Camping at Kingston Lake

We just met a guy who goes by the name Camping Russ. That is what he has painted on the side of his trailer in which he hauls all of his equipment which he then unloads and assembles as extensions of his truck. He has a shower and a toilet and a kitchen and a bunch of other extremely high end, Rube Goldberg like accouterments. We met CR on our walk because, of course, he wanted to know more about Swirl because he is so handsome. Punchy runs small circles around whoever is holding his leash during these conversations. It is the behavior of a homely kid brother.

We still just have our pop up tent which always smells hideous when we first set it up but is lovely after a few hours with the breeze humming through the screen windows. We are camped on the edge of a small lake that we’ve canoed many times. Once when we were here, we sat in our old green canoe in the middle of the lake and watched two eagles fly about for close to an hour.  No canoe today. Too much camping equipment. We could only have brought the canoe if we’d put it on top of the truck. The thought alone makes me hysterical even if we could lift it which I’m not sure we could. Instead we usually put the canoe in the truck bed, like an oversized sofa, and tie a scrap of red material to the canoe’s rear to conform with the law. No one up here cares though. We could have purple sheep roaming around our open truck bed and nobody would say a word.

We are camped about thirty miles from our house on Lake Superior. This makes no sense since we have the world’s best view and a full larder, but camping has become the way we trick ourselves into thinking we’re still able to do things which may appear to others to be difficult. Most things are just heavy, not hard, but today we had the challenge of assembling a new cot. This required the use of an ax as a hammer which I dislike because of the obvious risk of maiming. We only have small bandages in the first aid kit, I thought to myself, as my husband pulled back the ax to give an essential locking piece a good whack. What would I use to staunch the bleeding? My hoodie? I only brought the one.

For dinner, we packed a frozen pork loin the size of a children’s baseball bat. By mid-afternoon, it showed no signs of thawing in time for us to cook it, although to roast it, I’d have had to pitch it directly into the fire since there is no rack for the firepit. So, when we went to a tiny ‘party store’ (as they call them in Michigan), I spied an eight dollar jar of homemade sauerkraut which I bought along with a package of bratwursts, the price of which I avoided seeing, along with four cookies, also homemade, and a bag of cheddar/sour cream chips made at the Ford factory in Detroit that closed in 1976.

So, dinner on the Coleman stove it is. With beer from Wisconsin and red wine from St. Julian’s winery in SW Michigan, a place where they pour free shots at the bar for people pulling off the interstate for a little rest and rejuvenation. The wine is not great, though as a box wine drinker, I hardly qualify as a judge, still, it seems rushed wine – what one would make in one’s kitchen if grapes grew in the backyard and special people were coming to dinner.

The wind is picking up. It occurs to me that I may have to put my pajamas on under my jeans. It is always colder camping than you think it will be unless you are in the great Southwest, then it is too hot for words and there is no way to cool down except to pray for sleep and a dawn that might include dew. Either way, the sitting in it -the heat or the breeze or the cold – is good and important for its own sake. It makes a person settle down and not think of 10,000 things at once and just reflect on Camping Russ and what all he’s got going at his pumped up camp down the path a bit.