Sunday, May 3, 2009 - Poplar Bluff MO
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Lava field dawn, Valley of Fires, Carrizozo NM, April 28, 2009
It's still raining but forward progress is being made
The leaks still leak but the wind dropped during the day and my gas mileage picked up a little.
With a little luck I'll see some sun tomorrow. Yippeee!
Interesting signage at the Wal-Mart here in Poplar Bluff. One sign says no truck parking. The other says No parking or loitering outside business hours. The catch is the store is open 24 hours and yes I can park here overnight (I asked). Clever. I recall one other Wal-Mart, though not which one, with a similar ambiguous wording that had the effect of reducing RV overnights without actually prohibiting them. Must be a response to some community issue.
Night camp
Wal-Mart Supercenter in Poplar Bluff MO
Wal-Mart Supercenter Store #19, 333 S Westwood, Poplar Bluff, MO 63901 - (573) 686-6420
- Nice level parking - to the right side of the lot away from the store
- Verizon cell phone service- Very good
- Verizon EVDO Broadband service - Good service
- Locate this Walmart on my Night Camps map
- Find other Wal-Marts in the area
- 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.