Don't Bug Me I'm Camping

After the excitement of that first glorious night, with the constantly developing panoply of river life, tugs to-ing and fro-ing, roaring diesels, flashing lights, froth of wake and fulness nearing of blue, blue moon I slept, in my toasty bed, soft, blessed, like a log.

This new air mattress turned out excellent must remember to get a foot pump.

 A vigilant log, to be sure. Every couple hours looking around to see where's the  dory, is the fire still out, where's my flashlight, everything's fine. As the night progressed my trips out into the sand away from the camp to seek nature's solace were shorter and shorter as I began to care less and less about anything but the shortest distance back to sleep.

That might be the Rebel pushing a grain barge down the Columbia as I camped like a boss and watched the world of the river go by.

 Then there was a slash of deepest blue among the dark charcoal clouds and it was soon morning and the greatest cup of coffee of my whole life.
When my kid was little and we went camping he was obsessed with sticks, picking and collecting and stacking and dragging every stick as if vastly important. I found myself in solidarity with the little tyke, who is now 28 and does not speak to me. That mattered not as I collected and dragged and then stacked all categorized the sticks of the beach, and then burned the most of them sweetly smoking in my little camp.

The Happy Camper

More cooking and eating although I have virtually no appetite nor capacity for very much at all it still was outstanding roasting a smoked polish link on a stick and then drowning it in clam chowder of which I fulfilled my self-promise to eat a little more. Easy. It was good.
All this camping equipment was new, the mattress and tarp and stove and cooler it all performed fully as advertised. It makes a boatload, but the more, it seems, you put in the boat, the better she goes. The longer each pull of the oars sends you forward, the less she wobbles and crooks her tracks, and the stronger you feel.

Under the blue lifejacket, handy but not actually worn, is the edge of brown tarp wrapping up all the backpacks and bags and softer stuff to keep it dry, and then all the extra ropes and floats and my new throwable PFD and that is just the front half of stowage.

 This  morning, Friday, having slept at home last night, I discovered many a skeeter bite faintly russet among the sunburn  and I wonder I never noticed there were bugs out there.