so where have you been where have you been camping before
well i've been camping a number of uh of state parks as it were and one of the
the first ones that i ever went out with was with another group of people there were some uh college students uh
uh out on a camp out and there were probably ten or fifteen little tents strung in a row on a little peninsula sticking out into Lake Texoma
oh yeah
and the wind started blowing and it was one of my earlier trips to be really out in the middle of
no where as far as wind breaks go and and we had secured tents real well even if we had done it in the dark at eleven o'clock at night
and uh oh i guess an hour into my
somewhat sleep a guy woke me up and uh said you'd better get out of the the tent they're they're liable to come down several of the others had already come down blown down they hadn't blown away but they had flattened
and i said okay i didn't you know was kind of groggy didn't know what was going on and crawled out of that tent and uh sure enough uh shortly after that they blew down so we're out here in the pitch dark in this wind and it starts to rain
naturally
and we managed to uh fortunately the rain didn't last long but we managed to get them all back up and uh got some sleep in that night and
after we got uh
back from the weekend we checked with one of the parents of one of the other college kids and they were a little concerned they had heard on the radio that the winds on the dam there anyway had gotten up to ninety seven miles an hour straight winds and
good grief
and we could believe that we were out in that at that time and it uh it can be quite a horror story i guess and i
yeah
that was a bad a bad place to be especially right there on the water at night especially if it i mean if it were summer you're all right because it probably wasn't too cold but uh probably the worst one that ever happened to me was in when i lived in South Dakota
yeah yeah
right it was summer
um i was stationed at Ellsworth there at Rapid City
and it's right there at the Black Hills and i just absolutely love the Black Hills it's the greatest place in the world to go camping you throw a pack on your back and get up in the mountains
and you can understand how the Indians got real religious up there because it's just it's just awesome up there
so quiet and peaceful and the wind blowing through the trees and all that i had a favorite little camping spot i used to go to it was uh right next to a stream and all the streams of of course are mountain fed melted snow
so it's nice and ice cold a good place to keep your eggs and stuff and this little place was uh it was a perfect a perfect circle of trees
right yeah
it was almost like they were intentionally planted that way and i would camp right in the middle of this thing and it provided shelter and everything else it was just absolutely terrific well
the winters are pretty tough up there and right around March i start get cabin fever
and i say oh man i got to go camping so throw all the stuff in the car and of course being the careful camper that i am i carried my uh propane heater with me and a couple bottles of propane
and so i get my tent up and i get my fire place built and all that and i'm just having a good time and uh that night
it got down to seventeen degrees below zero and snowed
um
and i'm sitting in this tent in my sleeping bag freezing
so i said oh time to get this heater cranked up so i cranked up the heater and this things going of course i got it going full bore
i run out of propane so here it is about three o'clock in the morning and i've got to hike back to my car to get more propane
well across the stream there's a fallen log that you have to walk across to get into this little place
and i'm crossing over the top of this thing it's snowing the thing is slippery and of course i slipped and fell in
so at three o'clock in the morning i'm up to my neck in freezing ice cold water and i can just feel my heart just you know scrunch right up the size of a pecan
so i finally drug myself out of that i just got in the car and drove home i left everything sitting there i just got just got in the car went home got uh got a nice hot shower uh i got some dry clothes on and then went back
huh
that was probably the worst thing that ever happened
yeah i i i hope to never venture into something that drastic
it's fun though that that was i just absolutely loved it up there that whole part of the country was great went to uh Glacier National Park a couple of times and
oh
Yellowstone Yellowstone is just too crowded though it's not a lot of fun with a whole bunch of people around and these stupid bears i mean they're almost tame they come up begging for hand outs you know course i'm
uh-huh
yeah
yeah a couple of generations of you know being around people and boy there's nothing left of them as far as wildness goes
well that's true and and it's sad because now they they're so used to people they're going into the towns and raiding garbage cans and stuff and that presents a threat to the people living there and now they're having to shoot them
huh
you know i mean it's sad because those those bears were doing fine until we got there you know and now they're now we're killing them because of something that some monster that we created
that's true
right
so i don't know it upsets me a little bit i like bears they're pretty they're pretty cool
yeah that's it's a shame to change a whole area so much like that
yeah and to me Yellowstone was just too uh commercialized
i mean it it's it's got some areas that are really nice but i mean you get up there and everything is just you know you know souvenirs and all this kind of junk
huh
and i i sort of i like the really raw land you know go out and where no man has gone before and that sort of thing
yeah i uh uh i've been mainly with groups of people and uh sometimes with a family here and there a couple of families get together but mainly it college age kids and
uh on this one weekend where the tents blew down that same weekend we had one one college kid that yeah he thought he wanted to come and then when he got there it was a little more boring and you know that place doesn't have a whole lot to do up there
and uh he sat in his car most of the time and and uh listened to his tapes and fortunately he didn't keep them crank them up too loud but he uh he stayed in the car and did what he could have done at home as it were
and it was no surprise when Sunday rolls around and the car won't start and then you listened to tapes all weekend you know
yeah
that's right there goes his battery
it doesn't take much but uh we got him all back going and
packed up and came on back uh let's see i i had another another camp out that wasn't uh near as bad in fact it had some really good good points to it i'm trying to think of exactly where we were
uh we were on another lake i don't remember the the name of it but we were right up at the shore and the way it was layed out the camp grounds were
uh it was another state park and the campgrounds had railroad ties blocking off a sandy pit and that made for a fairly level place to put the tent
but to get down to the beach you had to walk down a real steep embankment i mean it was so steep they had put railroad ties as stair steps every once in a while mainly for the erosion and that became a path as it were
uh-huh yeah
but the beach was beautiful we managed to comb out some of the broken glass and the like but the actual sand was a real good quality and real deep and we set up the old volleyball net and you know just a typical
uh twenty or thirty guys playing volleyball on the beach and this this cove this beach was a bit of a cove
and it was surrounded oh i'd say a couple of hundred yards by uh this hill this mountainous uh rock terrain and only that little bitty section of it was actually beach the rest of it was water right up against the rock
so you pretty well had the whole area to yourself there were enough of us where we filled the whole peninsula as far as the the camping on both sides so we did we all had to walk down to the one area to go down to the bea ch and it was pretty much the whole area to ourself
beautiful weekend however at that time at that stage in our life our kids were
were uh real young and one of them managed to catch diarrhea while we were there so we'd have to run him up the the hill and you know the little portable toilet was up there and
uh-huh
and uh it was a little bit to bulky to bring all the way down to the to the beach with us and we probably should have found some way to do that or
but uh and it was hot and we had a little trouble keeping ice it didn't last as long as we had planned so we had to buy that a little more often but uh the beach just couldn't uh couldn't have been any better a good place to dive for balls
uh-huh
uh-huh yeah i uh i used to uh when i was over in Guam i used to go out and just spend the night on the beach and go scuba go scuba diving at night and
looking around
it was a lot of fun
yeah you have to get pretty far out of the Dallas area to uh be able to see the stars and uh we do that on the camp outs
yeah all the all the all the light pollution
yeah
yeah that was one good thing about the hills you could get up there and it was just it was crystal clear it was just beautiful you saw stars you never saw before great place i'd love to go back up there
yeah
huh
maybe i'll get back up there one of these days
yeah
of course i'm in i'm in North Carolina now and and uh the mountains here are pretty nice i haven't been i just got here last September but i'm planning to
that's true
do a little camping trip this summer
get up there in the mountains and have a look we used to uh when i was in Alabama as a boy uh we used to have our YMCA retreats in uh
