Early evening at Two Medicine Lake.
Early evening at Two Medicine Lake. We arrive at our campsite and take a bottle of white down to the water’s edge to sit and watch. We don’t like the smoke from the fires but we do like the depth of field.
Over her camp stove, June makes an exquisite couscous with kielbasa, chickpeas, sun-dried tomato and zucchini from her garden. Then we go to sleep in our tent on the big glamping mattress I bought as a condition of this type of outdoor adventure.
We wake to the sound of rain, knowing it’s been raining for a long time. We make love and drink coffee and revel in the pleasure of being warm and dry. It’s going to rain all day and I have brought a good book, so I’m very happy to stay where I am.
But June wants to get up. So I squat in the rain and wash last night’s dishes in the ice water of the campground’s well while she makes breakfast — eggs and sausage with mushrooms, bread and butter with jam from the huckleberries she picked last fall. It all tastes so good out here it’s ridiculous.
We drive to the lake for a hike and I have a surprise — umbrellas! She laughs at me but five minutes up the trail has to acknowledge my urban genius as the rain pours down and the soaked hikers pass by, headed for shelter.
Umbrellas are the best. You can go for a walk in horrible weather and get to see and smell everything — the forest an incandescent green sparkling with raindrops, the emerald and burgundy stones wet and luscious on the path, the air an earthy soup of pure oxygen — while staying dry and serene.
I guess this is how I am. I like to be right in the thick of it but not get wet. I like to see it and taste it and then sit under my umbrella and feel it, to absorb the impact inside. And then write about it.
