We learned a lesson about tents and zippers. We learned that when they give you two zippers so you can open or close the door from wherever you want, you should always choose to close the zippers at the top of the door. We did not leave a zipper open when we went to bed the first night out. There were plenty of animal noises from outside the tent, but during the night I woke to the sound of feet scuffling about inside the tent. I rolled over and in the bright moonlight got a very good look at a black and white striped skunk about a foot from my face. It was a beautiful creature: long hair, well groomed, its big fluffy tail held straight up, but not tense. One more observation: when your head is on the ground looking up, skunks look *really* big. I looked over at the tent door to see if it was open and it was not. I thought: “I don’t know how he got in, but if I don’t know and he doesn’t remember and gets scared, this could be *very* bad.” “If we inadvertently do something to alarm him….” “There are so many ways this situation could suddenly get so much worse.” My head held visions of an hysterical skunk running screaming laps around the inside of our tent, spraying. When I rolled over and looked at the skunk, he took a few steps back but didn’t leave. I looked at Jon to see if he had anything to offer. He was sound asleep. I didn’t make a sound. I got my arms out of the sleeping bag and carefully waved the skunk back a few steps toward the door. He stopped again. He didn’t seem to be upset. I sat up a little more and extended my arms to gently “guide” him to the door (without actually touching him of course). I could see a small gap in the zippers at the bottom. So could the skunk. He went to the door, stuck his nose into the gap between the zippers, lifted a little to create a bigger gap, and quietly slipped through and walked off into the night. No harm done. I pulled the zippers tight together again and went back to bed. It was later on as I was reliving the experience that I figured out the lesson about where the zippers should end up at night. The following morning, we were visiting with our next-door-camping-neighbor. He was packing his gear into his car. He said: “I hope I didn’t scare you last night.” “What? Scare us how?” We wondered to ourselves what he could have done to scare us after what we’d just been through. He said “I screamed like a girl when I woke up in the middle of the night and saw that skunk in my tent!” I knew from the way the skunk didn’t panic and worked that zipper so smoothly that he’d done this before. Apparently he does it every night as much as he wants.
West Texas report
Stay tuned. I’m still writing. More tomorrow…
Happy Anniversary to us
46 years today. If we add in the 4 years we waited to get married, that’s 50 years we’ve been together. Any time in our lives when we weren’t together is a distant memory indeed. 82 degrees and sunny. Life on the beach. Dinner at Snoopy’s.
West Texas Trip
Big Bend National Park. Fort Davis State Park. 1,700 miles, and we never left Texas. Birds in 15 counties. I have no idea how many birds altogether yet, but I’ll tell you later. County-birds. Year-birds. Lifers. This was a trip about birds and it was very good. It was a camping trip too. Jon brought the tent. He brought a nice big tent with those long bendy shock-corded poles. I brought a brand-new air mattress that has a built in foot pump for inflation. It worked great. Jon brought a borrowed air mattress with a duct tape patch. He called it his sleep-number bed. Every night he blew it up with a portable electric pump to about a 98. By the next morning it was always about a 2. We had temperatures ranging from the 100s at Rio Grande Village, with about 90 degrees in the Chisos Basin where we camped the first two nights, to the low 40s in the Davis Mountains in the mornings. Sometimes it was hard to sleep from the heat. It was cool enough to cover up at night in the mountains. We did all the usual camping things. We got caught out on the trail in a thunderstorm. The tent got caught in the thunderstorm too, so that first hot night in the tent could best be described as “swampy”. We spent a night in a windstorm with the tent repeatedly flexing and collapsing on our heads before springing back into position about 800 times. Ungainly javalinas invaded our camp; clattering about on those dainty little hooved feet. A fox walked between our folding chairs. A bear passed within 25 yards of us. Elf Owls called at night in the Basin. Common Poorwills and Western Screech Owls sang from right above our heads in the dark at Fort Davis State Park.
Home again
A great trip. It’s good to be back.