“Life is too short to sleep on low-thread-count sheets.” – Leah Stussy
Travels With Maggie
I suspected raccoons, of which there are too many here at Lake Walcott, of causing the wee-hour disturbance, but she sheriff's deputy said it was a two-legged night wanderer. -- Photo by Pat Bean
A knock on the door in the wee hours of the morning is never good. But if you’re a campground host at a small Idaho park, as I have been all this summer, at least the first thought that runs through your mind is not “Who died?” ‘
Last night’s 1 a.m. knock on my RV, which wasn’t actually necessary because the headlights pulling into my site already had me hopping down from my over-the-cab bed to check out what was going on, was a sheriff’s deputy informing me that he had gotten a 911 call about some man wandering through the campground. The campers in tent site 27, he said, had made the call.
“Perhaps it was raccoons,” I voiced. “They get into everything at night.”
“Nope. I found the man. He’s parked down by the boat docks, drunk as a skunk and loopy as well. Gave me some story about UFOs,” the officer said. “I ran his license plates and he didn’t have any warrants out on him, so I just left him to sleep it off in his truck. But I thought someone should know.”
I thanked him for the information, and he told me to call 911 immediately if the man gave any more trouble.
I went back to bed, but of course not back to sleep. This was the third time this season that I had been awakened because of my campground host duties.
The first one involved me getting dressed and going down to the tent area to tell some idiot he couldn’t run his generator in the middle of the night to power floodlights around his tent.
“Ah. The generator’s going to run out of gas pretty quick,” he said in a “you gonna make me kind of way.”.
Lake Walcott sunrises are worth rising early to see even if sleep was stingy during the night. -- Photo by Pat Bean
“Now,” I said in my sternest mommy voice to the large red-faced guy with the paunchy stomach.
“OK,” he said, this time rather meekly, and wandered over to turn the noisy contraption off.
I love that mommy voice.
The second time I was awakened in the middle of the night here at Lake Walcott, it was a young couple with an infant who had been on the road until after midnight. They had forgotten the combination to the cabin they had reserved. Fortunately I knew it, and was soon back in my comfy bed, but of course not back to sleep
Of the many bits of trivia that floated through my head keeping my brain from shutting down last night was the time I had been the one to pound on a campground host’s door at 4 a.m. I was supposed to meet up with a group to hike to a place where we could see rare red-cockaded woodpeckers emerge from their nests at dawn – and had lost the combination to the gate lock.
I sure hope the bleary-eyed guy who gave it to me had an easier time getting back to sleep than I was having, I thought as I listened to Maggie’s snuffling snores beside me, and the yowling of coyotes off in the distance somewhere. Too bad he couldn’t know I was getting paid back for waking him.
Yup! What goes around comes around. It’s the only thing that makes life somewhat fair.
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