During my long road trip, I spent one night camping at Monahans Sandhills State Park in Texas. I knew that there would be sand dunes. However, being from an area mostly devoid of sand dunes, I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of the wind. It felt like a tornado was coming.
I’m pretty sure I was the only fool attempting to camp there without an RV. Normally, when I got to my campsite, I’d immediately go into camp set-up mode. I had figured out the most efficient way to set up my tent, and had the order of each step memorized, so I was like a machine on autopilot. [At a different campground, another camper approached me once and said, “I just wanted to tell you I appreciate how quickly you set up your tent.”]
Here, I had to think first and plan all the steps in advance to prevent my tent from flying away. I took almost everything out of my car- plastic storage bins containing all of my belongings, gallons of water, my backpack, and used them all as weights to lay on top of the folded tent. As I unfolded each section, I had to move some of the bins and belongings to keep the new piece in place before moving on to another section. Next, I tried hammering my tent stakes into the sand. That was basically a joke. Then I moved each of the weights inside the tent, one at a time, marking the corners and edges as best I could before inserting the poles for structure and raising the top.
After exploring the dunes and eating dinner, I got ready for bed. It was such a strange feeling, laying in the tent with all this other junk that took up all of the floor space not covered by my sleeping bag. It was like living in a camping version of the show Hoarders.
The top half of my tent was made of mesh- what’s basically a “window” in a tent. A rain fly stretched over the top, but instead of following the contour of the tent, it splayed out farther, creating a tiny “vestibule” area on each side of the tent, in front of its zippered “doors”.
The wind blew in gusts all night long, like waves, like breathing. It carried sand with it, sand that swept under the rain fly, through the mesh, and rained inside the tent all night long.
In the middle of the night, I had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t take my camera with me, but it was the one occasion I wish I had.
On the floor in the women’s bathroom sat the craziest insect I’ve ever seen in real life. It was about two inches long and an inch thick- around the size of a meaty adult thumb, and peach-colored, except for a yellow-and-black-striped, teardrop-shaped section toward its back end. It looked like a cross between the alien in the movie Spaceballs and a honeybee. It pretty much sat still, so I did what I came to do and hightailed it out of there.
On the walk back to my campsite, my flashlight landed on something near my tent. What was it? A large stone? I leaned in to get a better look, and it moved! A toad! The most gigantic toad I’ve ever seen! It looked dusty, the same color as the dunes. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t want to scare it by reaching close to it, or have it get trapped in the vestibule if I unzipped the tent, so I just stood there, and we stared at each other for a minute in the warm summer wind until the toad hopped away.
Here’s how much I like being clean: the next morning, in the corner of the campground shower, lay a glossy black scorpion. It was maybe an inch in size. It wasn’t moving. I turned on the shower, and it still didn’t move. I always wore flip-flops in public showers, and I figured, well, there’s some protection, at least, if it does get near me. I took a shower, making sure to stay away from that corner, and kept an eye on the scorpion. I never saw it move.
I had the job of taking down my tent in reverse of the way I had set it up, trying to shake as much sand out of it while the wind simultaneously tried yanking it away.
On my way out, I stopped in the ranger’s station. “I saw the craziest bug last night…” Before I even described it, the ranger said he could guess what it was and handed me a photo of the alien bug. “Is this it?” “YES!” It turned out to be a Jerusalem cricket, sometimes called Child of the Earth. This was no child of the earth.
Another sand dune range in a different state was on my trip list, but after spending the night in Monahans, I had a “been there, done that” attitude. Now that some time has passed, I feel like I could brave the sand again, but this time with a different agenda. I’d grab my flashlight and camera and go on a night hike to find out what kind of nocturnal creatures gambol on the dunes.
