Evading Sasquatch

After calling several campgrounds the morning of the day we were supposed to go camping and being told "there's no room in the inn," I finally found a place that had open tent sites over the Mardi Gras break: Chicot State Park in Ville Platte, Louisiana.

Amanda and I finally kicked into high gear at noon, packing our bags and getting supplies for the trip. Singing songs and bubbling with excitement we piled all our belongings, strangely including a laptop computer containing a DVD movie and a set of Chinese checkers, into my red Chevy pickup and cruised on down the road. Pretty smooth sailing till just past Opelousas, where the Mapquest directions were wrong again and again. Before we knew it, a fella at the Cabot Power Plant was telling us, "Shore, yessir, y'can drive right through the plant down them gravel roads and get to the park that way."

After discovering that the dirt roads dead-ended at someone's property with a lot of barking and snarling dogs, we reversed course and finally arrived at the park as the sun was preparing to set. We drove around looking for a site and found to our dismay that it was the zoo. The sites were right next to each other and you would have thought it was the annual campers' convention. It was a metropolis of tents.

With rays of sunshine slipping below the horizon, my wife and I decided on a whim to do the "primitive camping" site. This is the deal where you park and then walk to your campsite. 2 mile hike to be exact. Out into the middle of the swampy woods where if you yelled no one but the raccoons and alligators and wild hogs oh my would hear you. Virtually running up and down the wooded hills, we arrived at a breathtaking site. Our elevated campsite was surrounded by a swampy lake. Very pretty.

We scrambled to set up a campfire as the sun slipped behind the horizon. Amidst a few sparks of fire and our flashlights, we set up the tent in the dark, with the owls already beginning to hoot.

True confession: If my wife had not been there, I don't know if the tent construction would have happened. I took one look at the instructions beneath my flashlight and knew that they were written by someone who spoke English as a second language, or perhaps a third or fourth. After she calmed me down, we got the thing established in less than an hour, built a roaring fire and ate hot dogs and marshmallows.

Things were going smooth, nice and wonderful until a wild beast started walking circles around our campsite just beyond the trees. I say "wild beast" because we never did find out what it was. But for the better part of an hour, we did huddle inside the tent, pointing our flashlights out at the trees and waiting for the sasquatch, or black bear, or whatever it was, to reveal itself. All I know is that sounded large enough to be a small man. Maybe I'm glad we never found out what it was. (Maybe it was a small man.)

But, oh, the stars! I've never seen them like that. I used to read about God promising Abraham and saying, "Abe, see if you can number the stars," of course with the latent idea that "No, Abe, you can't." I always used to think under my breath, "where I live, you can count 'em." Not this night. It was hard to find areas in the sky that were not "star".

You would think that three layers of clothes and a sleeping bag in Louisiana in February would be warm enough. But you'd be wrong in so thinking. It was frigid.

The evening of the next day after various wandering adventures in the woods, it was a little hard to say goodbye. As we hiked back to civilization, I thought to myself, "I could do this again." By the time I was asleep in my own bed that night, I had begun to second-guess that sentiment.