Strange Contrasts Between Spaciousness and Confinement

 How the world changes when you drive perpendicular to a river!   Utah is a great place to practice that game, because of the Colorado River.  Here in Idaho I drove away from the Salmon River to accomplish the same thing.

After climbing 2000 feet where nothing was flat, I was surprised to find a large flat campsite.  It had certainly been used and since it was a Friday I expected to accrete neighbors.  But none came.  Apparently there is a bit of a camping lull between Labor Day and hunting season.

What a large and flat campsite it was!  Here was a chance to act out a long term fantasy: pull everything out of the tow vehicle (a van) and organize it.  Normally that is impossible at campsites because the actual work space outside the van is tiny and cramped by rocks, weeds, and steep slopes.  What a strange irony there is to being confined in one sense while looking off 40 miles in most directions to suck in those great panoramic views.  

The campsite was as big as a football field, and I used about half of it.  It is truly amazing how much stuff can come out of a van.  It was time to act out another camping fantasy: finish off decent leveling blocks.  Most campers have a chaotic, half-thought-out collection of mismatched, half-split wooden blocks.  Why not work it out to perfection?

There must be some variation to Parkinson's Law that says that "No matter how small the project, you must get out most of your tools."  And that was true for this simple project.

The project began in the morning, when all was cool and shady, but extended into the afternoon.  The damn sun kept moving closer and closer.  Soon I would have to pick up 327 tools and move them into merciful shade.  It is strange how celestial mechanics seems like the dry subject of a schoolbook until you experience the minute-by-minute progress of the cursed sun. 

Then Mother Nature performed a miracle: she graced half the sky with puffy cumulus clouds.  The plastic boxes wouldn't disintegrate!  Pressurized cans would not explode!  I could just keep working until the project was done.  Now the football-field-sized campsite seemed five times larger.

More than that.  With actual clouds in the sky, the world seemed three-dimensional.  Without clouds we are scrambling around on a paper-thin two-dimensional surface of this earth, our lives so puny and restricted, no matter how much room there is for horizontal roaming.