Saturday, May 12, 2012 - Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, Fritch TX
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Camped at Blue West, Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, Fritch TX, May 11, 2012
Dry
Lake Meredith is nearly dry, and has been for years. The Canadian River drainage seems to be suffering a severe drought. Ute Lake, where I camped before coming here, is also a reservoir on the Canadian and it too is nearly dry.
Night camp
Blue West - Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, Fritch TX
- Verizon cell phone and broadband service - good signal and reasonable connection speeds.
- Go to the Lake Meredith National Recreation Area website
- Locate Lake Meredith National Recreation Area on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
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.