Howling in the woods

From Crown Pointe IN I headed west on the I-80 in mostly-pleasant weather and really, what is there to report about “slabbing it” (biker-speak for “taking the interstate”) across the great plains on a sunny day? Most interstates are boring. I can almost recite the order of towns across central Ohio along the I-71, across TN on the I-40, from WV through IN on the I-70. If I had all the time in the world I’d probably never ride them (with the possible exception on the I-95 in NH) but I don’t have all the time in the world and if divided super-highways typically go through flat, featureless terrain they at the same time afford you (typically) with road conditions that allow for faster speeds and safer conditions. So let’s just say I’m not sure how many miles I covered on day-two heading towards Steamboat Springs but I’m pretty sure I made 500 easily, crossing the Nebraska State line as the sun was getting low enough on the horizon to have me thinking of where I’d spend the night. I’m pretty familiar with Lincoln, my band having played there quite a bit in years past and I’ve been to Omaha a couple times and I like both city’s enough to maybe want to get a hotel room and a nice meal. At the same time, I’m geared to camp and If I’m ostensibly on my way to CO to make money then maybe I should try and save it where ever I can.

     So I consult the map outside of Omaha and find a state park not 15 miles off the interstate and decide to camp for the night. I get to St Louis State Park a little before dark and find the camp office still open.

 “Can I pick my own spot?” I say to the ranger
“Sure, what kind of spot do you want?”
 “A tent spot. Not to sound like creepy-camps-by-himself guy, but away from the crowd if ya can….no Sweet Home Alabama, no Kumbaya…”
“No prob. That’ll be $12”
“Do you have firewood?”
“Sorry, camp store just closed, but the convenience store should have some”

 So I go pick out a secluded spot by the river, and it seems quiet enough and I get the tent pitched before it gets dark and get my gear all laid out where I can find it and I light my lantern and take a ride over to the convenience store outside the park. I’d get bug repellant, but they’re charging $9 for a can of OFF, I’d get beer if I hadn’t already grabbed a tall-boy near the interstate and I’d get firewood, but they don’t HAVE any.

 SHIT.

 If “camping without beer” is just” sleepin’ outside,” then “camping without a campfire” just…um, SUCKS 

But it’s a nice enough evening. There’s a slight breeze, I’m warm, I’m dry, I’m not complaining. The camp grounds seem quiet enough. You can just barely hear the river above the crickets and the katydids, I don’t have a campfire but I do have my phone and I do have an android notepad and both devices have kindle apps installed and loaded with lots of reading material---or so I think. I decide to put my phone on the charger on the bike and read whatever I have loaded in the notepad---which I find after starting has crashed--- which leaves me with whatever comes loaded with it and nothing else and what comes loaded with it is Jack London’s “White Fang.” I should probably get motivated enough to go fire up the pad right now and transcribe the first paragraph of “White Fang.” But I’m not….let’s just say it kind of blew me away.
Oh hell. Now I HAVE to re-read it…the best parts go like this:

 “The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement. So lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but a laughter more terrible than any sadness---a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter as cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility, I was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life….”

 WOW.

 So, seduced as I was by that first paragraph I read on about the travails of two men alone in the arctic, attempting to stave off the inevitable as a pack of wolves surrounds them, killing their dogs, eventually claiming one of the men when his bullets run out, surrounding the other man who staves them off by surrounding himself with fire .

 Fire

 Which I do not have, alone out here in the campgrounds of the state park. Out here in the woods along the river where I’m reading this in a tent in the dark all by myself…. And at the very moment in the story where the last man is about to succumb to the pack of wolves, outside my tent---for real—there erupts a loud

HOOOOOOWL!!

A pack of coyotes has just killed something.

For real.

I can’t make this shit up