Wednesday, April 30, 2008 - Independence KS
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Sunset in the Park, Elk City Reservoir - April 30, 2008
Elk City State Park campground
My black tank needs to take a dump making a night in a campground a desirable departure from my usual Wal-Mart parking lot thing and what a fine campground this is. Elk City State Park has some beautiful modern campgrounds on the east side of Elk City Reservoir and I bagged a site right at waters edge. Nice. Nice sunset over the lake to boot.
Night camp:
Site 13, Sunset Point, Elk City State Park, Independence, Kansas
A Voyage and a Harbor
The native American was forced westward by the young escaping the limits of east coast villages that had been established only a generation or two earlier by parents escaping the limits of European villages. From then on, whether seeking a whale, rafting with Huck Finn, easy riding with Peter Fonda, or next week in Cancun, there has been a strong belief in America that happiness lies somewhere else. And yet as we find freedom we also rediscover loneliness. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says, we require both shelter and venture. We need freedom and support, silence and cacophony, the vast and distant but also the warm and near, a voyage and a harbor, the great adventure and the hobbit hole. Much of the iconography of our times gives little sense of this. Instead, the individual is treated as a self-sufficient, self-propelled vehicle moving across a background of other things, other places, and other people.