if you acted threatening or weird in their vicinity. Elk or no elk, Wapiti quickly became my favorite campsite anywhere, edging out other favorites such as the walk-in site at Pete’s Lake in Michigan with its view of starlight on the lake or Bastrop State Park, which evokes a little high school nostalgia for me.

Wapiti’s an enormous wooded campground, 366 sites spread on a large piece of real estate between the road to Jasper Townsite and the Athabasca River. It’s also bounded on one side by a creek, which I later found out was called Whister’s Creek, and we got a site next to the creek that included plenty of tall trees and a flat spot among them just big enough for the tent.

We parked some folding chairs creekside, which made a fine place to read. It was rapid and rocky, meaning great sport for Lilly and Ann in stone tossing. Even better than any of that was the constant low rush of the water, recorded versions of which people pay money for. By itself it was soothing to fall asleep to, but it also had the bonus of drowning out noise from our neighbors on either side, who weren’t that near anyway. No distant caterwauling or radio noise from people who just have to have their Retro-80s! Superstation! Flashback! Weekend! playing in the middle of a national park.

The campsite at the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt NP was shady and quiet, too, because there weren’t many people there. People go to South Dakota. People go to Yellowstone, Glacier and the Grand Tetons. North Dakota? I asked a park ranger about the low number of visitors, and she said yep, TR NP’s an unknown jewel of the park system. I agree.

A thunderstorm greeted us on our arrival in that part of North Dakota. We’d started the day, July 12, in a motel in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and didn’t particularly make haste on the drive that took us back across part of Saskatchewan and into North Dakota. By the time we stopped for gas in Williston, ND, it was almost dark and we could see an angry-looking storm off to the east. Just the thing you want to see when you’re planning to pitch a tent not far away, to the southeast.

But we pressed on, and the darker it got, the more terrific the lightning became. The country around there isn’t completely flat, but it’s flat enough to let you see for miles—boiling dark clouds lit up by bolts. Best lightning show I’d seen in years. The girls were so scared they covered themselves up with a blanket. So scared they actually shared the blanket without argument.

Sleeping in the car wasn’t something I really wanted to do, since I have long legs, and as soon as we got to the campsite, I put up the tent as fast as I could. It rained a little but mostly I had lightning and thunder to content with. There were trees around, and the time between the flash and the rumble was fairly long, so I figured I was fairly safe. We piled into the tent and listened to more thunder and watched everything light up with spooky blue lightning light for a while. When we woke up the next morning, the sky was clear and the ground wasn’t wet.

After our very first day of driving, the long Schaumburg to Fargo run on July 1, we arrived at Lindenwood Park, which is along the west bank of the Red River of the North just across from Moorhead, Minn. It’s a Fargo municipal park, and yet has campsites, a couple of rows for RVs near the river, and space for tents right on the river. I’d called ahead a couple of weeks before but was told that the tent sites had flooded. “It’s been raining a lot here,” the attendant said.

So I wasn’t sure we’d be able to camp there, but the river was down by the time we got there, so we got a site for a reasonable $12.50 a night next to the river. It didn’t have a picnic table, so we took (and cooked) our meals on the ground. Not many rocks were at hand to throw in the river, so the kids pried loose pieces of earth from a nearby spot that had been flooded, then dried and cracked, and used those. We had some mosquitoes, but not as many as I would have thought.

Our neighbor was a minor pest, though. A wiry, grizzled fellow in his 50s who was bicycling long distance, he was eager to make conversation, beginning while I was putting up the tent, including almost immediately oblique comments on my skills at it. “So this is the first time you’ve put up the tent, huh?” I might have answered him as a younger man, but I didn’t bother, especially since I was busy actually putting up the tent at the time. (The answer: I’d put it up in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Montana, all successfully enough to shield my family from rain and wind and bugs.)

Later conversations with the man, which luckily weren’t that extensive, made me think he was just one of those people who had a knack for saying mildly irritating things, probably without realizing it, so I won’t be too hard on him. Still, like the Red River mosquitoes, I wasn’t sad to leave him behind.

Fauna

The only creature I run into regularly while camping is one or another kind of mosquito. The weather had been dryish in Jasper NP, so there weren’t that many there. Things had been even drier at Theodore Roosevelt NP, and we encountered only a very few hardy mosquitoes who managed to survive wrigglerhood in the risk-of-wildfire badlands this summer.

The plains near Regina, Saskatchewan, were another story. On the evening of July 3, we found a private campground a few miles east of Regina for a reasonable C$14. The place was sparse with people, probably since the Canada Day long weekend was winding down, but well populated with blood-drinking vermin. Their main diet likely came from the livestock on the surrounding ranches, but they weren’t above snacking on human beings. Once a cloud of them followed me, so I had to zig-zag back to our camp to lose them. Others buzzed intensely around the tent door until I sprayed it with Off.

Prairie-dog town hardly describes the colonies we saw next to the single road in the South Unit of TR NP. A couple of prairie-dog cities is more like it, with suburban prairie-dog sprawl thrown in. The more you looked, the more of them you saw, and the more holes in the ground you saw. I understand that some prairie dogs act as guards for the colonies, and I believe it too. One little fellow eyed us pretty closely the entire time we were admiring his hometown.

Elsewhere in TR NP we came across the small group of wild horses which, contrary to popular image of creatures spirited and running free as the wind, looked pretty much like any saddle- and bridle-less horses eating grass. The difference, I guess, would be in what they do when people come near. We didn’t get near enough to test this, but I suspect that they would behave like most wild animals and get the hell away from people.

On the morning of July 13, we took in a ranger presentation about buffalo, near our campsite (at the amphitheater, as park literature called it—a collection of benches facing a table). Fairly interesting, especially right at the end, when a bull bison wandered by, as if on cue. He showed no interest in us.

We saw buffalo elsewhere in the park from time to time, mostly lounging around on hillsides. That’s the life. No Indian nor white hunters to worry about, though the ranger did say that every few years the Park Service culls the herds of its older and more infirm members, taking the part of buffalo predators that no longer roam the park. So it’s the life of Logan, sort of.

And I don’t care what zoologists and park rangers say. I plan to use American bison and buffalo interchangeably. Those creatures are buffalo, and they can share the name with bovines in Asia and Africa without confusion. The U.S. minted buffalo, not bison, nickels from 1913 to 1938, and it’s buffalo soldiers, buffalo wings, and Buffalo, NY.

Back in Jasper NP, we saw a lot of elk. We stayed in a campground called Wapiti, which I’ve read means “elk” in Shawnee, and that was a fitting name, because they wandered through every day we were there, sometimes picturesquely (to us) next to the fast-flowing Whistlers Creek.

In Kootenay NP on July 6, we stopped for a walk to the Paint Pots, where iron-rich springs bubble up through small pools, coloring the surrounding ground a Georgia orange, or, as the guide signs call it, ochre. Apparently both Indians and white men used the pigmentation in pre-park days, with some of the latter’s mining tools still littering the site. At the end of the trail, a couple of near-circular pools were a remarkably gaudy green, because of certain other minerals within (I forget what).

On the return, Yuriko and Lilly went ahead of Ann and I, because Ann’s easily distracted, and because Lilly wanted to go back to a riverside and throw rocks. En route, Ann and I sat on a bench facing a stretch of pools and ochre ground. Behind us were some woods.

Ann was standing on the bench looking back into the woods when she said, “Bear. Bear. Look!”

I looked, and about 100 feet away was a black bear, standing up and looking at us. About a second later, he turned away and disappeared.

Banff v. Jasper

Before we left for Canada, I consulted with a friend who knows the Canadian Rockies well, and regarding Banff Townsite, which is in the national park of the same name, he used the word, “nightmare.”

I’d already planned not to stay in the town of Banff, warned by other sources about crowds and the high cost of accommodation in summer. Instead, to explore Banff NP, we spent three nights at a motel, the Drake Inn, in Canmore, a town just outside the park’s boundary to the south. The Drake was decidedly plain, but had a delightful location along Policeman’s Creek, which runs through the town and which has a plank walkway on one of its banks—not a wilderness walk in any sense, but a pleasant morningtime stroll among pines and twittering birds and the gurgle of a creek.

Canmore had its shopping street, partly living off tourists, but it was still a fairly sedate place. Banff Township was not. “Nightmare” might be too strong of a word, but after an hour or so on the teeming sidewalks of Banff, a town saturated with retail space, I was ready to leave. Several streets in Banff not only feed off out-of-towners, but cater to the sort of person who considers shopping an essential part of any trip, or who might even travel just to shop someplace new. I won’t mock that sort of mindset (though I’m tempted), but I certainly don’t share it, and Yuriko doesn’t either, at least not much.

But there was something in Banff both Yuriko and I did want to see: the Banff Springs Hotel. You can’t very well come to Banff NP and not see it. That would be like going to Singapore and passing on the Raffles.

So we went into Banff Townsite and sought out the hotel, one of the grand old railroad hotels of Canada, and actually part of the reason Banff eventually became a national park. The railroad and its hotel were instrumental in bringing people to the area in the early days, many of whom no doubt help shape Canada’s parks policy in the early 1900s.

It’s an impressive pile o’ stones indeed, particularly the backside, which commands an extraordinary view. Canned histories of the hotel would have you believe that the builders got it backwards, and that the front should have faced the mountain vista, but I don’t think so. The entrance is the workaday side of a hotel like this. The back is where guests can lounge around and soak in the view.

Later, we spent time at Jasper Townsite, the main town in Jasper NP, a much more likable place than Banff. Both are ringed by forests and mountains, but Jasper feels more remote. Which it is, since it’s further from the Trans-Canadian Highway than Banff. It’s also smaller, less crowded and really has only two shopping streets, the main drag Connaught Dr. and the parallel Patricia St. Jasper reminded me of Flagstaff, Ariz., because both towns have a main street fronted by businesses on one side and by a rail line on the other, complete with a railroad station—a fine old restored station in the case of Jasper.

But Jasper had more going for it than a passing similarity to Flagstaff. You might ask, who needs a town in a wilderness national park, especially when you aren’t even staying there, but camping a few miles away? A family of four does. In Jasper we bought groceries and gas and ice cream, ate a few meals, did our laundry, bought and mailed a fair number of postcards, and let the kids play at a well-appointed municipal park a few blocks from the main street, something that often interested them more than the prospect of walking another couple of miles in the woods, no matter how promising the scenery.

We also spent a short while at the town’s log-cabin visitor center, sitting around on its front-porch benching looking out onto a pleasant lawn and beyond that to the train station. On other occasion, I had the chance to wander around the back streets of the town by myself, and enjoyed the sight of two churches, both little jewels of construction, each set at 45-degree angles to their street—which was the same street, the curiously named Geikie St. Two blocks apart, it was almost as if the two church buildings were facing off: one Anglican, the other Lutheran.

Pete’s Lake

When we got the Hiawatha National Forest on Saturday, it was fairly late—an hour or so before sunset, about 8:30 EDT—and we were fairly tired, so I was willing to throw over whatever thin sentimental attachment I had for the campgrounds at Pete’s Lake, where I camped in 1989 and 2000, and camp elsewhere. We stopped at a campground south of Pete’s, and it looked all right. From inside the car.

As soon as we were outside and looking around at the nearby lake and the mostly empty other campgrounds, we realized what we'd forgotten on this trip. It’s one of the rules of packing: you always forget something. We’d forgotten mosquito repellant, a pretty serious mistake when an air force of mosquitoes starts maneuvers in your personal space. The place was swarming with them, more than we expected, more than I remembered, but then again this was late spring, compared with early fall. Camping in the age before DEET? No thanks.

I remembered a store up the road further, and discovered that it was open till 10 on Saturdays, mostly to accommodate local families and teens at its small ice cream parlor. I found some Off and off we went, a few more miles to Pete’s Lake, a place so obscure that isn’t marked on either the Rand McNally or Michelin road atlases that I own. That’s one of the reasons I like it.

More people were camping there this Memorial Day weekend than the Labor Day weekends I visited, but it wasn’t at all full, so we picked site #12, set up in the near-darkness, ate sandwiches and other easy food, and went to bed. A light rain started to fall.

Sometime in the dark the storm really got under way. Boom! Boom! Boom! Six years ago, exactly the same kind of storm cut our visit short, since the old tent leaked. I listened to the heavy rain, and thunder, and the swishing of the trees, and dozed. Occasionally I’d move my hand around to see if any water was getting in the new(ish) tent. No. A dry tent. I slept happy.

Against expectation, it was still raining pretty hard after the sun came up. From a dream I woke suddenly to a loud bang of thunder, followed by a long, low growl. Then this sound-pattern must have repeated a half-dozen times: it was like a bowling ball being dropped on an aluminum pan, then rolling down another sheet of metal.

The sky cleared up later on Sunday, and when we returned to camp a little after dark that day, it was a different experience. Instead of thunder, we heard yahoos off in the distance. Not campers, I think, but kids out whooping it up on a long weekend. Yeah! YEAH! WHOO! Awright! WHOO! WHOO! Yeaaaaaaaah!

But they went away before too long. After everyone else in the tent was asleep, I took a walk alone down to the lake itself, a few minutes from the campground. The tree canopy, a lush mix of new-leaf deciduous and pine, is so thick at the campgrounds and admits so little light that I needed a flashlight to find the path to the lake. Near the lakeshore, the trees thin out, and the view of the sky opens up. Next to the lake, benches face a tiny beach. A fine place to sit and see the vault of stars. Flashlight off, it was dark enough to see all the stars of Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, which is really, really dark.

Item from the Past: UP II

September 6, 2000

We’ve just returned from the Upper Peninsula. On the whole it was a good trip, though it didn’t quite go the way we planned. Our original thinking was to spend the first night in a motel in Green Bay, and then two more nights at the Hiawatha National Forest, at a place called Pete’s Lake, in our little tent. That’s more or less what I did by myself over Labor Day weekend in 1989, though at that time I stayed in Marinette, Wis., overnight, which is a little further up the road. And I stayed at Pete’s Lake two nights, but not by plan. It was just the place I picked.

This time we went to a Microtel motel in Green Bay for the first night. Odd name, and a brand I’d never stayed at, but the description in the guidebook sounded good, and turned out to be accurate. The rooms are basic, the price not too bad, and the best part was the pool, which Lilly was very happy to use on Saturday morning. It had fountains, a whirlpool effect in one corner, a “volcano” that dribbled water, basketball nets and water slides that were too big for her. Mostly the other guest were people with small children, a fact confirmed at the pool that morning, which was chockablock with kids and their chunky, middle-aged parents. I fit right in.

On Saturday, we pressed on to the Nat’l Forest, picnicking along the way, setting up camp at little Pete’s Lake, eating noodles for dinner and bedding down fairly early, as we tend to do while camping. Sometime in the dark night, an enormous thunderstorm broke over the Upper Peninsula. Over our tent, in fact. No light except the lightning, intense rain and rolling thunder, and the whoosh of the wind through the endless rack of trees. It was like being inside the storm. Lilly slept through it. Yuriko and I didn’t.

It would have been quite a thrill, but for one thing. We discovered that night the value of a ground cover, which we did not have under our tent. We’re only camping dilettantes, and fortunate enough never to have been rained on in the half-dozen campouts we’ve done, so we didn’t have one, and we didn’t appreciate the creep of water through the ground and up into the tent and into our sleeping bags & pillows &c. We do now.

The next morning (Sunday) everything was wet enough, with no prospect of sun to dry it all out, for us to change our plans. We discussed spending the day in the UP and returning to Green Bay, but the travel spirit moved us and we decided to return home via lower Michigan. Then, after breaking camp, we drove up to Munising, Mich., and the Pictured Rocks Nat’l Lakeshore. Lake Superior was foggy, cold and grey, the austere patriarch of the Great Lakes. (“Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings/ In the rooms of her ice water mansions.”) I want to see more of it someday. Say, from the wilds of Isle Royale or Whitefish Point or from the Canadian side. There’s a place on the Canadian side called Thunder Bay. Is that not cool geo-nomenclature?

We crossed the Mackinac Bridge (third-longest suspension bridge in the USA, says my almanac) on Sunday afternoon and began looking for a place to stay. Unlike Pete’s Lake, which was less than half occupied, the accommodations were mostly full around the Straits of Mackinac, so we headed south and ended up at Gaylord, Mich., in a golf/snowmobile resort. The golf season is declining, and the snow season hasn’t started yet, so we got a good deal on a fine room and access to an excellent outdoor heated pool. Which of course Lilly liked best of all. While I was sitting around in that pool with Lilly, a clutch of other guests — two middle-aged couples — discussed in great detail all the places they’d played golf. It’s a subculture I’ll never understand.

Monday was a tough drive home. You’d think that rural Interstates in Michigan would be free of traffic jams, but no, not on Labor Day. We did stop briefly in Lansing, and saw the outside of Michigan state capitol. In a way, it was all a test to see how Lilly would take to a long car trip, and in that she did very well. That is, she didn’t complain too much, and often we were able to provide her with things to do. For as long as I can remember, I liked those long trips. Maybe that’s part of growing up in Texas. Or more likely, that’s just me.

Red Shale, Yankee Jim

Six nights in a tent, three in motel rooms. I’d say we got our money’s worth out of our new tent, acquired this spring. Especially in Montana. At Custer National Forest just off US 212, there’s a campground called Red Shale, since the soil is redish orange and rocky. At one time the Park Service must have collected a fee for it — I saw a rusty container that once held fee envelopes, for instance. But maybe the regional office decided that collecting fees cost more than was being collected.

Maintenance had also been cut. The water pump was busted. The campsites were so weedy that it was sometimes hard to tell where they were. In fact, it looked like the only attention anyone paid to the place was in the toilet building, which did have toilet paper. But this inattention led to a rustic charm, especially pleasant considering what we paid. It was a cold night and the stars shone very bright. Late at night, while snug in the tent, I was sure I hear coyotes in the distance.

Gallatin National Forest has some campgrounds on the road to the north entrance of Yellowstone. We picked one of them, about 15 miles from the entrance, the better not to deal with crowding in the park itself. A wise choice, because every Yellowstone campground we later saw looked jammed.

The campsite in Yankee Jim Canyon, by contrast, never filled up. About a half-dozen sites were occupied each night, out of 20 or so. Like the Red Shale site, it too was free — quite a surprise so close to Yellowstone. Also like Red Shale, there was no water, no maintenance and no other services except a daily delivery of toilet paper by unseen Park Service hands.

Yankee Jim Canyon is a rocky place. Boulders everywhere, both way up the sides of the mountains and next to the campsites, with a lot of smaller rocks here and there as well, and a handful of gnarly trees thrown in to keep things interesting. At night, a near-constant light wind blew through the canyon, but we pitched the tent — and it was hard to drive those stakes — among some boulders that served as wind breaks. We had the presence of mind to store all of our food in the car at night, in case of bears, but there was no evidence of anything bigger than a rabbit around the campsite during our entire stay.

And the wind blew. Wooooooooooooooo, a relaxing sound to fall asleep to, once we realized that the tent wasn’t going to blow over. It reminded me, strangely, of the night-sounds at the hut we rented overlooking the ocean in Bali, with its constant crashing waves. That was a nearly perfect aural experience. The winds of Yankee Jim Canyon were close to that.

Fishin’ Lilly

I’m not a recreational fisherman. When I was seven or eight, my grandmother’s next-door neighbor took me with her son, who was about my age, to a lake in south Texas for fishing. I remember disliking the worms and dreading the fishhooks—I’d heard they were painful and hard to remove, if you got one in your finger. I avoided that problem, but sitting around in the heat waiting for the pole to move didn’t seem like much fun. Especially since it never moved.

Much later, after I’d grown up, I tried again. This time I went fishing in a stream in Idaho. Fishing in Idaho. I’d read my Hemmingway. I knew this was supposed to be a fine place to fish. Probably it was. But even sitting around in the shade, waiting for the pole to move, wasn’t much fun. Especially since it never moved.

Lilly may feel differently about fishing someday. Among the sport fishers at the lagoon near our campsite was a middle-aged woman by herself, parked near the water, managing two poles. On Saturday evening, Lilly and Ann spent a lot of time near the water’s edge. Ann especially was fascinated by poking a stick into some of the algae scum. Lilly became fascinated by what the fisherwoman was doing, and started to watch her.

The woman was nice, and we talked to her a little. Eventually she let Lilly hold one of the poles. I didn’t think any harm could come of it, so while Lilly was doing this I went back to our campsite to build the fire. About 10 minutes later, Lilly came to me holding a bucket. She’d caught a fish. A small thing, who knows what kind, but alive in the bucket. “I caught a fish! I caught a fish!” she said, as pleased as could be. There wasn’t anything we could do with it, so she soon threw it back. Still, that’s more luck that I’d ever had fishing.

Sounds of the Night

The last day of May, and we finally felt like running the air conditioner for a time, to cool off the upper rooms of the house. This house retains heat quite nicely, which is a virtue in the long, long winters, but not during the brief summers.

The day was warm and the night quite cool at the Marshall State Fish & Wildlife Area over the weekend. The camping area was divided into two lobes, one with electricity, one without. RVs parked in the electrified area, tents sprouted in the other; $12 per night for one, $8 for the other. A gray-haired park employee -- ranger might be too fancy a description -- showed up late in the afternoon to collect the fee. When we pitched our tent in the early afternoon, there was only one other inhabited site, occupied by a young couple. A young childless couple. According to Yuriko, they eyed us grimly at the introduction of noisy kids to the site.

Turns out, though, that the real noise that night was produced by three middle-aged fellows -- a little older than me, I think -- who showed up after we did, set up a tent that looked too small to hold all of them (someone was sleeping in one of their cars, it seems), and promptly turned on a radio.

A radio. At a campsite. This is like taking a ViewMaster to the Louvre. I’m not going to yammer on about missing the marvelous sounds of nature, the song of the whippoorwill, etc., but really. Whether or not you care anything for birdsong or those throaty bullfrogs we heard at sunset (away from the campsite), you’d think one of the pleasures of camping is to get away from items like the radio. I’d think that, anyway.

It wasn’t a bad station. It was playing all ’80s. And it wasn’t all that loud—just background noise. We turned in an hour or so after dark, and it was still on. We all drifted off anyway. Then a big crack of wood woke me up, and the damned radio was still on. The men were breaking wood for their campfire, talking, drinking, and listening to the radio. It was about midnight.

I fumed for a few minutes, but eventually unzipped my tent door. Being rude would have backfired, of course. So this is exactly what I said, in a measured tone: “Gentlemen, could you at least turn the radio down?”

Other than nodding hello, that was the first thing I’d said to them. Sure enough, they turned off the radio, almost at once. Then I had the sound of their fire to fall asleep to. Which I did. Perfect.