It was the second day after the storm. I'd slept pretty well and dreamed a lot, but can't remember what about. I packed up most of my stuff and left the laptop out to get online right before leaving. The motel breakfast was calling my name. I ate all the same stuff as the day before, but skipped the waffle. Ha! When I was full of carbohydrates and weak coffee, I stepped outside to get a sense of the temperature...
Tiny streams in the parking lot.
The high forties, and rising.
The HyVee and Cub cards went bye-bye. The former wasn't even for discounts.
It was for gasoline rewards--duh! The Starbucks is precious--it earns me free coffees every now
and then. And I had to keep the RiteAid, since there is a store on every piece of real estate on earth;
probably on the moon as well. Picked up the Regal Cinema card after The Revenant.
Just before leaving I took a couple shots of the room. It was a nice one...
You may remember that I took a shot of the road when I walked to the motel. Here is one looking the other way...
No worries here.
It was super bright and I noticed that my right eye ached a bit as my pupil contracted. The small injury from a few days before had triggered a touch of uveitis. So I went on a search for cheap sunglasses. First I checked WalMart and was pleased to find a nice pair for - I thought - $2.00. The woman at the register did not agree as they rang up at $10.00. What I thought was the price was actually the UV strength "S2" (no idea what that means). I left empty handed.
Next, was RiteAid, but they were out of men's glasses, except for a few $12 and $14 pairs. Same thing with Old Navy. I really wanted to find my tent alive and well again, so I headed back toward the camp site, stopping at Starbucks to work for a few hours first.
The Spartanburg West Gate Mall stood between Starbucks and the sleep spot. I had walked through this gigantic parking lot several times. This time, I walked through the mall itself to check for sunglasses at Sears...
The mall was practically empty, except for Latino folks--no Blancos to be seen. Not sure why. I got to Sears at the end of the mall hall and asked the very, very bored woman sitting behind the watch display if they might have some cheap sunglasses. She pointed me toward the wallet area. Again, nothing! Plenty of women's sunglasses, but even they were way overpriced ($10-30). I couldn't remember the last time I'd been in Sears--maybe when I was ten? I don't even think I've seen their ads.
I remember the Sears catalog though, also from when I was a kid! Six hundred pages of absolutely everything that could be sold legally. Loved looking at the musical instruments (this was before the days of Guitar Center and online places like Musician's Friend, when it was rarer to see instruments and their prices before going into a music store). Of course the women in bathing suits was always worth a look. No bathroom in America was complete without that catalog. Must have cost millions to print and send that sucker out for free! And, here they were - an empty store in 2016 - selling $30 glasses. I was looking for something in the $2-3 range.
I'd pretty much given up. I walked back through the mall, past the massage chairs, aromatherapy stand, hoverboard stand, ten sports shops for hip young men, with their day glo sneakers and form fitting sweatshirts, past the jewelry store, past the plants filled with plastic trees, and through a store I'd never heard of - Belk - and then out into the parking lot. I was curious why the world needed so many department stores. But, the thought only lasted about one second.
As I made my disappointed way toward the field across from the cinema, I saw a Mighty Dollar and figured it was worth a try. On the front door were the typical list of so-called "dollar store" type rules. No refunds, only exchanges, blah, blah, blah... I was just making sure they allowed backpacks. Saggy was not discriminated against. Phew!
There is only one dollar store that I know of where everything is a dollar or less, and that is the Dollar Tree. All the rest use the word dollar but they're really just a bunch of dollar-posers. Even on this door was a slightly detaching sign that said, "Most of our products are a dollar!" Liars! Ha! I checked around, and except for a few food items nearing their expiration dates, everything was over a dollar. Can't trust advertising anymore.
I found the sunglasses. They had plenty. And some of them were kind of cool looking. But they were all $8.99. Almost good enough. But I only had $9 and would be needing $5 after coffee the next day on my walk out of town. Well, I needed a hell of a lot more than that, but post-Christmas donations weren't exactly flowing in. Interesting isn't it, after all I wrote about Christmas?
I left the Mighty Dollar vowing to take my revenge by writing about them. Okay, check that off the list. The sun was just touching the treetops when I fake-checked my watch as a car passed by, and then crunched through the snow to the camp site. I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the tent waiting there for me like a loyal dog. It looked lonely and a bit weathered. I guess I expected that. I opened up the flap to air it out...
The moisture seen on the head end is from the rain that was under the little
blue hiking tarp when I'd put it on there two nights before to stop the leaks on my head.
Looking inside I was surprised to see that somehow water had leaked in or under it and covered the mid section of the floor...
I ran my hand under the tent and felt a puddle. But did the water come into the tent from the tarp/fly and then soak down through the bottom, or did it melt in and onto the bottom tarp, thence soaking up through the floor from the snow that had piled up outside. The jury is still out. Some of the sources for the leaks in this tent are among the greatest mysteries of the universe. The scientific part of me knows there are answers, but I just can't figure them out sometimes. I unstaked the tarp/fly and removed it; hanging it on a nearby tree in the last beams of orange sunlight, then tipped the tent up against a tree to take a good look at what I've been calling the "new tarp" underneath. It isn't so new anymore...
I still couldn't figure out where the water had come from. My working hypothesis is that the foot end of the tarp/fly had a combination of leaking through its seam (which channeled drops down into the corner of the tent--a problem I had in Athens), and the snow piled on that outside, perhaps melting in and between the floor of the tent and the under-tarp.
I know all of this speculation is thrilling beyond belief for you readers. You're on the edges of your loveseats with anticipation. You have worked hard all day and navigated the human jungle of danger and intrigue just to read about the puddle in my tent. Aren't you lucky! Honestly, I guess I'm being this specific so that I can refer back to these ideas in the future and maybe put together a more coherent theory for leakage. You might have termites, gutter clogs, ice dams, dry rot, burst pipes (shout out to Melinda!)... I have tent leaks. Maybe they are magnitudes less serious than your issues--okay, they definitely are, but they are what make an "up" day or a "down" day for me. Simplifying life does not lessen some levels of frustration. In a more serious sense, tent leaks before a cold night slips below freezing can actually be dangerous to life and frostbitten limb.
At this point, my real concern was drying everything as best I could. This was certainly no disaster. I had stockpiled napkins and paper towels from several restaurants for just such an event. I put them to good use wiping everything down, even the ground side of the under-tarp and then just let it all sit in the air for about an hour...
Naturally, as the temperature dropped, the rate of evaporation slowed. So - especially with the tent floor - I wiped my hands quickly up and down the fabric allowing the friction to warm it on both the inside and outside, while blowing on it. This actually worked! The other (green) tarp dried more quickly. And, the tarp/fly dried before everything else.
I swept the snow out from around the edges of the footprint of the tent, then laid the under-tarp down...
The tent floor was dry enough, and I knew it would dry completely under the radiant warmth of the sleeping bag that night. I got everything set back up...
It was nice to know that through a little extra effort I would be stowing a dry tent in my pack the next morning. I had downloaded three Terence McKenna talks from the Psychedelic Salon podcast and charged my iPod that afternoon. Nothing relaxes me and makes time fly like the endlessly interesting voice of "The Bard McKenna" as he riffs and waxes eloquently about hyperspace with his amazingly fresh viewpoint. He died in 2000, but his ideas (these talks were from 1993) are as new and prophetic as when he gave the seminar from which they are derived. He is the best speaker I have ever heard. His political and social philosophies are the primary ones that I have adapted into my own worldview and belief system. He is the one who first said, "We need to wear ours souls on the outside." In my short list of purely human heroes, he floats somewhere above them all.
I settled into the warmth of the sleeping bag, in my dry tent, put the earbuds in, and pressed play. Ahhhh, true relaxation. I woke later that night (having fallen asleep during the first talk), with the end of the third talk still running. Best sleeping pill around. I shut off the iPod, turned over and sank back into unconsciousness.
_______________________________________________________________________
PLEASE CLICK ON OUR SPONSOR ADS BELOW FOR GREAT DEALS!
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
PLEASE CLICK ON OUR NON-PROFIT CAUSES TO SUPPORT YOUR COMMUNITY!
_______________________________________________________________________
Support Dawna Lamson's Simply Smiles fundraising campaign!
From her page...
Help me support Simply Smiles by making a donation to my Win A Trip campaign! With your help, you can send me to Oaxaca, Mexico or the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota to work with Simply Smiles. The process is fast, easy, and secure. I truly appreciate any support you can provide. And, no matter the outcome, it will benefit a great cause!
If you can't make a donation at this point, help me reach my goal by sharing this page on Facebook and Twitter! Or, even better, send an e-mail to friends you think might be interested in contributing and include a link to my page!
Thanks so much for your generosity!
This will be a wonderful opportunity for Dawna to provide a brighter future for impoverished children, their families, and their communities. It's easy to give! Just click on Dawna's picture below.
_______________________________________________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.