Reading: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Watching: rain and lakes

Moving: hiked a few miles

6 September 2002: Two Ocean Lake and Oxbow Bend

Rain. Now, I'm not so gung-ho about camping in theory. It's a cheap means to an end. Having mule deer five feet away is kind of cool. Learning the Catalan and Castillian words for "weasel" (and promptly forgetting them, both something like "armenyi") from the Spanish family whose campsite was next to its burrow was fun. Being out of the city and into the tamed, paved, with flush toilets and bear lockers, wild is great. But at home I have a dishwasher; how much of a vacation is having to wash dishes at all, let alone in hauled water painstakingly heated and rinsed in more hauled water distastefully hauled to an service sink? Camping is better now that I use daily contacts, even if only on rainy days (and the Yellowstone day since I cannot use binoculars over uncorrected eyes). Camping is not better with percolated coffee making a whole pot to swab out instead of the little filter holders we've used previously. And not better with rain.

I will never curse rain, but I admit I enjoy it the way Richard Adams says humans (opposed to rabbits) enjoy winter: they enjoy the protection against it. I ate oatmeal and drank coffee then orange juice in the rain that morning, armored in Gore-tex parka and pants. I retreated to the tent--stripping my protective layers in the car, where they wouldn't dry, but not wanting them in the tent to soak the sleeping bags either, and dashing for cover--there to read Michael Chabon for the morning while RDC fished the lake and saw a black bear (smallish, he said).

In the afternoon (after vegetable soup, cooled by rain splashing into it) we headed for Two Ocean Lake. I'd read that trumpeter swans are often spotted there, and I wanted to say hi to Louis.

It was vaguely spooky. We were the only car at the trailhead. The steady, light rain drummed on our hoods, enforcing the quiet. Also it smelled just wonderful, the rain and the sage and the willow and the clean, clean air. Also it was beautiful.

We saw teal and canvasback and a pair of mule deer (the last not on the water) and, on the opposite bank, a white blur that did move but that, even through 8x25 binoculars, refused to resolve itself into a swan. We didn't take many pictures because of the rain.

Back at Oxbow Bend, we did see a moose, a huge bull. I never saw one in New England, moose not exactly rampant in southern Connecticut, so my first moose was on the western side of Rocky Mountain National Park with my father in 1996. They were introduced there a while back, and since then they've crossed the Continental Divide and have been spotted on the much drier eastern side.

The second two sightings are stories. In the summer of 1997, RDC's mother visited us and the three of us went to RMNP. Ahead of us on a trail, two parents and a boy ambled. At a bark of my laughter, they turned to look at whatever that hideous noise was, and I yelped and exclaimed all too audibly, "Omigod." Because the father was Charles Bierbauer from CNN, and this was when Charles Bierbauer had the Capitol beat and interviewed someone at 8:30 eastern time every weekday, and I watched him at 6:30 mountain time. I was a CNN junkie (and ha, my being such a one scripted the way for Nick Hornby to insult me), and this was my first (and to date, only), spontaneous Brush with Celebrity Greatness. So I wasn't sure it was he, sexy beard or no. Then I noticed he was wearing a CNN/fn t-shirt and the boy wore a shirt for some Potomac brand of Little League. So it was he. Also we saw moose that day.

In the summer of 2000, RDC, Haitch, Ben, and I went to RMNP for the day. I think this was Ben's first time in the park. We spotted moose, and he was amused by how people would just stop in the middle of the road, not pulling over, to look at a critter. Ben was not the first to invent the game of pulling over, getting out, and pointing and binocularing at nothing at all just to to tantalize other motorists, but we did enjoy that round.

Thus ends my moose-spotting.

That night I could not get warm. Golly I wonder why. The inside of the tent was mostly dry and we had a towel to dry our feet (we didn't have the vestibule so had no place for wet boots; we ran from car to tent in Tevas), but our body heat combined with damp air created condensation on the interior walls and I expected rime to form. Our sleeping bags are lined with brushed nylon, not as slick and sticky as regular nylon but not as cozy as combed cotton sheets by a long shot. I wasn't radiating enough body heat to dry my feet; I felt like those terrestials on rainy Venus in the Rad Bradbury short story in The Illustrated Man. I had brought the fleece blanket to snuggle under by evening campfires and forgotten about it until RDC tucked it around me (and cold as I was, wearing clothing to bed never occurred to me). Then I warmed up.