When I was about 15 years old, I went on a camping trip with my sister, my ex-Step Mom, and her current boyfriend, who later became her husband. (This is a story in and of itself, but I’m not going to go there right now.) It was approaching the end of a summertime trip of seeing most of my extended family in California and I decided to take this camping trip with the aforementioned group of people to a lake in Oregon before the vacation was over.
Now, once we got there, we weren’t really going to rough it in tents or anything like that, because we had a huge pop-up fifth wheel camper in tow, complete with kitchen, shower, and one of those toilets you have to hook up to a giant hose to empty when you exit the campsite (think cousin Eddie from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation). So this was a “camping” trip in the loosest of terms.
When we completed the drive up north and pulled into the campground, the beauty of the area literally took my breath away. There were cedar trees that seemed taller than skyscrapers and the lake was the clearest I had ever seen in my life. There were small fields of clover and wildflowers, populated by deer and birds that literally came up to humans and ate tiny scraps of bread from the hands of children. And the coolest thing of all to me were the hundreds of prairie dogs that skittered through the patches of flowers, dodging tree roots and diving into their subterranean homes.