Camping with Dan

I went camping with Dan a little while back.  It was a wonderful trip.  We've gone camping before.  Those were wonderful trips too.  No stories this time, though.  Rather, some panoramas, captured on my dandy new camera.  For those with screens to justify it I'd advise saving the more promising pics, below, for full-size viewing outside your browser.

Ma

BBQ's of yore

We do a lot of barbequing these days, and in the classic American style.  Still, I miss those OB BBQs, they really had the best of the old world and the new.



Apologies for the sudden fit of nostalgia.

Who sleeps?

My last posting, I realize, may have given the impression that I am exasperated to an abnormal degree by child-raising.  That may be your impression, but it is certainly not mine.  I live in a village, and while it does not actually take a village to raise a child, the village environment, in which you see the same parents dealing with the same children day after day, provides ample evidence of the daytime trials that most parents face, and of the not always graceful manner in which they meet them.  Comforting it is.

Ah, but what of the night?  What happens behind closed doors, in those wee and terrible hours?  Village or not we don't all share the same house, we don't awake to each others' children.  In this, we know only what others choose to tell...until, that is, we go camping together.  In camp we do all share the same house, we do awake to each others' children, and, in anticipation, in fact, and in aftermath, we learn what we otherwise could only suspect, namely that in the face of these nighttime trials other parents do much as we do, which is to say, they freak out.

From an email exchange generated by our plans to go camping earlier this summer with a couple of other families:

• Mother 1:  "I will need the following:  1 tent (for Pack n Play and me); 1 sleeping bag (for the kid - no glow sticks included please); 1 Alec clone to address nighttime crying; 4 stiff drinks, possibly more, to get me through the first few hours of camping acclimation."
• Mother 2: "I need 4 stiff drinks to address my own nighttime crying. Our boys have been practicing all week to get their nighttime wake-ups in steady 2-hour intervals. They are ready to take the show on the road."

Ha ha!  What funny mothers, how jocular, how jovial!  In point of fact they were not kidding.  First night we had near-continuous coverage, beginning with Mother 1's number 2 son's broadcast (a lovely song called "cry it out," took us all the way through to the last dying embers of the campfire), followed by GM's wakeup-and-smell-the-bottle number.  Not to be outdone, Mother 2's number 2 came through with some very late night programming of his own.  And, as threatened, the four-year-olds made their own contribution:  put to bed in a single tent, they were redistributed to two additional ones by morning.  No adult managed more than an hour of uninterrupted sleep.  And, as usual, morning came at dawn when the Littles (the three kids between 1 and 2) all woke up and began chirping.  The second night--and in writing this I find myself surprised at the mere fact that there was a second night--we dismantled the separate tent for the not-big-enough kids but were nonetheless subject to a really impressive display of nighttime terror by one of the older boys, in addition to relatively minor disturbances by the usual chorus.

Here's the punchline:  this was our second camping trip with these same families, whom we love.

Growing up

"They grow up so quickly," I am told.  "They grow up so quickly," I am told again.  And again.  And again.  "They grow up so quickly," I am told, "so enjoy it while you can."

Will you stop already?  I know you are right, but I know, too, that you don't remember a damn thing about what it was like to be immersed in baby, to have child wrapped about you, night and day.  You have forgotten the sensation of having a sick infant sneeze directly into your ear canal.  You have misplaced the revenge you swore while being driven to distraction by a four-year-old's inane, unending, pre-dawn retelling of the battle of the purple half ninja/half clone/half tiger/half Bionicle© and the KungFuWonderPets.  The panic you felt as the one child prepared to take off the other child's head in a game the rules of which neither understood but which both are about to learn, that panic is long gone.  So, too, the sight, sound, smell, and sensation otherwise of a shouting infant as it exults, slamming its free hand into its shit-encrusted crotch while you stand there, clutching its other three limbs in one fist, an exhausted wipe in the other, yourself screaming as the remaining wipes fall to the floor past the overfull diaper you hold pinned against the dresser with a knee.  And why do you not remember any of this as you stand there on the sidewalk, in your clean clothing, on your way from a point of your own choosing to a destination entirely suitable for adults, gracing me with your avuncular advice?  Because when, for you, this was all happening you were never allowed to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time and were thus physiologically incapable of laying down new memories.

"They grow up so quickly," to which I reply--to date silently--Imagine what would happen if they grew up slowly.  Just imagine that.

Crows

While getting my degree at Cornell I fell into the habit of working late and rising later and would oft supplement my sleep with a nap in the afternoon.  And oft, too, that nap would be disturbed by cawing crows, of which there were an abundance in Ithaca, and several in particular who seemed to spend most of their time perched outside my window, waiting for me to fall asleep.  The day came for me to leave, but, being petty by nature, I determined to have my revenge before I departed.  I decided to wake the crows.

In our backyard there grew an enormous pine tree, and in that pine tree, in winter months, there was to be found a quite sizable roost of crows.  The phenomenon of roosting, I am surprised to learn, is not thoroughly understood; my personal hypothesis is that crows come together in large numbers for the night because they are highly sociable creatures and because they like disturbing each others' sleep as much as they liked disturbing mine.  Certainly the process of settling down for the night was, for the roost, a long and drawn out one in which each individual crow among the hundreds bickered and fought its way to a suitable branch, discussed the experience with its near neighbors, discovered itself to be thoroughly incompatible with those neighbors, drove off some, was itself driven off, found a new spot, and began the process all over again before...well, suffice to say that going to bed took them all a good hour or more.

It was a cold winter's night when I left to catch the Lake Shore Limited out of Syracuse.  Bags packed, ready to go, I slipped out the back door and tiptoed to the crow's pine to say my wicked farewell.  In my hand I held a string of tiger crackers.  As per the instructions, I lay the string on the ground beneath the tree, lit the fuse, and retired quickly.

As the string began exploding I looked up and was gratified to see one of nature's lesser-known wonders:  hundreds of terrified crows erupting from a single tree, forming a terrific mass of smoke that obscured the starry night sky.  The noise, even without the firecrackers, was deafening and delightful.  Well satisfied with my cold revenge, I stepped into the waiting vehicle and left forever.

Since that day I have now and again joked that the crows are looking for me, spreading the word from colony to colony, and that eventually and surely when I least expect it they, too, will have their revenge.  You can imagine my discomfiture at reading, therefore, the following in the latest Science News:

Crows may have gotten cozier with people, but the birds don’t forget insults. Crows even appear to recognize and remember the faces of upsetting humans, Marzluff and his colleagues reported in Animal Behaviour in 2010. Marzluff and other experimenters trapped wild Seattle crows just once while wearing rubber masks sold on the Internet as caveman faces. More than two years after the incident, people of various genders and ages and with different body sizes and walking gaits attracted shrieking, dive-bombing crows when wearing the masks. Yet the same people could walk unmasked with hardly any attention from crows.

Crows can even learn grudges from other crows, the Marzluff team reported in June online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Five years after the original trapping episode, crows that weren’t among the offended birds — and crows that weren’t even hatched at the time of trapping — now scold people wearing the masks. The tendency to mob someone wearing the dangerous face has become twice as common at some Seattle sites and spread at least a kilometer from the original study area, apparently via crow information networks.

"Crow information networks":  is there any more chilling phrase in the English language?  Not late at night, burdened with a guilty conscience, and facing another day at the playground which, whatever its many pluses, is absolutely infested with crows. Not late at night there isn't, and not when the crows know.