Sierra Loop - White Wolf Float Trip - Tuesday, September 4, 2018

Waning Crescent Moon

Flash! Crack! Boomity-Boom!

I have not experienced a mountain thunderstorm in so long that I forgot how powerful one can be. The sky gets so stoic, impossibly quiet - eerily so - then the suddenness of the manic thunder gets instantly personal. Marauding sound waves vibrate through the forest and the granitic rocks, rattling your chest cavity and involuntarily startling you. Lying on your mattress pad in your zipped-up-tight tiny tent during a storm like this multiplies the sensory input to the point of camper delirium. What was that old safety thing about counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder? To judge the distance the storm must be away from you?

Flash! Crack! Boomity-Boom! It is here!

First comes the hail, small but loud and quick to melt. An hors d'oeuvres, an appetizer, a rat-a-tat-a-tat teaser. And then (soon) the rain ensues. Drop. Drip. Pour. Pelting crescendos. Full on, all out, buckets full of rain. Hard rain. Rain with a purpose. Kamikaze rain, Cossack rain coming just for you, holed up right there in Yosemite National Park White Wolf Campground site #23.

You marvel at the sturdiness of your tiny tent, made in China, designed by nerds in Seattle, sold for cheap by a Pennsylvania dude on Ebay. Flash! Crack! Boomity-Boom! You start to get used to it after thirty or forty minutes. You start to feel a rhythm to it. You start to let it rock you to sleep and before you know it you're out, napping, dreaming about something long forgotten. Or never known. Or actually happening. Elsewhere. Vaguely familiar. Gauzy. Pop! You're awakened by silence, rain gone, it's cooler, approaching cold. Your eyes open, real world now, at least a consciousness you're used to, you look out the side window into the tiny tent vestibule where your sandals are floating.

FLOATING!?!

You look out the other side and there is standing muddy water two inches deep. You pull your arms out of your mummy bag and put your hands down on the floor of the tiny tent to push yourself upright and squish-squish it feels like the soft mushy floor of a river raft. Your tiny tent, except for the part in touch with the ground due to the gravity of you, the gravity of your intensely awake self, is floating. Holy Samuel de Champlain, Batman, you are sitting in a lake.

Credit the Chinese seamstresses (seamsters?) and Seattle nerd engineers (enginettes?), for the wonder that no water whatsoever leaked inside the tiny tent. Briefly, you consider just accepting the status quo. Why go out there and get sopping wet and muddy if the tiny tent can hold a lake at bay, so to speak? But, of course, you do not. You cannot. You unzip the fly, stick your clammy cool feet in the muddy cold sandals and wiggle your way out into Lake Champlain. It covers your feet and it's shockingly wet. In fact, it is cold enough to register on your foul language triggering meter as a full fledged "Motherf--er!!"

That little burst warms you up. You spring into action - well, sixty-six and three quarters years old action anyway.

Free-standing tents are great. You always stake them down initially regardless, but if it rains hella hard and you find yourself afloat, you just get out, pull up the stakes, grab the whole enchilada, and move the tent where it should have been in the first place - up on high ground. So it went.

I didn't take any pictures. It didn't even occur to me. I simply re-staked, dried my tootsies, re-entered my lair, and went to sleep. It only rained a little bit the whole rest of the night.

Peace, Love, and To Be Continued (TBC),
Jim