No, I Did Not Take That Bite!

Yesterday, I began the story of my husband's and my early September adventure into the wild woods and waters of north central Pennsylvania. When we left our intrepid adventurers, we had just had a marvelous swim and a fine visit with some butterflies, and then were packing up our gear back into the car and heading on to the next phase of our trip.

We had planned to swim at the Hyner Run swimming pool and then eat at Lisa's restaurant in south Renovo (a place recommended to us by Jack, the head life guard at the pool), but the swimming pool had been closed for the day, and our side trip to Young Woman's Creek threw our time table off a bit.

We were back on the road just before the school buses, an advantage we didn't want to yield. And we were anxious to spend as much time as we could at our back-country site. So we ended up skipping Lisa's (we'll try it some other day) and continued on to Sproul State Forest, where we would backpack in to a favorite campsite and spend the night.

"We ought to have just enough food with us to keep from starving" were my husband's words as we resolutely drove past the signs for Lisa's. I thought back fondly to the quick McDonald's breakfast we had managed to snag on our travels the morning before - not even seemingly significant enough at the time to include in yesterday's adventure tale. Gee, what I'd give for an extra egg McMuffin in the middle of the woods!

But my husband had a few surprises up his sleeve, and when we got to the place where we park the car, while the engine was still hot, he heated up a couple of leftover slices of pepperoni pizza on the engine of my Mazda.

This is a trick we learned back in the old days when we used to travel in Florida for a week to 10 days each winter, though I have to admit that the old yellow Chevy Nova my husband had back then, with its V-8 engine, did a better job on heating up the pizza than my four-cylinder. But we had what we had, and it was good enough. We ate the slices quickly and then packed our packs and headed into the woods.

It's not a long hike from there, and shortly we were back inside the green forests. As soon as we arrived at our campsite, I put down my backpack and set up my tent. Once that was accomplished, all that remained was to have fun and relax. Which we did! The green view we had while sitting in our campsite is included in the extras; it is a very soothing shade indeed.

We have not had a lot of rain lately, and many of the streams are running dry. However, it's moist enough everywhere for mushrooms, and we found some fine ones indeed in and around our campsite. They were available in every color and shape, some of them quite phallic and giggle-worthy.

We sat and listened to music, and talked, and read our books, and ate and drank the snacks and treats we had brought along. I am one who always tends to conk out a bit early, especially after all that fresh air and exercise, and I think I made it to a bit after 9 before taking my pack and the rest of my gear into the tent (yes, my tent is huge and it all fits!) and calling it a night. So it was that I fell asleep to the low music of cicadas, a sound from my childhood; they rang out sweetly in the night like distant sleigh bells.

I woke in the middle of the night to a wild shrieking sound - WHAT THE HECK WAS THAT!!??? - you can never tell if it is a howl, a shriek, a scream, or a hoot. The mind always leaps to the worst possibility. But the sound was not very close by, and I went quickly back to sleep. The next day, my husband and I compared notes and decided it had been an owl of some kind.

I awoke in the morning to complete quiet and peacefulness. The light was just hitting the tops of the trees and it was a glorious sight indeed. I lollygagged in my tent for a while, trying not to wake my husband, who was sleeping in. I'd been awake for about an hour in the middle of the night - a thing that happens when I fall asleep a bit too early.

I'd heard my husband get up just as I was getting back in my tent after my own little wide-awake, toss-and-turny time, and was finally falling back to sleep. We traded times of wakefulness in the night. He couldn't sleep around 4 am, and so he got up and spent an hour or two walking around or sitting in his chair. He got back in his tent and slept until almost 9, a thing unheard of in our home life with a cat who serves as our morning alarm, regardless of whether we NEED to get up.

And then we hung around the campsite, and I finally photographed the mushrooms I'd seen sitting around. This little one in the main photo had a tiny bite out of it, and one of the red-shirts insisted on climbing up it. No, he did not take that bite; it was taken by someone long before us. One must be careful taking bites out of unknown mushrooms; you never know what unexpected adventures may await!

As per usual, we had some kickin' tunes on, and the woods rang with the sounds of the best 70s and 80s rock. And we read our books some more, and we ate the last things we had brought along to eat. Snack bars, breakfast biscuits (never leave home without them!), yogurt, that sort of thing. We ended up with just one water left, as we were getting ready for the walk out. That's cutting it close! But we knew there was more back at the car, in the cooler in the trunk.

Before we left our Sproul campsite, my husband insisted on walking up the hill a ways and checking on the status of the vernal pool that we enjoy so much nearby (here are two views of it in springtime when it is most opulent: one, and two).  As I had expected - no, I didn't go along to see - he reported that the little pool was completely dry and overgrown with vegetation. No more vernal pool!

We talked about many options for stops on our way home. And guess what, most of them featured food! For there is nobody who will talk more enthusiastically about food options than a starving backpacker, to be sure.

But we discussed it seriously and agreed that with the first Penn State home football game in town, starting at 3:30, the most direct and expeditious road home might be best. And so we threaded the needle, leaving our campsite by 2 pm and arriving home around the start time of the game without incident. Success!

I have not mentioned the weather, but I should have, because it was spectacular. Quite a bit cooler than the past few weeks, low humidity, a mix of sun and clouds. Night time temps are cooling down a bit these days; the overnight low had been 50 degrees, and it was only 69 degrees or so when we walked out of our campsite at Sproul.

We'd had our early September adventure, and it included just about everything fun we could think of (except for much food, but hey, there's always catch-up time for that): we'd swum, we'd slept out under the open skies, we'd fraternized with and rescued butterflies. We'd lived for stolen moments out of time in a world of peace and quiet, surrounded by shades of lush green.

The soundtrack I've chosen is about a mushroom . . . . and a little girl and a rabbit . . . and a trip to a world of magic. Could you guess it?  :-)  Jefferson Airplane, with White Rabbit.