Sunday, December 27, 2009 - Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu NM
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Photo Shoot, Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu NM, December 22, 2009
Brrrrr... 1:30AM and it's already 5 degrees below zero. Last winter, camped down at Leasburg Dam State Park, I met fellow fulltimer Jan, living in his Honda sports car, who observed that the temperature drops noticeably an hour or two before sunrise. Will tonight's low break LD's record 10 below set just last night? [6:30AM] Nope - didn't happen - in fact it warmed up a tad to -3 degrees.
Where will I find warm enough weather in the next week to thaw the tanks in time for the next dump? I may have to take a southern route to Las Vegas this week to get enough hours above freezing to thaw the tanks. The shorter I-40 route won't see much above 32 degrees for most of the way.
Night camp
Ghost Ranch Campground, Abiquiu NM
- This is a basic, small campground with full hookups.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are not available here.
- Locate Ghost Ranch on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
It was the Crickets
Now then: it isn't so much that one way of dying beats another, though that certainly is the case, but rather that when you KNOW the jig could be up any second or any decade -- it's the awareness that's important -- that just might make a difference. I'm like everybody else, I have these moments and then forget, lapsing back into "immortality." But there was a thing that happened in my back yard maybe 18 months before we split from Maryland that hit me as hard as seeing their president drop dead on stage must have hit those graduating seniors.
It was the crickets. I'd gone outside one warm fall evening to shut the garage door and suddenly realized I couldn't hear the crickets! No wait, I could, but only if I turned my head a certain way. Oh God, oh no: I had almost no high-frequency hearing in my right ear, or was it my left? That doesn't matter. The point is, a part of me had shut down permanently. No, it hadn't happened suddenly, but I had finally noticed, and that was hard to take. I'd never again hear crickets like I once had. Never! I walked back to the house in tears. All right, I'm sensitive. But I understood at once what all this meant.