A Little On the Windy Side

To Say the Least

Here’s one from our last camping spot. Signal was scarce, but even more so at our current spot. While we are doing laundry, I thought I would fling this one your way. I will get caught up soonly.

Between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. daily the wind blows here on the Coconino Plateau. I am not talking about breezes that gently bend the grass, I am talking about constant 10 to 20 mph winds with gusts up to 40 mph for hours and days on end. We recently lost two grommets on a tarp we use for our awning off van or trailer due to snatchy wind gusts.

Boondocking neighbors Steve and Sandy saw the dust devil coming as they sat under the awning attached to the side of their skoolie. They later recounted that they knew for sure our camp would get it, confirmed when I hollered "it got the shower tent" to Dan who was sitting in the back of our spare room/cargo trailer.

I had been perched in the doorway of said trailer praying the dusty dervish would continue a straight path and not take out the awning above me. We bought a screen tarp replacement that allows the wind to flow through instead of the perfect sail effect created by the plastic tarp fighting against the wind instead of flowing with it.

I watched as the dust tornado twisted our staked down shower tent that was drying from our recent showers and slapped it down flat on the desert floor. It reached out its tentacles and grabbed a bottle of dish soap and the window cleaner from the outdoor kitchen area and sailed them across our current back yard. I later found the dish drying pad way out there in the tall grass after thinking we had left it at the laundromat.

Dan fixed the shower tent by bending the piece of metal tubular framework that had gotten twisted back into place and adding a screw to firm it up. He replaced a grommeted tab, the second he has replaced on this particular Tardis porta-shower. The shower tent has done the twist and smackdown in several locations across the country, and yet, it lives to see another pair of naked and grateful Cordrays on another day. We are big fans of fixing, upcycling, repurposing, and buying less in general. And showers, blessed showers.

Why would we stay here more than two weeks thus far and have plans to stay longer? Because every potential living space or camping spot has its good points and bad points. Ask people who contend with months of rain or snow in the course of a year. A verdant, deeply green and forested paradise requires months of soaking rain. In between the sweet spot, the cooler-than-other places idyllic summer months, there is mud season. Floods, then mud, or bite-y bugs bigger than your head. Palmetto bugs zip through the air and land on your coolest hat while you check Key West off your bucket list. Chiggers, sand fleas, alligators within shoe flinging distance and the dozens of live ticks that descended from a tree above the open zombie hatch in the van to land on us in our bed in Florida, and yet we return again and again to that swampy paradise. Every spot has an I would rather not.

And yet, when the wind throttles back this place is nearly silent, save the call of crow, raven, songbird, or coyote pack. Silence, she whispers. Do they make that anymore? Here the grasses sway noiselessly and the primitive roads are doubled as people create new paths alongside existing deeply rutted and ungraded byways.

Every now and then a hoop-dee truck rattles past on a distant road in a cloud of red-brown dust, heading to the crossroads to fill the water tanks. Living out here means creating your own energy via solar and hauling in every drop of water needed to survive. As we are accustomed to that we take it in stride and make our dusty water runs, too. Half an hour to Williams to do laundry (with bonus car show peepin' while the clothes washed), an hour to Flagstaff, the big city.

To see more classic car photos from this event, visit my travel/inspirational page, “The Sunny Side" on Facebook.

We cannot imagine living here in the winter when the snow and later mud make leaving and coming home treacherous. For now, we are deeply grateful for the ease of being innie-outie Cordrays living in the van and trailer when the winds are extreme, but also outside on this sagebrush meadow high plateau with a sprinkling if juniper and space to enjoy each other and hear ourselves think. Aaahhhhhhh!

Just-a whistlin' in the wind,

Brenda Cordray

"The Desert Rose"

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