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Socially Distant Camping, With Graveyards
Aug. 20th, 2020 09:11 amA couple weeks ago, Darwin and I decided enough was enough. We needed to get away. But this is a pandemic. What to do?
Camping!
Of course, Darwin and I don't do tent camping at this point in our lives. Instead, we go to Campit Campground, an LGBT campground near Saugatuck in west Michigan and rent a cabin. The campground is huge, and they accommodate tent camping, RV camping, and rustic cabin camping. And it's all LGBT people.
It was a delightful week. The weather was perfect--never too hot or too cold. No bugs. Darwin ordered firewood from the campground office, and they asked, "How many?" "Six!" he replied brightly, thinking they meant "how many logs?" A while later, the campground's errand-runner came out with a trailer piled high with wood. It was six sections of wood, each one the size of a 1'x1' box. So we had this huge woodpile, and it forced us to have a campfire every night. (We still had wood left over!)
Our cabin was basically a wooden box with a knee-high shelf for a bed, though it had a mattress. It also had a small fridge and a very nice deck. And it was surrounded by gay guys. They may strike some of you as funny, but I have to tell you--it's so very wonderful knowing every single person around you is like you and supports you and won't be a source of homophobia. It's why we go to this place.
Usually when Darwin and I go camping (and I realize I'm using the term loosely, here), I don't cook much. We usually go into town and eat in restaurants. But with the pandemic, we wanted to keep that to a minimum, and we brought food with us, along with my camp stove. Darwin had never seen this stove before. It's old--I got it back when I was in college. It's the size of two shoe boxes and has a chamber for liquid propane. You use a tiny hand pump to pressurize it. I like it better than the stoves that use propane canisters--it's less wasteful. Darwin was both fascinated and appalled. "How can you cook on that thing?" he said.
I demonstrated on the first morning by cooking bacon. Cooking bacon outdoors while camping is cruel for everyone around you. The wonderful, crispy bacon smell permeates the fresh morning air, and they know they aren't getting any! The stove impressed Darwin very much. I cooked nearly all our meals on it all week, and did the usual camping trick of setting water on it to heat while we ate so it would be ready for dish washing afterward. I didn't know that Darwin had never done any campground cooking before, and he was more than a little amazed at how smoothly it went.
We did run into one problem. We stopped at the store on our way to the campground, which meant we arrived with a whole mess of bagged groceries, but the cabin had no cupboards or shelves or anything. We put the food and kitchen equipment under the bed, but it was highly disorganized and difficult to find anything, which makes my teeth ache. The next time we were in town, we stopped at another store and I searched for . . . laundry baskets! Two of them. One for food, and one for kitchen stuff. Everything went into the baskets, and the baskets slid neatly under the bed. Ta da!
We lazed around Saugatuck and South Haven, two of our favorite Michigan towns. Saugatuck is crowded with vacationers, even during a pandemic, and we amazed ourselves by scoring a perfect parking place right at the edge of downtown. We kept our masks on, even outdoors, and so did almost everyone else. Progress!
We also came across The Lake Problem.
The Great Lakes are riding way high this season. No, seriously. They're higher than any time in recorded history. And nowhere was this more evident than in Saugatuck and South Haven. Both of them are lake towns, with docks and piers right on the streets. Usually the water levels are low enough that you have to climb down a short ladder on the dock to get to a boat. Now? Many of the docks are underwater. Water has encroached into the streets, forcing some to close. The Saugatuck Fire Department (which is on the river because it also rescues boats) was flooded. Many houses are inches from water in the living room. Inches. Water pumps were everywhere, gamely gooshing water out of the street and back into the lake, only to have it return a few minutes later. Nature always wins in the end.
We love South Haven so much that we joke about Darwin becoming city manager there one day as a retirement job. While we were out there, he learned by accident that South Haven is currently looking for a new city manager. (!!) He isn't going to apply, but it was a head-shaking moment.
We shopped and ate ice cream (and made sure Darwin used his insulin pump) and worked out bits of local history by studying the architecture of buildings and houses (What? What do YOU do on vacation?).
And we hunted graveyards.
See, Darwin has a number of ancestors who are buried out in that area, and he wanted to find their graves. For a couple a days, we wandered through Niles and Berrien Springs. Here, I was invaluable. Totally true! (Since this blog is All About Me.) One graveyard surrounded a white, clapboard church way out in the country, a church that Darwin's great-grandparents helped found. Their graves were somewhere in the graveyard, and I finally found them. They were only a few yards from the church, and as far as Darwin and I could tell, they must have been among the first people buried there. It was very interesting.
A side note: the church's outhouse was still standing. It was divided into two sections, each with two seats. I said to Darwin, "Your great-grandparents pooped in here." And he nodded sagely.
Back to my invaluable-ness: Later, outside Niles, we were hunting through another cemetery for the grave of another ancestor, though this one didn't have the last name McClary. We looked and looked, but found nothing. Finally, I found something that made my jaw drop. Darwin was in another part of the graveyard, distracted by an odd inscription. I trotted over to him.
"Come over here and look," I said.
"Hold on," he said. "I want to see what--"
"No, no," I interrupted. "You want to see this. Right now."
Sighing at the perfidy of husbands, he trudged over to where I was pointing and at last realization came over him. =His= jaw dropped. In the middle back of the graveyard, occupying a prominent position, was a large stone marker engraved with one word: MCCLARY.
This was a major find. Darwin didn't know that he had a McClary presence in this graveyard. Darwin immediately set about checking the stones. He found a number of relatives buried in that plot, and these were graves he wasn't sure he'd ever see. One was for a great-great uncle who lived on his own farm all his life, never married, and who eventually committed suicide by poison. Darwin suspects that he was gay, and the guilt and pressure from a homophobic society and upbringing finally forced him over the edge. I agree with him.
It must also be said that Darwin had a miracle find of his own. We scoured the little graveyard, which was surrounded by a thick woodland on three sides and on the fourth by a busy road, looking for the non-McClary ancestor Darwin really wanted to find, and came up empty. Finally, we called it a day and got into the car. As I was driving toward the exit, Darwin yelped, "Wait! Wait! Stop!"
I did, and he got out. A gravestone we had both seen before but passed over because it was too hard to read, had become legible after the sun moved and changed the way the shadows fell. Darwin happened to catch sight of it as we were heading out, and it was the very grave he'd come there to find. Win!
As we're wont to do, Darwin and I also spent some time exploring small town downtowns, commenting on the old buildings and whether the place was a decent one or not. Many of the small downtowns we looked at had basically been wrecked by the local highway system. Back when the state started linking up little towns with the then-new highways, the state just incorporated the town's main street into the highway. The towns initially welcomed this--it brought more traffic and people to town. But this was back when "traffic" still involved horses and those new-fangled automobiles that went a shocking thirty miles an hour. As time went on, cars became faster, and semi trucks appeared on the scene, and they all use a highway system designed back in the 1920s.
Now, the nice little downtowns are being wrecked by roaring traffic. You might we strolling down the sidewalk, wondering if there's a cafe for lunch, when two semis and a dump truck bellow past you in a cloud of acrid diesel fumes, followed by a long line of cars that whoosh and rush and drown out both conversation and enjoyment. And none of them are stopping in the downtown to shop or eat or do anything. To them, the town is just a place that slows you down for a minute before you pound back up to 55. It's a terrible shame, but it does give Darwin and me something to complain about. You take your wins where you can.
The weather continued to be a delight--warm during the day, cool at night. Perfect for campfires. It was a fine week!
Camping!
Of course, Darwin and I don't do tent camping at this point in our lives. Instead, we go to Campit Campground, an LGBT campground near Saugatuck in west Michigan and rent a cabin. The campground is huge, and they accommodate tent camping, RV camping, and rustic cabin camping. And it's all LGBT people.
It was a delightful week. The weather was perfect--never too hot or too cold. No bugs. Darwin ordered firewood from the campground office, and they asked, "How many?" "Six!" he replied brightly, thinking they meant "how many logs?" A while later, the campground's errand-runner came out with a trailer piled high with wood. It was six sections of wood, each one the size of a 1'x1' box. So we had this huge woodpile, and it forced us to have a campfire every night. (We still had wood left over!)
Our cabin was basically a wooden box with a knee-high shelf for a bed, though it had a mattress. It also had a small fridge and a very nice deck. And it was surrounded by gay guys. They may strike some of you as funny, but I have to tell you--it's so very wonderful knowing every single person around you is like you and supports you and won't be a source of homophobia. It's why we go to this place.
Usually when Darwin and I go camping (and I realize I'm using the term loosely, here), I don't cook much. We usually go into town and eat in restaurants. But with the pandemic, we wanted to keep that to a minimum, and we brought food with us, along with my camp stove. Darwin had never seen this stove before. It's old--I got it back when I was in college. It's the size of two shoe boxes and has a chamber for liquid propane. You use a tiny hand pump to pressurize it. I like it better than the stoves that use propane canisters--it's less wasteful. Darwin was both fascinated and appalled. "How can you cook on that thing?" he said.
I demonstrated on the first morning by cooking bacon. Cooking bacon outdoors while camping is cruel for everyone around you. The wonderful, crispy bacon smell permeates the fresh morning air, and they know they aren't getting any! The stove impressed Darwin very much. I cooked nearly all our meals on it all week, and did the usual camping trick of setting water on it to heat while we ate so it would be ready for dish washing afterward. I didn't know that Darwin had never done any campground cooking before, and he was more than a little amazed at how smoothly it went.
We did run into one problem. We stopped at the store on our way to the campground, which meant we arrived with a whole mess of bagged groceries, but the cabin had no cupboards or shelves or anything. We put the food and kitchen equipment under the bed, but it was highly disorganized and difficult to find anything, which makes my teeth ache. The next time we were in town, we stopped at another store and I searched for . . . laundry baskets! Two of them. One for food, and one for kitchen stuff. Everything went into the baskets, and the baskets slid neatly under the bed. Ta da!
We lazed around Saugatuck and South Haven, two of our favorite Michigan towns. Saugatuck is crowded with vacationers, even during a pandemic, and we amazed ourselves by scoring a perfect parking place right at the edge of downtown. We kept our masks on, even outdoors, and so did almost everyone else. Progress!
We also came across The Lake Problem.
The Great Lakes are riding way high this season. No, seriously. They're higher than any time in recorded history. And nowhere was this more evident than in Saugatuck and South Haven. Both of them are lake towns, with docks and piers right on the streets. Usually the water levels are low enough that you have to climb down a short ladder on the dock to get to a boat. Now? Many of the docks are underwater. Water has encroached into the streets, forcing some to close. The Saugatuck Fire Department (which is on the river because it also rescues boats) was flooded. Many houses are inches from water in the living room. Inches. Water pumps were everywhere, gamely gooshing water out of the street and back into the lake, only to have it return a few minutes later. Nature always wins in the end.
We love South Haven so much that we joke about Darwin becoming city manager there one day as a retirement job. While we were out there, he learned by accident that South Haven is currently looking for a new city manager. (!!) He isn't going to apply, but it was a head-shaking moment.
We shopped and ate ice cream (and made sure Darwin used his insulin pump) and worked out bits of local history by studying the architecture of buildings and houses (What? What do YOU do on vacation?).
And we hunted graveyards.
See, Darwin has a number of ancestors who are buried out in that area, and he wanted to find their graves. For a couple a days, we wandered through Niles and Berrien Springs. Here, I was invaluable. Totally true! (Since this blog is All About Me.) One graveyard surrounded a white, clapboard church way out in the country, a church that Darwin's great-grandparents helped found. Their graves were somewhere in the graveyard, and I finally found them. They were only a few yards from the church, and as far as Darwin and I could tell, they must have been among the first people buried there. It was very interesting.
A side note: the church's outhouse was still standing. It was divided into two sections, each with two seats. I said to Darwin, "Your great-grandparents pooped in here." And he nodded sagely.
Back to my invaluable-ness: Later, outside Niles, we were hunting through another cemetery for the grave of another ancestor, though this one didn't have the last name McClary. We looked and looked, but found nothing. Finally, I found something that made my jaw drop. Darwin was in another part of the graveyard, distracted by an odd inscription. I trotted over to him.
"Come over here and look," I said.
"Hold on," he said. "I want to see what--"
"No, no," I interrupted. "You want to see this. Right now."
Sighing at the perfidy of husbands, he trudged over to where I was pointing and at last realization came over him. =His= jaw dropped. In the middle back of the graveyard, occupying a prominent position, was a large stone marker engraved with one word: MCCLARY.
This was a major find. Darwin didn't know that he had a McClary presence in this graveyard. Darwin immediately set about checking the stones. He found a number of relatives buried in that plot, and these were graves he wasn't sure he'd ever see. One was for a great-great uncle who lived on his own farm all his life, never married, and who eventually committed suicide by poison. Darwin suspects that he was gay, and the guilt and pressure from a homophobic society and upbringing finally forced him over the edge. I agree with him.
It must also be said that Darwin had a miracle find of his own. We scoured the little graveyard, which was surrounded by a thick woodland on three sides and on the fourth by a busy road, looking for the non-McClary ancestor Darwin really wanted to find, and came up empty. Finally, we called it a day and got into the car. As I was driving toward the exit, Darwin yelped, "Wait! Wait! Stop!"
I did, and he got out. A gravestone we had both seen before but passed over because it was too hard to read, had become legible after the sun moved and changed the way the shadows fell. Darwin happened to catch sight of it as we were heading out, and it was the very grave he'd come there to find. Win!
As we're wont to do, Darwin and I also spent some time exploring small town downtowns, commenting on the old buildings and whether the place was a decent one or not. Many of the small downtowns we looked at had basically been wrecked by the local highway system. Back when the state started linking up little towns with the then-new highways, the state just incorporated the town's main street into the highway. The towns initially welcomed this--it brought more traffic and people to town. But this was back when "traffic" still involved horses and those new-fangled automobiles that went a shocking thirty miles an hour. As time went on, cars became faster, and semi trucks appeared on the scene, and they all use a highway system designed back in the 1920s.
Now, the nice little downtowns are being wrecked by roaring traffic. You might we strolling down the sidewalk, wondering if there's a cafe for lunch, when two semis and a dump truck bellow past you in a cloud of acrid diesel fumes, followed by a long line of cars that whoosh and rush and drown out both conversation and enjoyment. And none of them are stopping in the downtown to shop or eat or do anything. To them, the town is just a place that slows you down for a minute before you pound back up to 55. It's a terrible shame, but it does give Darwin and me something to complain about. You take your wins where you can.
The weather continued to be a delight--warm during the day, cool at night. Perfect for campfires. It was a fine week!
