Thursday, December 30, 2010 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
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Tracks Through Time, Sandhill Crane, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 1, 2010
I'm moved
By the fierce wind. By the dust blown in by the wind. By the cold weather predicted for the next few days. The combination sent me fleeing over to Site 8 for its electric hookups.
I've been boondocking fairly successfully for a few weeks now but this cold dust storm makes boondocking difficult with my setup. I have been heating with an unvented propane catalytic heater. It works quite well as long as I keep a couple of vents open to supply combustion air and exhaust the fumes. Now I've discovered I need to close the vents to keep the choking dust out. To do that I need to run my electric radiant heaters.
Night camp
Site 8 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
- This is a spacious 65 site campground with most sites offering full hookups.
- Locate LoW-HI RV Ranch on my Night Camps map
- Verizon cell phone - strong signal
- Verizon Broadband - strong signal but often slow
- Check the weather in Deming NM
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.