We finally get stuff done

 After our experience struggling to survive outside, we decided it was high time to accelerate our pace.

Around this time, we also picked up an ATV of our own so that we could really start bringing materials out to our campsite.  The first few loads though--those were done by hand. Ever tried hauling a wheelbarrow full of construction materials a mile into the woods?

I'm telling you, my wife has the patience of a saint. There was more than one time during those pre-ATV days that she and I had some pretty close calls, or racked up a solid road rash from the trail. 

But we got a lot done in very little time.

Obviously, watching us build things is extremely exhausting:

But by the end of June, we had a roof over our heads:

Soon we had water filtration set up, a nice outdoor kitchen, and were starting to explore the area and find some neat surprises:

Pretty cool, eh? Fun-colored boletes, real food and cooking, and no more nights spent cowering around a fire trying not to die. 

Whippoorwill what?

 We rejoin our plucky heroes at the end of May, when it finally seems warm and safe enough to go back out to the woods.

The world no longer makes sense, the US has abandoned all pretense of being a functional country, and not being in the city sure seems pleasant right now.

At this point in our grand adventure, things are looking lush, and beautiful, and we're starting to haul some building supplies out to the forest.  We haven't yet built anything, but my parents contributed the use of their UTV to us, and things were starting to look downright civilized:

See how green and lush everything is, and how there's hammocks and tarps and a pile of lumber? It looks like a fun time, doesn't it?

It was, until it turns out that whippoorwill winter is a thing, and wants to hurt you.

For those of you who don't live in an area where this occurs, it turns out that in late May, winter comes at you like the Kool-Aid Man, shoulder checks you into a wall, and reminds you that Mother Nature is bigger, stronger, and scarier than you will ever hope to be.

You go from a very pleasant evening filled with the sound of crickets and songbirds as you relax in a warm hammock to huddled around your firepit wearing every shred of clothing you can find and every blanket you brought with you, desperately stoking the fire and literally clutching hot rocks to keep your fingers from freezing solid.

We're gonna go ahead and call this lesson "hard won".  Also, it turns out that sometimes when you're hypothermic, you'll "fall asleep" for an hour or so at a time, interspersed with just enough semi-consciousness to keep a fire going. Thanks biology! I'm not saying we definitely suffered brain damage during this experience, but I don't look forward to some future CAT scan where they go "and this lesion is your camping trip from May of 2020."

Spring is here, hurray!

 With the arrival of warmer weather in Spring, we thought we would start building our cabin, and really settling in.

This was, however, early 2020, and we had not yet realized that 2020 had other plans for humanity.

Naturally, having ended 2019 with a tornado of yellowjackets, we started 2020 with a tornado of... tornado.

Nashville of course was devastated, and our neck of the woods was not spared. Where once there were houses, there were empty lots. Entire churches caved in on themselves and spilled their guts all over the streets. Even on foot, you couldn't make it out of our neighborhood for days, because all the roads were impassable. It took three days before it was even possible to get a vehicle out of our neighborhood and to a grocery store:

While we were safe and sound, our neighborhood was not, and it turns out that a week without power in the city is dramatically less fun than camping (bees and hard-won lessons notwithstanding).

Instead of heading back out to our land, we instead used our new survival skills to make the best of surviving in what now seemed more akin to a post-apocalyptic RPG than our previously quiet neighborhood:

If you ever get the chance to spend a week in your house in the early Spring before the weather really warms up, with no power, playing Magic the Gathering and whatever else you can find to pass the time, clearing debris from your neighborhood during the day, cooking meals in your fireplace, and "bathing" with a bowl of lukewarm water and a rag while standing in your kitchen, I highly recommend you don't do it. You should also make note of whoever has offered you this experience, because they are not your friend.

When the power finally came back on, and we were able to take a hot bath, it was the most grateful I've ever felt in my life. I very literally stood there with my hand in the water the whole time the bathtub filled, holding back tears.

2020, you son of a bitch...

People camp in the winter, right?

Several months pass between our first camping trip and our second, while we let ankles and egos heal.

By the time we spend any other significant amount of time in the woods, the seasons have changed and things are much chillier than they were.

Have you ever seen the look of your entire family either questioning your judgement or outright accusing you of being an unmitigated moron?

If not, here's what it looks like:

Just let those faces sink in:

Suffice it to say, those are not the faces of family members who appreciate what you've done to them.

Coincidentally, this is also the trip we learned three things.

First, we learned that air mattresses are the devil. This was our very last time sleeping on an air mattress, because it turns out that no matter how warmly you bundle up at night, your air mattress is a demon sent from the ice caves of Niflheim to rob you of everything keeping your frail body alive through the night.

Second, we learned that my wife will freeze to death long before I do, as I was perfectly comfortable during the night, while she was pondering her last will and testament.

Third, we learned that left to her own devices, Nisba will not only steal all the best blankets for herself, but also will cocoon herself inside a wool blanket and emerge only after the sun has come up, revealing that she was, in fact, the warmest one in the tent all along.

Over the rest of the winter season, we kept camping, slowly shifting from babbling idiots trying to survive through the night into reasonably competent idiots trying to survive through multiple nights. Good times were had by all, except for everyone that wasn't me. 

And maybe Tula... she enjoyed at least part of it:

Ok, so the first night sucked. So did the next day.

 Now, one thing about living in the Southeast is that we have a wildly variable climate, and a heck of a lot of wildlife.

Those two factors immediately come into play on our very first camping trip (yes, this is still the same trip as the bees). 

That night, after recovering from the assault on our yellowjacket neighbors and settling into bed, we had a moment we still reference...

Let me set the scene for you.  We picked a night with a full moon on purpose as our first night out. Our tent is white, so the light of the full moon bathes us like soft velvet draped over a marble sculpture.  The air is dry and cool, but not cold, almost perfectly room temperature. Late-season frogs are chirping in trees, and miles off in the far distance you can hear cows settling into the night in their fields. The air is still but not stifling, and all is perfectly well with the world.  A tree frog drops onto the tent roof, and we spend what feels like days snuggled on an air mattress with all three of our dogs in a big cozy heap, watching this little frog slowly climb up the slope of our roof.

Snuggling sweetly in as she falls asleep, my wife turns to me and says "it's so peaceful out here..."

Immediately upon which, a cicada mere feet above our heads explodes with the sound of a thousand fire alarms blaring simultaneously inside a metal trashcan.  The sound waves from this tiny insect were so deafening that I swear to this day I could feel a physical pressure bearing down on me from them. It was as though the forest, unable to cope with us in any other way, sent a riot control squad to pin us down in our bed while it cooked up plans for the next day. 

Exhausted, battered, stung, and pinned in place by the dead weight of sound pressing us into our bed like g-forces in an accelerating roller coaster, we fell asleep. 

The next day we awoke refreshed and ready for something new! Our dogs had yet to see the place we found in our previous hikes, so we leashed Nisba up and set off on foot.  The two others proved they could walk along just fine, but Nisba being a hound, well she likes to follow her nose a bit more than she likes to follow her humans. 

We got to the bottom, and started to set up camp... when it immediately started to pour down rain.

Against my wife's protestations, I insisted we head back up the hill, because I didn't want all our things (and selves) to get wet and add to the already hilarious litany of things that had gone wrong. 

This was the wrong call. About halfway back to camp, my wife slipped and twisted her ankle, spraining it badly.  We got to the tent, elevated her foot until the next day after the rain stopped, and then went home.

Forest 1, us 0. 

Episode 1

 

So we rejoin our intrepid hosts at the first campsite.  This one's accessible by truck, so it's much easier to get to, and we can leash up our dogs and just hang out.

We bring our firepit from the city, pick up a nice large tent that we thought looked neat, and headed out for a few days.

Now, there's something funny about where I'm standing when I take this picture, but I won't know it until later:

Thing is, there's a yellowjacket nest immediately below my feet. I just didn't know it, because everything had been going so swimmingly all day long.

Later that afternoon, I'm sitting in the blue chair, right where it is now. My lovely wife, not pictured, is sitting in a chair, also not pictured, on the other side of the fire. Our big white hound dog is sitting next to her, and the other dogs are in the tent relaxing.

All of a sudden, sheer chaos explodes around me.

Nisba, the hound, screams like someone dropped a hot coal into her bed and jumps clean out of her harness, wrapping her lead around my wife's chair and knocking over a number of small items in the process. She then bolts around the corner of the tent with my wife starting to scream too as a look or horrified confusion spreads over her face. 

I jump out of my chair and run around the corner to where the two of them are huddled, both in absolute shock, where my wife is frantically slapping yellowjackets out of Nisba's fur while stripping off her own clothes, which are filled with them as well.

I help rip the yellowjackets off both of them, detangle and strip them both down, and shove them both bodily into the tent and zip it behind them.

Somehow in this process, despite having to pull yellowjackets out of the skin of two of my favorite people, I've managed to not only avoid any stings, but also the attention of the swarm. These hellish little bastards are for some reason treating me like I don't exist.

I'd like to say there was some manly theme playing in my head, or that I said something potent and amazing, but I think I probably just said something like "stay inside, I'll figure this out".

Being careful to keep the smoke from the fire in between myself and the swarm, I saw what had happened.

Those of you smarter than me have already figured this out, of course--there was a hole in the ground just buzzing with yellow, angry little needlejets who were upset that we put a firepit next to their home and then let a dog lay down on top of their foyer.

I am assured by the only observer to this act that my next actions came swiftly and confidently, but not being outside my body to observe, I have to take her word for it.  In the first discus throw of my life, I picked up the lid to a cast-iron dutch oven and slung it over to the nest, where it plopped down directly on top of the hole.

Perfect--though there were still dozens of yellowjackets in the air, at least they could not call for reinforcements.

I quickly mixed up a solution of kerosene, dish soap, and water, and had myself a little "bowl o'death".  Not necessarily the most environmentally friendly thing in the world, but a cup of kerosene on the ground is a lot better than this buzzing tornado we find ourselves in. 

Good news is, a tiny bit of kerosene on a yellowjacket is nearly instant death, so I started slinging my ad-hoc bug spray at them to knock them out of the air, and then once the aerial ranks had been dealt with, poured the rest directly into the gullet of their once proud house.

Our first misadventure had been handled, with only minor casualties to the family, and a little bit of traumatic and unintentional training for our dog. 

Time to show the family and explore a little

 Now, my wife and I aren't "family" people. We have our dogs, but we're not exactly interested in kids.  That said, you've gotta call in the relatives to come inspect your smallholding, right?

It's difficult to say if the kids were impressed with our choice of location... I suspect they mainly thought we were crazy, and that it was hot, and that there were monsters somewhere in the woods that were going to eat them.

Several of those things were true, in fact. And continue to be, at least at times. But we did keep coming back to that same spot we had found in our first few trips out to explore.  Something about this little bend in the creek seemed so welcoming, even in different seasons:

Doesn't that look welcoming? We thought so too. 

Which of course is exactly why our first camping trip was nowhere near this spot!

I know, "what the hell", right?  Well, that little hollow is only accessible by foot or by ATV, and while we had feet, we didn't really want to hump our supplies all the way down to it.  So we figured any significant progress down there would have to wait.

Instead, I present to you, "camping trip number one," otherwise known as "the one with all the bees":

...to be continued in the next post, for the sake of dramatic suspense (even though I'm uploading all of these on the same day).