Prior to the plague, Dawn and I had planned to spend Mother’s Day weekend in Brooklyn with our daughter Sierra. Mother’s Day coincided with the end of the spring semester for me, so I had planned to hang out for a few weeks on Sierra’s couch by night, and stroll the city by day. Plans changed for us, as they most likely have for everyone else. The city will have to wait for my stroll. So it goes.

Memorial Day weekend is usually spent either in Lignite, or in Grenville, South Dakota. Dawn’s father, and four of his seven brothers, are veterans, so we often make our way to eastern South Dakota to honor them as they honor theirs.

As a result of the previously mentioned plague, those plans also changed, and we ended up sequestering ourselves in a remote campground in the Black Hills for a few days of camping in our 53-year-old camper, hiking on our 40-some-year-old feet, and fire staring with smoke stung eyes. Use them or lose them they say. “They” say a lot of things.

Our camper is a 1967 Aristocrat Lo-Liner, that was manufactured in California, and gradually bought and sold its way to the Dakotas. My parents purchased it from Don and Kathy Knutson, sometime last century, way back in the 1990s I believe. And for the past eight years or so, Dawn and I have been its proud keepers.

Technically, it’ll sleep six, but anything more than two seems to be a bit more than anything I’m willing to be a part of in the quaint, and mildly confined, space of the Aristocrat.

Admittedly, much like the fate of many campers I suspect, the Aristocrat has logged many…many…many more hours in our driveway than it has on the road or in a campground. We hope to change that this summer. Hope. It’s as good a four-letter-word as any…well almost.

The campground we stayed at was small, fairly remote, fairly secluded, and fairly quiet. Other than the splash, babble, and rush of the lovely little creek a hop, skip, and maybe another hop, from our camper, it was perfectly quiet. Almost. Almost some of the time.

The rest of the time the creek song was in competition with the wail of one or another gas powered generators from some of the other campers. The creek song lost.

We don’t have a generator. The Aristocrat is pretty self-contained, and the energy it does use is sufficiently, and quietly, provided by propane. Having children sort of made other people’s children a bit less annoying, so perhaps if we had a generator we wouldn’t be so annoyed by the other generators?

When I say “we”, I mostly mean “me”. Dawn was annoyed, but she handles these sorts of auditory annoyances with much more grace than myself. I’ve been accused of being the “noise police”, and Barney Fife was wildly itching for an arrest that would provide some silence of the natural kind.

Bird chirps, creek babbles, flatulent mountain lion…flatulent camper…anything but the steady, persistent roar of someone’s hotdogs staying cold (or hot), or their television televising, or their whatever whatevering.

Selfish? Perhaps, but aren’t bird chirps, creek babbles, and mountain lion farts the reason we drag ourselves, and much more of our stuff than is necessary, into the woods? Let no mountain lion fart in vain. After all, silence is a virtue.

Happy summer my friends.