Wednesday, June 16 2004

Ruby of the Wilderness

Last night was Ruby’s first camping trip. I have always been a fan of backcountry camping. As a matter of fact, Ruby is named after the Ruby Mountains in eastern Nevada. Lamoille Canyon is full of beautiful trails on which Ani and I love to hike. We are used to trekking several miles to find a camping site, and we love arduous excursions into the Nevada rangelands.

For now, at least until Ruby is a bit older, our outdoor overnight adventures will need to be at sites where we can park the truck and pitch our tent nearby. Since we usually avoid this kind of car camping, it was quite an effort to pull any useful locations out of my memory. Pyramid Lake is always at the top of the list; we will probably be back there tomorrow, but yesterday we wanted to try something new. I thought I had come up with a winner near my work. At the top of Thomas Creek there is a meadow. It is only a half an hour from home, and yet it feels fairly secluded. My old roommate Shane and I used to go up there to watch meteor showers. As I have written before, Ruby will see plenty of desert, and I wanted to take her up above the tree line for something different.

There are some “primitive” sites along the bottom of the creek, which are always crowded. Since it is so close to town, I think that it is on a circuit of places for Reno’s fringe society to live during the summer. However, if you keep going up the fire road, you can get miles away from other campers. It is possible to drive right up to the base of the Mt. Rose Wilderness Area. It used to be a short hike from there to the sought-after meadow of seclusion, but yesterday, as we reached the top of the jeep trail, we were followed by a truck with two construction workers who unlocked a gate with a POSTED sign. They were part of a crew building a house smack dab in the middle of that beautiful meadow! Living in the West, I am used to the painful loss of sacred space to wealthy property consumers, so we made the best of it and found another creek side spot to set up camp.

During the first two hours in the wilderness, Ruby experienced the gamut of camping emotions: giggling bliss, squirmy discomfort, intense pain (after a bump on the head from a wayward truck door), and true existential angst that she expressed with an inconsolable scream. It was after a particularly long such session that Ani and I decided to pack up for home. We did so with no regrets; we had enjoyed the drive out, and picnicking at the base of Mt. Rose had provided a much-needed dose of outdoor living. As Momma Charis has often told me, sometimes we have to roll with a baby's punches and let our parental instincts be our guides. For now, Ruby makes the important calls. It's ok, she is a fairly benevolent dictator.

I just want to make one thing clear. The fact that we decided to leave had nothing to do with the camp-side discovery of a large pile of rocks supporting a creepy makeshift cross tied together with "dirty" gauze. Ani thanked me for waiting until we had already started to leave before I told her my theory. I’m pretty sure that the serial killer who made that pile was camped at the base of the creek so that he could be near the repository of his vile deeds.

Before I quit watching TV, I watched way too many episodes of the Forensic Files.