I'm Dreaming of A White...

...Memorial Day!

Well, I don't think we'll get more snow this year, and we were up in north-central Mass when it came anyway. However, it's one thing to see snow in May; it's entirely something else to be sleeping outdoors at a campground when it happens! Apparently rumors have gone around that I said "It's not going to rain." I did, but I wasn't positive; I was just being positive. And I did also say in the same conversation that there was a chance of rain. Which there was; I checked the weather incessantly the whole week before the trip, and the last forecast for Gardner listed a 30% chance of rain that night, and 40% chance of rain on Saturday. It didn't say anything about two inches of snow.

The state park campground has a no-fires-after-midnight rule, and most of us retired a little before that anyway, it being the first night. Seth, Amie, and I all slept out in a shelter that we had built at the edge of the campsite under shelter of a thick hemlock. The shelter was a simple lean-to, with a weave of fallen branches covering the uphill side, and our legs extending downhill outside the shelter. I draped an unobtrusive green tarp over the center of the shelter, to protect us from what would likely be a heavy dew, or maybe a passing shower. The hemlock would do a good job, but the green tarp was a good addition. The one mistake I made was to throw pine needles over the whole thing, which gave it some "privacy" and a sense of actually being inside something, but the weave wasn't thick enough to allow for any real rain-blockage by means of needles alone. I decided, to my chagrin, not to drape the massive blue tarp over the shelter and the leaning sticks that extended past it; the blue thing was hideous and huge, and would have detracted severely from the outdoorsy aura; I mean, you might as well just sleep in a tent (of course, the tents were very crowded, which was our main reason for sleeping out).

Anyway, Seth went to sleep, but Amie and I chatted late. Rain started probably between 1 and 2, and we could hear it lightly pattering the tarp and tents. It slowly, creepingly got heavier, and I moved the green tarp into a better position, and we huddled closer to the top of the shelter to keep from getting dripped on. The hemlock tree was really good protection; of the three of us, only Amie's bag got wet early on, and it was so thick that the water never soaked through, though it was getting dripped or sprinkled on for 8 hours or so. The rain really picked up sometime around 4, and I finally decided to go out in the cold - it was very cold - and get the blue tarp from the car. I padded up through the camp barefoot, grabbed the thing, and ran back down as quickly as I could in my unhardened feet. In putting the blue tarp on, I caused a lot of precipitation inside the shelter, not of water but of pine needles, which went absolutely everywhere. As far as I know, Seth is still digging one out of an ear every hour or so. Anyway, we rested in relative comfort under the two tarps, and only our feet got wet (except Amie's, her bag was so thick). This was not too different than the lot of those who slept in tents, two of whom (Joel and Josh, the Eagle Scouts). We listened to stories about the legendary Mark Tappen and chatted about the weather for an hour or two, before it began to get light. This sort of scared us, and we decided to go to sleep, though I didn't think I would be able to.

The next thing I knew, I was awoken by voices. They were talking about the fire; where to find dry wood, how cold they were, whether they could keep the fire going ... I rolled onto my stomach and peered out under the tarp at the campsite. My first thought was, "Wow, it's snowing. When did that start?" My second thought was, "Wait a sec, it's May 18th! What the - ?!" After the initial shock, I could only laugh. After a winter of hardly any snow, we had chosen the one day in late spring when it was to snow for a good seven hours. It was so wet that it never accumulated much; it melted under its own weight, and the shelter never got snowed on under the hemlock; all that got through were the steady drips. Anyway, I'm exhausted now from two very short nights and one very intense hike; more later. Oh, and here's a shout out to all da peeps who braved the wilds for 2 tough nights in a row; north central Mass is a lean, mean wilderness, and only the stout of heart survive.