Deep Winter at Raccoon Creek

It's just snow and bare trees, gray skies and colorless branches, and temperatures below freezing.  We've been having the most wonderful winter this year.  For the past decade, winters in this area have mainly consisted of Thanksgiving weather: 40 degrees and overcast.  But the 2020 / 2021 season has been a rare delight, reminiscent of the winters I recall from decades past.  This is one of the two campgrounds along the backpacking loop at Raccoon Creek State Park.  See the lonesome fire ring standing sentinel in a snowy field.  I could see making this place home for a night.  Winter is the only time I'd want to backpack at Raccoon; the park is too crowded the rest of the year.  

Of course, I spent half the 1990s in West Africa, so that amounted to one very long summer.  Five years without autumn leaves, or spring daffodils, or winter snow.  But those wintry days of the 1970s and 80s are very clear in my memory: snow forts, snowball fights, ice football, sledding.  As a kid in those days, you couldn't let the winter keep you inside.  You just had to go out and enjoy the season because it was going to linger for a good long while.  I learned to drive on snowy roads.  I broke my collar bone playing football with neighborhood kids on a frozen parking lot.  When I was in Africa, I sometimes missed the winters back home.  I longed for the cold December air of home on my first Christmas in Africa, when I tried so hard to approximate an American Yuletide that I got overheated cooking on an open fire in the hot tropical kitchen house with its tin roof...  I had to spend the holiday in bed with heatstroke.  This year, I've welcomed the winter's long return--and with no respite in sight!  

Some folks really know how to embrace winter!  Raccoon Creek keeps one small campground open year round for car camping and trailers.  They call it the Sioux Campground, for some strange reason, and it only has three primitive campsites, a water pump, and an outhouse.  I've never seen it full in the winter, but there's usually some hardy soul out there making the best of things.  This tent reminds me of that old sitcom MASH.  It looks like a mobile hospital unit from the Korean War, right down to the stovepipe coming out of the roof.  Ah, but the woods were a lovely place to meditate today, to read a chapter of a Nigerian novel, to let my mind drift back across winters past.  All the seasons of the year are beautiful.  I'm sure that all the seasons of a person's life have their beauty, too.  This return to full-on winter has been such a joy so far.