All the trees are gorgeously spring green.

On my day of no destination, I decided that it was time to get out of nature for a while. I looked up things to do in Corpus Christi and found a nice art museum, so after taking my time packing up and cleaning, I headed that way.

Nature had other plans.

It was 89 degrees by the time I got there. I parked the van and stared at the temperature display and thought bad words and the temperature display ticked over to 90.

90! In February! When the weather apps had promised temperatures in the 70s!

Obviously, Serenity has a generator that allows me to run the air-conditioning without being plugged into electricity, so I can keep the van cool(ish) when it’s hot. And I have a temperature monitor that uses wi-fi to send me a text message to let me know if the interior temp goes past 80. But that’s five things to rely on: the generator, the air-conditioner, the temperature monitor, the wi-fi router and my cell phone connection. If it’s hot enough that the dogs could die, I don’t rely on those things.

Which means I don’t go to art museums.

So I hung out in a parking lot for a while and thought about what to do. I’d been tentatively considering going down to Padre Island National Seashore, but I really didn’t want to go there on a February weekend. I like empty beaches, not crowded beaches. And even more, I didn’t want to go there on a really hot weekend. I would need to run the generator to keep the dogs cool, it would be loud and hot and sandy and sweaty… It just didn’t sound like fun.

So I drove around Corpus Christi for a while—some very pretty houses around the waterfront, some very run-down houses away from it—and ate some lunch and considered my options and finally I said, ugh, I hate how hot it is, I’m heading north.

North wound up being Choke Canyon State Park.

I’m in a tent site, not a camper site, so I’m basically in a parking spot, with a picnic table within hailing distance, but oh, it was so perfectly what I needed and wanted. Still hot, but spring-green everywhere, and lovely. I was the only person in the tent area when I arrived and the solitude was bliss. After dark, a bunch of other cars showed up, so it was noisier and less peaceful in the night. Lots of flashlights waving around outside which stressed Zelda out. She kept doing that low dog growl of warning and I kept telling her to go back to sleep.

But the sunrise this morning was beautiful. We had a peaceful solitary walk down a dirt path through trees. I wanted to call them woods, but honestly, the trees just feel too short to me to be woods or forest. Maybe a grove? And I definitely don’t want to call it wilderness — it’s doesn’t feel wild enough for that. Just nature, maybe. Lots of bird noises — nature really does sound like a video game, sometimes, or maybe that should be vice versa. I was seriously jolted awake when we startled some birds though — a whole flock of them shot forth from the brush right next to us, so loud that the whirr of their wings almost sounded like a motor starting up.

And I had my bird app out trying to identify the swooping predator birds. I was fairly sure they weren’t vultures — they weren’t flying together, the way vultures do, or circling, and they were a little on the small side, plus the coloring seemed wrong. The app offered northern harrier as an option, which seemed to fit best, but I’m honestly not sure. They were beautiful, though. And they flew really close to the treetops, which was cool. The trees are short, so that meant they were remarkably near to the ground for swooping predators.

Because there weren’t any camper sites available and I’m technically not supposed to be in the tent sites, I’m headed north again this morning. This time with a reservation. As it turns out, while I like serendipity and while I approve of flexibility, I also don’t want to waste my days feeling uncertain and driving around aimlessly. I will miss some things if I only stick to places that take reservations (Padre Island doesn’t, for example, it’s first-come, first-served), and I definitely don’t want to make plans too far out into the future. But knowing where I’m going to spend the night is less stressful for me. Yesterday I seriously considered staying in a Walmart parking lot — I even asked if it was okay, and was told that it was fine — but I hated the thought of waking up there and having our morning walk be around cars and blacktop. I’m so glad this morning that I moved on!

Possibly all I need to say about Galveston Island State Park is that yesterday I went online to figure out when I could get another reservation, preferably for the beach side campsites. (I’m currently on the bay side.) March 5-10th. So I’m going to wander around Texas for a couple of weeks and then come back here. This will not be the first park that I’ve returned to, but it’s the first one that I’ve returned to that didn’t have relatives living nearby.

The park has vast expanses of blackened land, presumably recovering from a controlled burn, with wild grasses growing and not much else. It’s flat and muddy and dark. And by some standard, the weather has been terrible. I haven’t seen a sunrise since I got here because it’s been so foggy. But the fog isn’t cold, it just has a hint of ocean chill and it smells like ocean. It’s lovely. Zelda and I have gotten muddy and sandy and wet and salty. (B, not so much, because he does the finicky dog thing of, “What? You want me to walk there? On THAT? No, thank you.”) And I love it.

I could live without the tornado warnings, though. Today has been pretty much a non-stop stream of the national weather service letting me know that I’m going to die soon. Any minute now! It’s actually really impressive to be watching the ocean while a thunderstorm is going on — the waves are great, but the rumbles of thunder and lightning make them all the better. But, of course, I am hoping to avoid any actual tornados. I did unplug Serenity and move from the campsite to a parking lot, out of some notion of being ready to move should it be necessary, but I’m not sure how I would know that it was actually necessary short of seeing a forming tornado.

Back to the park: there are birds I’ve never seen before, tall and short and in-between. One was a reddish egret, which I wouldn’t know, except that I found a sign telling me so. Two yesterday were tall and pink and mysterious. I am fairly sure–after abandoning all hope of conserving my internet data to research the question–that they were not flamingos, but roseate spoonbills. If you had told me six months ago that I was going to be so interested in birds that I would be looking for an app to help me identify them, I would have looked at you sidewise, but there you go. One never knows what travel will offer.

Lunch yesterday was diced apple, celery, red onion, chopped dates, chopped pecans, finely chopped fresh cilantro, and a tablespoon of mayo, mixed up and rolled in turkey. And then wrapped in a gluten-free tortilla because the turkey wasn’t thick enough to roll properly. The tortilla was not good, but the relish-turkey combo was delicious.

And I mention it partially because I want to remember it for some future day when I need food inspiration but also because there’s a correlation for me between making weird foods & happiness, but I’m not sure which way it flows. Was I happy because I was making up a recipe or was I making up a recipe because I was happy? It’s possible that it’s one of those circular things, where feeling cheerful made me feel creative which inspired me to create something weird that was tasty and delicious which then made me happy to eat and so on.

I was also very happy with the words created yesterday. They were maybe not the greatest words ever written, but they were actual forward movement in Grace, not just revising and tweaking and being generally dissatisfied with the shape of Grace. (The book, not the character.) And since I’m hoping for some more of those today, I’d best get to it.

Happy Pan-Universal Be Who You Are Day!

Yesterday was the first day in a long while where I wrote no words for no reason. I wasn’t traveling, I wasn’t busy with other things, I had plenty of time to write… I just didn’t. I didn’t have the imagination. I stared at my files and no words showed up.

I went to bed feeling bleak and annoyed with myself and woke up feeling miserably sick. So I’m guessing that’s why there were no words yesterday and it might mean no words today, either. I gave Zelda the shortest walk she’s had in a while, then came back and crawled back under the covers.

But I’m leaving this park tomorrow, and I promised myself I’d blog about every new place I stay, so… Sam Houston Jones State Park. I have a nice tucked-away spot with a view of forest out of one window, but the park itself feels much bigger and more urban than most of the places I’ve stayed recently.

Bigger is accurate, I think, but the urban is just that it’s near a highway. Instead of birds and bugs and strange animals, there’s a lot of traffic noise. Well, and also there are a lot of picnic tables and a commensurate amount of litter. And maybe a lot of traffic? This morning, when I was trying to go back to sleep, I was looking out the wrong window–not the forested window–and I watched a long string of cars passing by, probably at least a dozen of them. For a Thursday morning in midwinter, that’s a lot of cars to be driving past a campground in a state park.

My first afternoon here, I watched two big cats — house cats, not wild, but I’d guess feral — stalking through the forest out my window. They feel like the definition of the place: feral, not wild. Example: this morning’s walk, admittedly short, included an encounter with a half-dressed guy staggering along the trail. Not staggering in the “I’m an injured hiker” sort of way, but staggering in the “drunk guy, sleeping it off in the woods” sort of way. Hmm, so maybe that adds to the urban feel, too? I didn’t cut my walk short because of him, but it definitely lowers my enthusiasm for random strolls through deserted trails in the semi-dark. On the other hand, swamp sunrise, quite pretty. And I saw an armadillo trundling through the woods yesterday and armadillos are always cool.

I’m hoping my current state of misery is a gluten-reaction — I didn’t read a label a few days ago and it contained some modified food starch, so it could be — but of course it feels like I’ve got the flu. Blah. It’s quite sad how desperately I wish I was back in my house, in my comfortable bed, with my freezer full of homemade chicken stock and my electric tea kettle on the counter. And my fenced backyard, so the dogs could go out without me needing to drag myself out with them. If wishes were horses, I’d have a full stable today.

But tomorrow, Texas.

This is the mist about half an hour later (and lighter) than when I decided, nope, not getting on that path.

I woke up early this morning, maybe because I was hearing a weird noise—like a far-distant telephone dial, the old-fashioned rotary kind—but probably just because I went to bed really early last night. It was 5AM or so and I spent the next half hour trying to track down the noise: moving around the van, opening windows to see if it was louder outside, turning off circuits from the circuit breaker, running the water, going outside and turning the water off… every new attempt punctuated by five minutes or so of trying to go back to sleep.

Finally I gave up and got up. The first thing I do every morning is walk Zelda but it was still full dark outside, so instead I made myself coffee and breakfast (honey Greek yogurt with blueberries and granola, yum.) Zelda is generally not patient if I try to do much before her walk—she knows how the morning is supposed to go—but it was early enough and dark enough that she opened her eyes and watched me but didn’t bother to start moving until I started getting dressed.

When we started walking, it was a little after six. Sunrise was at six-forty, so it was still dark, but getting lighter. I walked a short way down the road, then turned back and got my flashlight, that’s how dark it was. We wandered along the road, down a short path to the deserted nature center—closed today, alas, or I would be headed back there—through the parking lot, down another road, and right to the edge of a boardwalk path into the park.

And there I stopped.

I’m in Tickfaw State Park in Lousiana. I got here yesterday afternoon, with time to do a bunch of housebound stuff (vanbound?), but not enough time to explore the park in daylight. So there I was, approximately 6:20 AM, about to head into the park in semi-darkness. Except…

It was a grey and foggy morning. Mist was everywhere and it was doing that thing where even though it’s not raining, the mist condenses on the tree leaves and then drips, so it sounded like there were tiny random footsteps happening all around me. They weren’t footsteps, of course, they were just drops of water hitting the ground. I’m a rational person, I know that’s what that sound was. Not footsteps, just water drops.

But there were birds, too, loads of them, making loads of noise.

And to the right of the boardwalk, in the woods, there was a rustling. And then a sound like a coughing bark. Not a bark, not a cough, but something in between. It’s not a sound that a squirrel makes, not one of their chitters or squeaks. It’s a bigger sound than that. But it’s not a rumble or a growl, either.

I told myself that it was perfectly safe. I didn’t know what was making that sound, but I was going to get on the boardwalk, not walk into the woods.

Except these weren’t exactly woods. I’m in a cypress swamp. The trees are probably beautiful in summer, but it’s the middle of winter, so right now they’re trunks of mostly bare gray branches, scattered dead leaves hanging from them. Occasional scrub pines provide a bit of color, but the ground is dark and muddy, covered with leaves or swampy water. For whatever reason, it reminds me of the landscape from Stranger Things.

I heard the sound again. Does Louisiana have bears? Probably. No reason why they wouldn’t have bears, plus the trash receptacles are bear-proof and why would you have bear-proof trash cans if you didn’t have bears? But, middle of winter, bears ought to be asleep. Hibernating, right? And there’s no way that noise was big enough to be a bear.

Unless it was a small bear.

Zelda was tugging at the leash. She was quite eager to go walk along that boardwalk and sniff interesting smells.

I was not so sure.

And then, from the left side, I heard a howl. A real, true, actual howl. Like a wolf howling at the moon howl. Like a werewolf howl.

I was sure it was a coyote, equally sure it was far away. And I was totally positive that the little footstep sounds I heard all around me were just water drips from the trees created by the mist, and whatever the thing coughing at me from the trees to the right was (probably a raccoon, right?), it was definitely not a monster from a shadow realm going to eat us both alive.

But I was not getting on that boardwalk, just not.

So Zelda and I walked back along the road and deeper into the park. I saw an owl fly across the road, and then fly from tree to tree until it disappeared into the swamp. I saw two snowy white egrets lift into the air, so beautiful and so ungainly. An entire flock of some much smaller bird flew so close overhead that I literally heard their wings beating.

The noise here is just incredible. Alexa does a forest sounds meditation that I’ve always thought was unrealistic because it’s such steady noise, but this is the forest that meditation belongs to, because the birds and the bugs are a constant background harmony, even now, sitting in Serenity on the computer.

And the park basically belongs right now to me and the birds. The campground has spots for thirty RVs; I believe there might be two other campers here. It is peaceful, serene, beautiful… and also isolated and honestly, seriously spooky.

In a mostly fun way.