Summer of Caves (and a few other things)

If there’s one positive that came out of the pandemic quashing international travel plans for this summer, it’s that I had a reason to explore a few corners of the country where I actually live.  Instead of galivanting off to my beloved Iceland, I had a few domestic adventures this year.

First, I drove with my dad from North Carolina to South Dakota for a family reunion.  Along the way, we got caught in a traffic jam caused by a horse and buggy…

What it looks like to pass a horse and buggy
on a narrow country road.

…and stopped at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky to test my cell phone’s ability to photograph in semi-darkness.

I think it did rather well.

There’s not much to see in Pierre, SD, aside from family, so one of the days we were there, my dad took my aunt and me out west to see Wonderland Cave.

I didn’t know I was into caves, but apparently it’s a thing I do on vacation now.

For all that Mammoth Cave was mammoth in size,
it was sadly lacking in stalactites, which
Wonderland Cave has in abundance.

We also visited Deadwood, which was less like a town and more like a Wild West theme park.  Even the restaurant we ate lunch at used to be a brothel and was proud of it!

And of course we had to stop at Wall Drug on the way back.  I don’t really know how to explain Wall Drug to people who don’t know it.  It’s a small collection of shops in a town of 800 people, but South Dakota is kind of obsessed with it.  You see signs for it on the highway for hundreds of miles before you get anywhere near Wall.  It’s famous for 5-cent coffee and free ice water.  No, I’m not joking.

Later in the summer I had the chance to visit my sister and brother-in-law in Boston.  It was the first time I’d gotten on an airplane in twenty months, and I had every intention of sleeping through the hour-and-a-half flight, but the minute the engines revved up for takeoff, I got such an adrenaline rush I just spent the whole time staring out the window at the landscape below.

Pictures of the Boston cats, because I'd turned
my phone off for the flight and couldn't
take a picture out the window.

We decided to go on a writers’ retreat while I was visiting, so most of my pictures from the trip look a lot more like a cabin in Maine than an apartment in Boston.

In spring of 2020 I learned to appreciate the woods around my own house; this summer I had the chance to go a little further afield, but I discovered the same lesson applies.  I spend most of my leisure time flying away from the place where I live.  But as it turns out, there are some pretty special places not so far from home.

Me in my natural habitat (my aunt's farm in Ohio).

Adventures in My Own Back Yard

Normally the post you’d see here would be an account of my summer travels.  Well, 2020 has been many things so far, but normal is not one of them.  Having watched multiple international trips be scuppered by the pandemic, I’ve been left, like the rest of the world, to explore the only thing close at hand: my back yard.

However, unlike many, I’m lucky enough to live in a rural area where my back yard consists of twenty-two acres of woods and meadows.  

Picking my way along the trails where my landlady’s grandchildren ride their ATV, I discovered a whole little world of green and living things.  Watching them come back to life after the winter has been one of my greatest joys in the past three months.

Sweet gums in early April

Sweet gums in early May

I don’t have any quirky history to share about this little patch of Upstate, and having been my own tour guide, I didn’t come back with any amusing but factually dubious anecdotes from my tour.  But for anybody who might enjoy a bit of green, I wanted to share a few pictures.

The grape trellis from which my landlady never gets any grapes. The deer, however, enjoy the grapes a great deal.

I discovered that the pond next to my house is actually part of a creek that runs all the way through the property.

The pond, which perhaps doesn't show to its best advantage when coated with pine pollen.

I managed to get right down to the stream by following a deer trail.

I discovered hidden meadows I never knew existed…

A field full of bluebells.

And a field full of cornflowers, which around here are charmingly called raggedy sailors.

 …and hundreds of tiny beautiful things.

 

Green blueberries!

Ferns just uncurling

Vines hanging from branches like strings on a harp.

And I even met a few of my neighbors.

A toad in a log

An orchard mason bee on a thistle

In a way, the pandemic has been a lesson to me.  I’ve lived on this property for eight years, and it took a global shut-down to get me to explore it.  Before this, I’d never ventured beyond the end of my driveway--though, in my defense, that was partly because I was afraid of getting shot by my landlady’s son-in-law because I can never remember when deer-hunting season is.  

 

A deer blind covered in flowering wisteria.

I’m sure I’ll be among the first to start booking trips again once the crisis is over, but I hope in the future, it won’t take a pandemic to remind me that there are things very worth seeing right outside my own front door.