Corresponding with Nature
Nature Journaling: Part III
This is Part III of AMP’s Nature Journaling series. If you would like to know more about how to create a nature journal and to submit some of your journal entries for publication here on the AMP Substack, please visit Journaling with Nature by clicking HERE.
Letter #1 - From Phil
Dear Lynne,
Right now we are concentrating on making it back home. We are in a small (16-foot), old travel trailer with a currently non-functioning A/C system and no running water (a leak somewhere). Given more time, I would have tested these things before we left, but I was engaged with building a “chicken fortress” to keep our chickens safe from raccoons while we were gone. Plus other pursuits seemed to have higher priority at the time.
So it is more like tent camping in days past, but in a big sturdy tent that does not leak but is heavy enough to have to be towed behind us. Life is a series of trade offs. We open the screened door and windows in the evening until it is cool enough to sleep. Deb usually falls asleep first, but I can’t until I can close the door. I am not trusting enough of people to leave it open at night, even though we have a dog who alerts us to the slightest motion of even the squirrels scampering by. I know that people in the South in particular used to sleep on their covered porches or in a “dog trot” in the middle between two sections of the house. Deb grew up in Houston, and only her parents’ room had an A/C unit so they had to wet sheets and hang them up for evaporative cooling and just lie there in pools of sweat.
Which kind of describes last night. Massive thunderstorms. Booming and echoing. Great light show. Turned dripping sweat into cool breezes that brought relief and sleep. We have been staying at state parks when we can. They are very well kept throughout the South, with lots of camping spots. On an oxbow lake (the largest in North America) on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River. Pre-dawn, sipping coffee. Stately trees. A cacophony of birds we can identify with our Merlin app. Nature at its finest. A force to be reckoned with…
Phil
Letter #2 - From Lynne
Dear Phil,
You bring back memories. We rented an RV to go to Montreal way back when. What I remember most was the clanking of pots and pans every time it moved. And the table that turned into a bed, which fell down the first day and had to be propped up by a suitcase. The kids slept in a cubbyhole over the front seat, knees to chin.
Mostly we traveled by tent. We had several. My favorite was the cabin tent where all four of us plus the dog had breathing room. A little house we could put up in ten minutes.
Family memories: we drove from New York to and around Colorado in August in the late 70's. Our first night in Estes Park we wondered why everybody else was wearing ski jackets while we had brought only hoodies. When night came, we realized we hadn't done our homework. Fortunately, that tent was small, so body heat helped us sleep. Poor Sally, our dog, was shivering too and ended up in a sleeping bag with me.
That was one of our first long trips with a tent, where we discovered how easy it is for them to collapse when wet. We'd come back from exploring and find it flat. So my mantra became, "Don't touch the walls. boys!" Which made life a bit difficult in a small tent.
Another memorable moment was in Virginia, on a beach. A huge wind with rain came up, so we decided we had better get into the car. We were doing this when suddenly our tent left the ground and sailed toward the trees. Without thinking, I jumped out of the car and grabbed the tent ropes. Fortunately I was heavy enough to bring it back down to, of course, collapse. That was the first time I was happy to see that happen.
When I was growing up, we visited my dad's family almost every weekend (he was one of nine and the only one to move an hour away from Ithaca), and someone would inevitably start reminiscing about their parents. There would be a phrase that brought back a funny story--the punch line would always be in Italian, which I didn't understand--and everyone would fall down laughing. Well, our tent stories do that for us.
Tenting started out as a necessity if we wanted to go away on vacations - as academics we had so little money - but turned out to connect us to nature in a new way we hadn't expected, since neither Josh nor I had grown up traveling that way.
After I wrote this, I was inspired to go through our old boxes of photos. The pictures below made me smile. We were hiking what we thought was the Appalachian Trail with friends. We were all set upon by gnats, but only Josh was covered by them (the aftershave). We stumbled on a little store in the woods (which should have tipped us off that we were NOT on the Appalachian Trail, but didn't) and found the netting he's wearing in top right photo. It saved his sanity. As we left the trail, we saw the sign (bottom right photo) for the real Appalachian Trail.
Your photos and descriptions brought back so many memories.
Lynne
P.S. Every summer when my brother and I visit our family upstate, we go to the Cornell Lab. (Remember my sister-in-law's zoom lens.) Last year, the building was closed for renovation, so all the guided activity was outdoors. It rains a lot in the Finger Lakes region (I still wonder why my family ended up there, since both sides came from beautiful towns right on the Mediterranean Sea) and the mosquitos are BIG. Poor Josh--they love him.
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