Tuesday, May 4, 2010 - Beymer Park, Lakin KS
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Fish Ponds, Beymer Park, Lakin KS, May 3, 2010
Catfish dinner
The caretaker saw me out with my camera this morning. He had a couple pictures to show me and a story to go with them. It seems there are a couple of wily old catfish in the next pond over. Were in there when he took on the job 15 years ago. They are still there. About 5 feet long now. Wily as ever. Not tempted by anything those guys in hats throw at them.
I was honored to see them this afternoon, drifting around. Of course I didn't have my camera along. Wily old buggers.
Night camp
Site 7 - Beymer Water Recreation Park, Lakin KS
- Beymer Water Recreation Park is an older County park about 4 miles south of Lakin KS offering a few sites with electric and water. It's quiet and clean with several stocked fish ponds enjoyed by the local residents, hatted and feathered.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are available here with a strong signal.
- Locate Beymer Water Recreation Park 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.