Hiking, the lake, and meteor showers

Just when I said no one goes on the trails around Lost Lake, today the campers got moving. In the morning a bus filled with teenagers pulled in. Counselors and kids hiked around the lake, talking as loud as they could as they got one with nature. At least I suppose that was the intent.

After those screaming children passed by, others in the campground were inspired to take their own walks with dogs barking and children objecting.

Gary and I settled down in chairs at the edge of the lake to tan and let the ruckus die down. He had a heavy duty air mattress tethered to an anchor.  For a while I snoozed on it until the deer flies started attacking.  I hit the trail.  Immediately a family with a small dog (a puggle) turned onto the trail in front of me.  I sat down on a log and let them get ahead of me. 

When I started up again a stream of hikers came toward me.  I pulled to one side and let them pass.  I was half way around the lake when the puggle group came up behind me. They had taken a wrong turn onto the ridge trail, discovered their mistake and got back on the lake trail. Once again, I let them go on.  

Past the Lost Lake CCC cabins, I met a new stream of campers.  One of them was the boy I talked to yesterday.  He was eager to tell me that he had seen a porcupine burrow.  Since porcupines sleep in trees and don't burrow, he was mistaken, but I left him have his illusions.  He was trying to look at nature and that is all that counts. 

Gary is setting his alarm and we'll be off to bed early.  Around midnight, we'll take our flashlights and go down to the lake to see if we can spot any of the Perseid meteors streaking across the sky. They will be making a spectacle of themselves for the next three days.  For the past few years, we've had clouds or a full moon, either of which ruined the meteor showers.  There is no ambient light at Lost Lake, the moon won't interfere, and the sky is clear as I type this so we are hoping this is the year for shooting stars.

***

Blogging news:

I've never had as many "hits" or comments at this blog as I have since I wrote about John Ferguson.  He had so many friends.  Carol thought my column was right on, though I wrote it here at the campground with no journals to consult.  His daughter Glenda said much the same. She said people told her what a unique individual he was.  Which reminds me of the joke John told Mary at the canning company on the day our friendship began. 

How do you catch a unique rabbit?  You neek up on him. 

How do you catch a tame rabbit?  Tame way.     

Terrible joke, but he got Mary's attention. 

Then there's Black Coffee Fiction http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com  Since Bettyann Moore joined us we've added readers, probably those who like outrageous stories about silk panties.

Charles, Sean and Chris those three gay caballeros are on the Pacific Coast Trail again.  They've completed the California stretch and are in Oregon. So many others who began the trail on the Mexican border have given up, but they are still trekking right along.  You can follow their adventures at http://3gaycaballeros.blogspot.com/

On the Trail...or on the Beach

I came to Lost Lake yesterday to join Gary at campsite no. 23, our favorite. There were three campsites filled when I arrived, then eight by nightfall. Today is the beginning of the weekend and eighteen of the twenty seven campsites are filled.

Most of the campers are behaving themselves though some people from Illinois seem to be spending their day target shooting at beer cans with air guns.  We hope no chipmunks, songbirds, dogs or children become more interesting targets.

My usual way to avoid all the noise is to take my hiking stick and head off down a trail. Most of the campers amuse themselves at the beach or sitting on lawn chairs in front of fires downing beverages and eating junk food.  I almost never see anyone on the trail.

I was ambling along when a boy came tearing down the trail toward me.  He was perhaps nine or ten, with a shock of black hair, a red shitr, shorts and dirty shoes. He seemed terrified.

"Did you find something on the trail?"  I asked.

"I was going around the lake and the trail went into the woods."

"That's just the marsh.  You get back to the lake eventually."

I took him with me and showed him the way.  A woodpecker was working the old hemlock trees and I pointed it out.  "That's a black backed woodpecker.  You don't see them anywhere but here."  The boy didn't know that there were so many kinds of woodpeckers.

When we came to a part where the trail narrows, I told him I almost stepped on a porcupine there.  He had never seen a porcupine, so that interested him.  He had seen a bear when his family drove down the Lost Lake Road on their way to the cabins.

We got around the swamp and when the trail took us back to the lake, I told him he could run to the cabins where his parents were waiting for him.  "Don't wait for me, I'm taking it easy."

He ran on and I reflected that for once I had enjoyed the company of someone else on the trail.

Meanwhile, Gary was doing what he does best which is catching the sun next to the lake.

***
Bettyann Moore has added another Porpoise McAllister story to Black Coffee Fiction. http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com  This time she tells us the beginning of the Porpoise saga. It really should be read because it explains so much about Porpoise.

***
I asked for comments a while back, got none, and finally one of my readers told me that she couldn't make any because the blog wouldn't let her.  I checked our settings and found out she was right.  I've made corrections so fire away.

John Ferguson

In the late 1980s, John Ferguson came up from Sonora, Kentucky in his white truck Snowflake to deliver something or other to the Seymour Canning Company.

He was in the office signing paperwork, when the clerk said, “I know one of them.”

He didn't know what she meant until she pointed at the side of his truck with its sign that read, “John Ferguson, Storytelling Truck Driver.” Mary knew that her choir director was also a storyteller.

A few minutes later, John was on the phone with me, introducing himself. We met for coffee the next time he came through Seymour. That was the beginning of a long friendship.

John told me about Lee and Joy Pennington who ran the Louisville Storytellers and organized the Corn Island Storytelling Festival in Louisville each summer. Would I like to go? I explained that I never had much money and driving that far, staying in a motel and paying to get into the festival was just more than I could afford. 

No problem. John was coming up through Seymour, delivering goods there, then going up to the potato growing area around Antigo, Wisconsin to get a load of potatoes that he would then take down to Nashville, Tennessee to the Frito-Lay plant. He would pick me up on his way to get the potatoes. I got to see the potato business first hand, how the potatoes were picked, cleaned and bagged. I also got to see the trucking business from the inside of his semi.  We went south and for the first time, I got to see Kentucky.

John took me to his house to meet his family. But “house” is not a good description of where they lived. It seems years before his wife Carol complained about raising her three children in a crowded house trailer. She told him that if he didn't do something about it she was going to move into the big grain bin on their property.

So John, being John, looked at the grain bin and began to take measurements. It took a long, long time, but that grain bin became a round house, with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, a stone fireplace, a modern kitchen and not a square or rectangular room in the whole place. It is a marvel. The exterior walls are limestone rock, the stones carefully chosen for the fossils embedded in them.

What I loved the most was what was once the vent on the top of the grain bin. John raised it and created his study, a round room on the top floor with round windows that looked out on the surrounding countryside. His Amish neighbors often drove past in their buggies. 

Carol and John were both involved in the Corn Island Festival. Carol ran the concessions, John worked on parking and wherever he was needed. I helped out where I could.

The festival began on the Louisville Belle, a paddle-wheel steamer. We got a cruise on the Ohio River and saw the sights of Louisville. The storytelling was in the salon. It was on the steamer that I began to hear the professionals storytellers. By the end of the week, I would hear tellers from around the United States and the world and make friends with some of them.

The next day the festival moved to Tom Sawyer Park where we could wander from one area to another looking for more and more stories. My mind was filled with the tales and their craft. It was an education for this still novice teller. 

The last night of the festival we were at Long Run Park. People by the thousands filled the hillsides with blankets where they spread with fine foods and wines. They came with flashlights, too. When the program began, Lee Pennington asked them to shine them to make a light-show in this natural amphitheater.. Then the ghost telling began. John, who had been parking cars, led me to the very front of the audience where we sat on a blanket and listened as one by one, the tellers did their best to scare us witless. The best teller by far was Roberta Brown, a little woman with the sweet soft voice who to this day can send shivers up my spine whenever I think about her stories.

Before and after the festival, John and I went to the schools in the area. The money I earned paid for all the expenses of the trip.

So it went for years. I went down the Corn Island Festival, stayed with the Fergusons, ate Carol's southern cooking, became more and more proficient in my telling and enjoyed thee friendship of the tellers. I found out that John kept his eye out for storytellers around the country, connecting with them wherever he drove his truck. He was the goodwill ambassador for storytelling. His work with schools, telling the children stories and teaching them about trucking by letting them climb all over Snowflake got him the coveted title of USA Trucker of the Year.

 He and Carol raised three children, had grandchildren. In time, Snowflake grew old and refused to run. John started a new career as a hypnotist and wrote a book, but then his kidneys gave out. In the end he was on dialysis, waiting for a kidney.

I hadn't seen John and Carol for some years, but thought I would this winter when I go south to Mississippi on another tour. It was not to be.

John Ferguson, the man who picked me up with a load of potatoes and showed me the world, died two nights ago.

The Witches of Castle Crabapple

It seems sad news and happy news always come together and so it was today.

The good news came early this morning with an e-mail from Colette Bezio.

Doris Bezio, a member of the Quill Club, our writers' group during the 1980s and 1990s, was our poet laureate. She sometimes brought her daughter Colette with her to our monthly meetings.

I was not one of the founders but I was a member for years.  It was there that I met Susan Manzke who writes a weekly column about farm life that appears in two publications.  Betty, who contributed humorous stories that are now finding their way into Black Coffee Fiction, later became an editor for a newspaper, followed by two magazines.  I wrote for all three.  Lee, Bridget, Darlene and others, we all met monthly to write and socialize.

The best part of being in the Quill Club was that when any of us published something we could celebrate together.  It was sad when we no longer met.

Now the old gang needs to get together again soon because Colette has published a children's book, The Witches of Castle Crabapple.    She works at the Muehl Public Library where she creates designs for special events, runs the equipment, and gives me advice on books I might enjoy.  Head librarian Elizabeth Timmins urged Colette to write this book, which is just the first volume of a planned series. Not only did she write the story, she illustrated it beautifully.

The Witches of Castle Crabapple, now available at Amazon.com at this link.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Witches-Castle-Crabapple-Volume/dp/1475249217/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344434355&sr=8-1&keywords=witches+of+castle+crabapple

When the first case of books is delivered to Colette, it will be party time.  As I said, happy news.

I think I will save the sad news for tomorrow.

Adrienne Rich

Years ago someone gave me a poem by Adrienne Rich.  It's been on my bulletin board ever since.

Song

You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns' first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

It was a poem that spoke to me who lived alone and yet seldom was lonely.  I thought of it often when I seized my collapsible aluminum walking stick and went down yet another trail or when I took my car out on some storytelling tour "driving across country day after day, leaving behind mile after mile".  

When my cousin Charles, together with Sean and Christo, decided to attack the Pacific Crest Trail, I yearned to be off on a trail of my own, to walk alone with nature and my thoughts for an entire summer, but with arthritic knees, I must settle for shorter hikes. I no longer can carry a heavy pack.  I watch their blog 3gaycaballeros.blogspot.com and worry about them when they haven't posted for a few days though I know full well they can't when they are so far from signals.  

I read Cheryl Strayed's Wild to get the feel of the trail, but that only assured me that I really was too old to endure such a trek.  I did get the list of the books she read on the PCT and one of them was Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language.  I got that collection of poetry.   Now I read one of the poems each night before I go to bed and let it sink in as I go to sleep.  When I finish this volume, I'll go on to others.  One book leads to another.  It has always been that way for me. 

Adrienne Rich died in March in her eighties.  It was too soon.    

Looking for Stories

It isn't easy coming up with a new subject for a Black Coffee Fiction short story every other week. (Since Bettyann Moore joined us it is every third week.)  A few months ago, I came up dry so went to my photo scrapbooks to look for ideas.  The result was "Love in the Sixties" which eventually led to my Love Through the Decades stories.  Eight stories later, I've covered that ground.  In two weeks, I will need a new story, so I went back to the scrapbook shelves.  

I grabbed one of the books at random and came up with 1994.  I had forgotten what a busy year it was. I couldn't stay put!   It began with a storytelling trip to Texas in February.  I remember going to a rodeo in a San  Antonio arena, sitting with some large women in seats built for much smaller derrieres a hundred years before.  It got painful after a while.

That year I received a photograph of a little boy in Nambia reading my first children's book at a post office.  

In April, I was in Great Britain on another tour, for the first time meeting Helene my French pen-pal at an English friend's house.   Later Nancy took me on a tour of Essex and Kent.  From there I went on to Glasgow, Scotland and then the Lake District.  I am using much of that trip in a novel I am currently writing.  

But I wasn't done.  In July Gary and I went on yet another tour to Manitoba to take in the Winnipeg Folk Festival between storytelling performances. On our way back from Canada, I performed in North Dakota, a state I've come to love. 

In August, there was the Aestival Festival, a writers' workshop Bettyann and I began with the Quill Club writers.  It's a shame neither the festival or the club are around any more. 

But I still wasn't done.  In September I was on a southern tour that took me to Louisville, Kentucky for the Corn Island Storytelling Festival, all the way to Georgia then back to Tennessee and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough.  

In December of that year my Uncle George died after a full life that included service as a fighter pilot in WWII.  

The year wound down with the Ecumenical Christmas Concert (I was on the committee and wrote the publicity) and the Twelfth Annual All Purpose One Size Fits All Sing for Your Supper 12-Step Winter Solstice Party, held at my home.   

Surely in all of those experiences, I can find some stories.  Watch http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com to see where my scrapbook will lead me.   

Cooling Down

Gary just called from Lost Lake campground to tell me that tonight the expected low temperature there is 48 F.  He is sitting next to a fire.  He'll use the extra warm sleeping bag tonight.  I hope the weather stays sleeping-cool until I  get there on Thursday.  With meetings scheduled, I am staying here in Seymour until then. 

With moderate temperatures, I gardened. During the hot weather, it was next to impossible to do much about the weeds.  Now that it's August, I am not only weeding, I am doing my fall clearing wherever I can.  Summer will soon turn into autumn and autumn into winter.   

Before he left, Gary was checking on his camper out on the Manzke farm.  Susan sent home eggs, tomatoes and zucchini.  Tonight, I'm baking banana bread.  Tomorrow I'll use the tomatoes as the base for a vegetable  soup and tomorrow night, bake zucchini bread.  I picked the first two tomatoes from my own garden so more soups and sauces are on the way.   

It isn't so cold that I need to turn on the furnace, but using the stove makes sense right now. 

With Gary gone, I can get to work on some writing projects.  Wade and I have selected our stories for the Black Coffee Fiction short story collection we intend to self-publish.  When I did the word count on the stories I've written so far, I figured I had enough to do the collection with Wade and still had enough of the "Love Through the Decades" stories to do another book.  If I spend another Advent season writing depressing Christmas stories, I could have another collection for the following year.  

At the same time, I need to finish up the novel and continue this blog.  I'm setting up new storytelling tours, too. I will be in Illinois in October and Mississippi or South Carolina in February.  By the end of September I'll be setting up the summer 2013 tour. 

Finding the time for all those projects is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.  Each item must fit into the hours allotted.  With all that, I will not be camping with Gary as much as I did last summer, just a few flying visits to his campsite and even then, I'll be working on a computer.  

And people ask how I like being retired!