September 16, 1995

Ben and Paula:

Greetings from the river and the woods.

Right now, its pouring down rain; it rained gently all yesterday afternoon. Through the night and morning, it has drenched us in erratic fits. We have several sets of sopping campers who drove into the campground during the light rain yesterday afternoon, ignored the clouds, set up their tents while being dripped on. Some of them have run back and forth to and from the pavilion all morning. This kind of day is a favorite of mine–when I’m inside and dry. It says “Think good thoughts, speak kind words, write something, read, bake bread. Yesterday I blanched nectarines, made nectarine bread, and enjoyed the rain–sweet smelling and rhythmic.

But most of our days, here, have been sunny and varied. Last week, we patrolled the trails and learned that the ticks are hungry and the chiggers like Gerry. We met a terrapin with an attitude on one trail and a timid turtle on the other. We saw a red and yellow spider in the woods and crawled under his fine web so we wouldn’t destroy the art work in it. We picked up bags and bags of litter and listened to a zillion insects sing in combat with the music from an AARP picnic on the pavilion. We had cows in the campground, a fawn on the road, and elk tracks in the woods. We saw mist that moved upward and sideways on the mountains and enjoyed the sun spattered reflection of a bluff in the river. We’ve watched a squadron of turkey vultures fly patterns overhead and bats at their dive-through dining every evening.

On Tuesdays, we pick up our mail in Jasper and eat brownies.

On Thursday we drove in a fog to a dental appointment. We stopped to use the restrooms at a quick shop and came out smelling like subway sandwiches. We watched the sun burst through the fog and streak it with stripes of blue sky and pink circles. We saw a horse bathed in sunlight and three dogs patrolling the morning. We saw a hot-air balloon lying flat in a field and a brown Adopt- A- Road sign with the words Ku Klux Klan written on it.

In the woods, we have juicy, purple, wild grapes on their vines and pastel pink plums on trees. We’ve found persimmons and papaws. We’ve lopped away intrusive brush in the woods and sawed logs off the trails. We’ve had 106 campers on a weekend and nobody but us on a weekday. We smile at the last names of our rangers and like them a lot. In this Arkansas mountain country, this down-home kind of place we have– Kiramidjian, Stravroplus, Miaducy, and Ramaley. They are not Arkansawyers! They’re law-enforcement rangers who carry guns and tell us that our being here has discouraged the drinking, pot smoking, and other troubles they’ve dealt with this year. We do a lot of extra work to earn our keep– free electricity, sewer, water, and the privilege of being in this place–and we do it because we’re treated like we’re special.

Right now, the rain sounds like corn popping on the trailer roof and, even as I wrote that, it became a deluge. The army reserves are playing war games in a nearby woods and we hear small arms fire. The air is sweet and cool. We’re surrounded by tall trees and they’re all dripping. Several campers are walking up from the river carrying black umbrellas–two women, a man, and two kids. This is not a usual sight. These are not hard-core campers. Hard core campers would be standing around a blazing fire (never mind the rain, they’d get one started) wearing rain parkas with hoods, drinking hot coffee, frying bacon and potatoes; then they’d take off in canoes or carry backpacks off into the woods planning to be tough and eat freeze-dried food all weekend. We have hard core campers at the other end of the campground–they just drove in with rented canoes on their trucks. Gerry has been a hard-core camper for years.  I’ve done it, even enjoyed some of it, but never want to do it again.

Now, we’re a team, wimping it in our dry trailer home with regular food, books to read, our computers to play with, a television with moderate reception, and a ham radio book we’re supposed to study so we can take the test–and pass it. Gerry went to sleep reading it and it’s so full of numbers and frequencies, megahertz and kilohertz, and other precise and sharp cornered items that I can barely bring myself to pick it up.

Hope things are going well with you. We think about all our friends and, yet, we’re glad to be here and look forward to the rest of the year.

Love–Gerry and Rosalie