Raise the stone and you shall find me, split the wood and I am there.

The camping trip was, in a word, wonderful. Where to begin? MB and I drove up to Turkey Run State Park on Thursday in the late afternoon, and met up with the bibliophile, J-Dog, and Nick. Danger and MacGyver joined us the next morning. After a month of obscenely high temperatures and humidity, we were pleasantly surprised by low 70s during the days and low 50s at night. Fifties. In Indiana, in early September. Nearly half the fun of camping is sitting around the campfire at night, and it takes something away when it's too hot to enjoy that part of it.

Despite the fact that most of our neighbors were "camping" in ritzy RVs with TVs and huge dining flies and patriotic lights, the campground was really nice. We had three sites side-by-side, and they were the biggest and nicest in our area of the campground (which was a major bonus on the second night when a crew of loudasses parked their monster trailer on the lot to the left of ours).

Why watch the Colts game at home when you can watch it in a campground beside your massive RV?

Unfortunately I don't have a picture of the couple who were RV-ing at the site on our right. They had pet ferrets, which the bibliophile saw them walking on leashes on Thursday evening. On Friday morning, one of the ferrets apparently escaped and had to be coaxed down from the top of a tree. You can't make this shit up, people.

Even with all the RV lights, the stars at night were absolutely ridiculous. I saw the Milky Way for the first time, and all the summer constellations were clear as crystal. Also fun on the first night...I was just drifting off when I heard the bibliophile (whose tent was right across from ours) call out, "I can see you! That's our trash!" I went out to help relocate the trashbag, which we'd hung on a tree, and got to see the most adorable little bitty raccoon EVER, who was lurking in the branches above. We agreed that if it wasn't guaranteed to leave a giant mess, we'd have let him have the garbage. He was that cute.


We went horseback riding on Friday morning, and it was fun even though it was just one of those super-tame trail rides where the horses line up and walk. My horse, Maverick, was a moseyer, and that was fine with me. I'm not really a born horse-rider (horsewoman?), and until a few years ago, even trail horses made me really nervous. Now that I've married into a hugely pro-horse family (one of MB's cousins is the captain of Kentucky's state-champion drill team, and both of his uncles on his dad's side and his favorite aunt on his mom's side own horses), I figure it's time to cowboy up and get over it, and I'm definitely a lot less chickenshit than I used to be. Maverick was very chill, and I liked him very much, even though at times I could almost hear him thinking, "Oof, you're heavy. Could you just get down and walk for a minute?"

Maverick and MB's horse, Spirit

While we were waiting for the bibliophile to meet up with us post-ride, MacGyver spotted a fairy ring:





We hiked three miles on the less-rugged side of Sugar Creek and saw many cool things:

a fungus in the Cheetos family?

millipede!

Danger found a good climbing tree.

One of the laws of physics (I think it's Kepler's little-studied Fourth Law) states that all food consumed at camp tastes infinitely better than the same food would taste if consumed at home. We ate insanely well throughout the trip, probably canceling out all the hiking we did.

Things we did with the pie iron:  made pudgy pies, grilled cheese sandwiches, and a biscuit; heated up Pop-Tarts and leftover taco salad



We had reservations to go canoeing on Sugar Creek on Saturday morning, but it dipped into the 40s overnight and it was still cold when we got up, so we moved our booking to 2 PM and eventually decided to bail completely. We were only going to be able to paddle four miles anyway due to low water, so I think it was best that we decided to skip it. After a leisurely lunch and some warm-up Frisbee tossing, we headed across the suspension bridge into the more rugged half of the park, the Rocky Hollow - Falls Canyon Nature Preserve. According to the sign on the bridge, the nature preserve protects one of the last remaining fragments of Indiana's primordial old-growth forest. Other than a rather appalling crowd on the bridge and just off the other side, the ladders trail was pretty wicked:

Because a mile and a half of boulders and ladders and at least 300 stairs apparently wasn't quite enough of an ass-kicking, MB and I decided to head out for a second hike with Danger and MacGyver. Even though we were horribly sore the next day, I'm immensely glad that we went. It was a truly perfect day to be outdoors, for one thing.



There were neat things to see:

Photographs can't really capture the way the light was shining through the leaves of the trees like they were stained glass, but I had to try.



A friend of mine once told me that going back to church after a long absence felt like coming home after a long time away. That's the way I feel when I'm out in the woods, and this place was a cathedral.


In the literature I read in school, the constant struggle of man vs. nature nearly always pitted the characters against the soulless, cold, unfeeling natural world. The message was clear:  nature is impossibly vast, and it does not care about us.


I'm sure the archetype rings true in many places, in many situations, but in this place, nature was benevolent and alert and welcoming.



Here I felt small and loved, humbled and blessed and infinitely, stupidly lucky to be alive.