Little House on the Prairie; Summer Lake Hot Springs day two

11/28/16

                I woke up late, the smell of eggs, cilantro, and tomatoes mixed with cheese, frying away on the stove filled the bus.  The view from my bed was the mountains that rimmed the valley.  Funny how the view from the bed, or the chair, to the window never changes, but the outside environment does. 

My great grandmother used to tell me that, though she would say it in regards to aging.  Dusted with snow by the storm that had rocked the bus all night  they were quite beautiful.  I slept while the bus rocked like a boat on rough seas.  It reminded me of sitting through the hurricane Rita, after I deployed to help out after Katrina in 2005.  The storm raged outside, and we hid, like mice, in our safe little shelter hoping that it would pass us by.  The brisk air outside had frosted the inside of the windows, I lay and watched as the sun rose melting it away revealing our surroundings more clearly.  Alice told me she would have taken James out for a walk, however there was 4 dogs running around the campground without  leashes on.  She has an innate fear of dogs because in Kenya dogs chase and bite people on a regular basis.  I took him out,  walking stick/club in one hand and leash in the other, and he did his business.  We came back in and all had an 11:00 am breakfast.  Mine smelled better than James's.  Afterwords we went to the pool, and enjoyed what was left of the morning soaking and Alice, for the first time in her life, swam.  I helped hold her up a little while she mastered floating and then doing the back stroke.  Afterwords she took a nap and James and I went for a walk around the estate.  There were cattle and game trails covering an surreal amount of acreage. The prairie seemed to stretch on forever, with only the distant hem of the mountains signaling  their end.

                We found an old abandoned farm house that had collapsed, as had the root cellar next to it. 

It was a late 1800’s or early 1900’s building.  The lumber was thick, beams, and wide slats.  Milled out of old growth fir. 

The shingles were thin shakes coated with tar.  The nails that held them in were skeletons.  Relics of a time when nails were scarce.  They were not stout thick like modern ones.  Their thin shafts looked more like pine needles than nails.  They looked like thin toothpicks sticking out of a cheese plate.  The material to make nails then was precious, and the labor that went in to making them was far more intensive.  People lived in small houses then, tiny houses, a few hundred square feet, maybe a hundred square meters, these were the normal not the acceptation.  I recounted the last home my father and I built, 20,000 square feet.  It was an acceptation for sure, not the rule.  However, in the last twenty years we had watched the homes we built go from 1,500 square feet to 3,500 square feet.  A lot of the burden of our construction costs fell to permits, and regulatory burdens.  Where we lived the standard permitting cost before breaking ground stood at about $30,000 USD.  Bigger houses were almost the same cost as small ones, materials were almost a negligible cost.  It was the fixed costs that were expensive. 

Economy drove the old ways, the evidence was written in the sparse nails which stood testament to the frugality of the times.  The cellar was built of logs, sparsely hewn, and planted as posts.  The food storage, located adjacent to the home stood in ruins.  I wondered what it must have been like to live, in a time long before refrigeration, when food was the primary concern.  Politics, given the past presidential election, and any other thing that people thought might be important, were regarded as luxuries back then.  No one cared about their face book status, or their online dating profile.  Their primary concern was scratching out a life in conditions that were so harsh the tallest plants grew only knee high.  I would not romanticize that life, the average life span then was only 19.  There is a lot to be learned from a way of life that emphasizes working to live, not living to work.    

                James and I started walking back to the bus, through the sage brush.  We watched as the steam from the nearby lake swept skyward with the wind as it rolled across the valley.  A plume of cold dust followed it as it left the ground.  This would be one hell of a hard place to winter over, I thought, as we walked past the stone maze that the hippy lady had placed near the walking path. 

                The heat of the bus embraced us as we entered, thawing the ice from my face.  The eighty degrees, 26 C, in the bus would be a far cry from what the settlers in this valley would have known in a cold November like this.  We watched “seven” a Morgan Freeman movie, Alice's obsession with Morgan Freeman knows no bounds, and waited for night to fall. 

                After dressing in a few easily pealable layers, we headed to the outdoor soaking pools.  The sky was clear.  The air was calm and cold.  The black night twinkled with infinite stars.  The clouds framed the heavens like cotton stuck to the edges of the horizon.  Only one stone pool was open, and it had two men in it.  As I undressed to climb in, Alice decided she was going to go back to the bus.  I gave here the keys and the big flashlight and she headed back as I waded in to the chest deep water.  Again I thawed as a sat on one of the stone benches submerged in the 106 degree water, 41 C.  The air chilled my wet whiskers.  The slick mineral water warmed me up to my chin, leaving a sheen of steam on the rest of my face.  I laid my head back on the rocks behind me, and looked up.  A view as old as the universe looked back at me.  Humans have always looked awestruck at the same heavens.  The entirety of humanity, looking at the same stars. From kings to peasants, all looking at the same universe.  All equally powerless over it. 

The two men got out, leaving quickly to get their things from inside the main building before it closed for cleaning at 20:30.  I had the pool to myself, I lay for over an hour gazing up, half asleep, at the stars above.  Kate and I had enjoyed this pool in the day light the year before.  Then the wind ripped, and we had submerged ourselves to protect our skin up to our noses.  Today was a different day.  Tonight a different night.  I finished off my 1L Nalgene bottle of hot springs mineral water and thought about getting out. 

A head lamp rounded the corner of the main building that housed the big pool, my eyes were temporarily blinded while my pupils adapted. “Oh, hey, sorry” a voice came from a blurry figure wearing a blue rain coat. “No worries” I said, “im just enjoying the worlds oldest movie.”  “Yeah, totally.”  Replied the blur “im Craig.”  “Good to meet you craig” I said.  “Have a good night” Craig said “sorry I interrupted you.”  “No worries” I replied, “its all good.”  “Cant wait to soak in there tomorrow” he said, as he turned and walked away. 

                I stood up, my testicles immediately retreating in to my body and shrinking to the size of small raisins.  The cold of the night turned the warm slick water, in to icy cold slick water.  I stood on the flag stone steps.  It felt like my feet were freezing to them.  I stripped, quickly toweled off, and dressed in my bathrobe.  As I scurried through the dark towards the bus, and across the lawn, I felt my clothes start to ice.