Wilderness Quest 2011 - Part 2

The desert is moody.  Cold and indifferent one day, hot and intense the next.

Our base camp was set up before we arrived the first morning.  Water in the smaller containers was still frozen from the night before.  Wind drove the cold air into my bones.  And it was too late to head back to my warm house.  I was committed to being on this exposed land for the next eight days.

Forget about warm housing, I didn't even have a tent!  It is suggested that no tent be used on a quest, allowing us to be less separated from the land and life of which we are a part.  There are many things that would give me great comfort in the desert, and a tent is at the top of the list.  During the upcoming nights, my home would be made of a ground cloth below me, a sleeping bag around me, and another tarp above to keep out any rain.  No protective walls to keep out any boogeymen or four-leggeds that may find me out there in the middle of nowhere.  Even though I always approach quests with fears of tentlessness, I usually end up sleeping without the top tarp some of the time because I find that it separates me from the AMAZING, gargantuan night skies that reach into infinity.

The first night out this time around, dressed in long underwear, fleece shirt and pants, and my down coat, I snuggled into my blue down sleeping bag, and by the light of my headlamp, I began to journal.  (Yes, with all of that insulation, I was pretty darn comfortable.)  Grief about my dad's dementia and physical deterioration, along with confusion about how his care was being handled leaked out through ink onto paper, through tears onto cheeks, and through cries into the night.  As I was indulging quite nicely, a scorpion crawled from under my ground cloth.  Hadn't he ever heard the sound of a wailing woman before???)  He was about four inches from my writing hand.  Yikes.

Did you know that during the day, scorpions find shelter from the hot sun by hiding under rocks, but you can't fool a scorpion into thinking a headlamp is the sun, so you can't make him hide - or go away?  What to do, what to do?  He moseyed on around so that he was about a foot away from where my head would lie - if I had the nerve to go to sleep knowing that there was a scorpion hovering nearby.  I watched him as he would walk a short distance, then hang out for a while - getting nowhere slowly.  I watched to be sure that he was going to go THAT way, not THIS way, toward me.

After about a half hour, when I realized that the scorpion had more staying power than I did, I just decided to quit my supervising and hope that if that little stinger guy came any closer, he would choose to go underneath my ground cloth again instead of joining me on top of it.  Sometimes, you just can't worry about what might happen, so I cocooned myself into my bag and slept like a baby.


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