We arrived today on the family land of an unschooling
friend, Gail. Hereafter this shall be referred to as “Gail’s place,” which is
what Frank and I have been calling it for short. The land her family owns here
is big—over 600 acres—and we are parked at one edge of it near the remains of
the family’s old homestead and trading post. We have territorial views in all
directions. There is a neighbor in sight, maybe—we can’t decide if the teeny
little structures we can see are inhabited or not; it might just be relics and
storage—but our privacy is significantly deeper than any we’ve had on this
trip. (The one debatable exception is our stay two months ago (!) at Duck Lake
up in Montana. But the bathroom facilities here—our port-a-potty, planted out
in the open not far from the trailer—are significantly more pleasant than the
nasty outhouse at the Duck Lake campground.)
As I type this, I have a lovely view, past the trading post
and the silhouettes of the trees that flank it, to the gold and peach sunset
behind the western ridge. Out the other window, some rocky bluffs that run
along the edge of the property are catching the last rays of this golden light.
Very nice.
Once we finish running our generator, the quiet will be
disturbed only by what I assume are crickets. Their song is not a squeaky,
repetitive one but a looooooong steady drone. We heard them at Hovenweep too.
I wonder if there will be coyotes here like there were at
Hovenweep. We can only hope. (Update 10/15: There were!)
So, in exchange for campground noise and flush toilets, we
have quiet, the port-a-potty (which does flush, come to think of it), and thorn
bushes. The thorn bushes are abundant and… What’s the word? Efficient?
Effective? Whatever, we were getting poked so much while setting up camp that
we got our gaiters out of the “Well, we might find a use for this” box of gear
that we’ve been hauling all over the west. (See? We needed those!) They help
tremendously and are going to make tromping around the property very much
nicer.
There are tracks—horse and vehicle—in the dried mud of the
road, which means someone has been out here since the rain last week. This
leaves us vaguely uneasy because we are parked smack dab in the middle of the
drive, but hopefully whoever they were will stay away until we depart again. We
expect this departure to be Friday, after four nights here, because there is
significant rain in the forecast and we don’t want to get stuck in the mud out
here. We’ll keep an eye on the weather report. Fortunately, we don’t have to
drive very far to get a good cell signal, although we have none right here
where we’re camped.
The stars are coming out! And it’s getting cold. We are
layering up so we can enjoy the nighttimes here. But we will almost certainly
be heading farther south after our stay here, because brrrr.
