#hudson-meng

[high-plains]

Hudson Meng Bison Bonebed Atl Ati Throwers

William Harper

[spythebandana]

Why Every Outdoors Co. Should Test Their Products at Hudson-Meng

So, the last post inspired me to do a quick discussion on tents & tent camping. If you live at Hudson-Meng, it is IMPERATIVE that you own the right tent. Or it will die. A horrible, painful, death. Believe me, I've been there.

Last year, I came out to Hudson-Meng with the University of Nebraska archaeological field school. I was told that I needed a dome tent. Didn't matter how large or what kind, just a dome tent.

Ok, I thought, I can do that.

My four-person, roomy & tall dome tent bit the dust a week into the field school. Other people had tents like mine - they all died. One stayed up through a marvelous feat of jerry-rigging.

So, I bought a new tent. A Wal-Mart tent that was small & low to the ground. And then it rained. I had to sleep in the center of my tent b/c the rain cover didn't extend down every side. The rain came in. And I learned to roll my sleeping bag & push my stuff to the middle of my tent everyday while I was surveying.

What I learned: You need a small dome tent low to the ground with a rain cover that extends ALL THE WAY to the ground. Because, in Nebraska, there's something called WIND.

I had some experience with wind in Lincoln. I was not prepared for wind in Northwestern Nebraska. Many a tent have died out here because of the wind. They don't really blow away, the poles snap. Or the poles are too flexible, give too much, and your tent is suddenly laying on its side staked to the ground.

The wind blows the rain. Luckily for me, it hardly rained last year (which eventually led to a forest fire). "Luckily" because the wind blows the rain right into the sides of the tent. And if you don't have a decent rain cover, the water will seep in. A LOT. You really can't keep any of your stuff along the perimeter of the tent if your rain cover is awful.

And no one likes sleeping in wet sleeping bags.

So, I learned my lesson. I bought a new REI tent. It's a fantastic little thing. The only problem I have now is dust/dirt.

Return of the wind. If it's not blowing your tent over, or showering you with rain, it's blowing dirt up through the mesh windows & all over your stuff. The dust was horrible last year, but better this year (more rain).

So, after having a terrible experience with the dirt last year (I came back with an REI to volunteer), I looked for a way to solve that this year. The best idea I came across was a thin sheet over the tent & under rain fly.

It works for the most part, and I'm happy. I still have to sweep my tent clean, but it's not near as bad as last year.

So why should companies like Wal-Mart, REI, and Cabela's test their products out here?

Because Northwestern Nebraska is the ULTIMATE test: wind, rain, heat, snow, and dirt.

I think every tent should have Hudson-Meng rating. Or be Hudson-Meng certified. I'd spend a couple hundred on that. That tent would never die.

Unless, sun damage + hail = DEATH.

I can live with that.

[spythebandana]

Getting Back on Track

I think it's time for me to get back on track. My main posts will now be about my life adventures (or lack thereof). My goal is to keep the reblogging to a minimum.

As it is, my Turkey adventures are lost in the wild of my tumblr account . . .

I WILL NOT LET THE SAME HAPPEN TO HUDSON-MENG

[tracingbuffalo-blog]

14

The Wind River Mountains are old time Arapaho and Shoshone country with peaks ranging from nine to eleven thousand feet. They form the continental divide, a watershed ridge between oceans.

Crossing Wyoming can try even the most hardened traveler. By the time I get to Boysen Reservoir the poison ivy rash on my side makes me want to scream. I trudge into a pharmacy in scuzzy Riverton to find a toxic looking-salve the color of adobe. The salve works so well I want to tell everyone to buy nothing but Ivarest.

Western Wyoming, unlike the badlands which extend to the Missouri, is a nirvana-like biome of forested lakes beneath granite crags. The sight of shaded aspen groves and the sound of gentle waves lapping against rocky shores soothes me with thoughts of birches and Minnesota lakes.

When Adam, the next volunteer at Hudson-Meng, pulled up to the cook tent with his parents, Corey and I were playing cards. We smiled, shook hands, and I asked if they were thirsty.

“No thank you. We have some water bottles in the car,” the mom said peering into our humble kitchen with a wrinkled brow, “How are you guys doing?”

I shrug my shoulders, and Corey levels, “I’m ready to go home.”

[tracingbuffalo-blog]

8

The wind is dry and warm as it tugs at the scraggly elms and Russian olives at the border of camp. The sound of it rises and falls in the late afternoon to the punctuation of bird sounds, a short trill or simple note high above the low rustle of leaves and the tapping of tent flaps. I let the heat sink into my bones where it is good, and it lulls me to half-dreams of stories I heard during the day.

The sun has fallen behind periwinkle and gold-white cloud billows that fade into a dense rain wall to the southwest. Here the rain is always approaching, always a hint of droplets from the south, never to fully articulate itself in flowing channels down the dusty arroyos. There is talk of ancient riverbeds and long-gone hackberry trees as signs of former swamps and bogs. Like the grasses and deep-rooted trees, we purchase water from the subterranean aquifer through a complex of PVC tubes and electric pumps laid down by the last generation.

I hear swallows flutter in chase of bugs. Walking along the Hudson-Meng valley I pick cedar berries, and crush them between my fingers to smell the cool green lodged in the chalky cell walls. After reading for a spell I put down N. Scott Momaday’s On the Way to Rainy Mountain inspired by his evocation of the yellow plains, where “sweet clover takes hold of the hills … and the sun is at home.” Unlike Momaday and the Kiowa, there is no particular people I sense through the land and its colors and sounds—I, quoting Whitman, contain multitudes. Millennia of wind, erosion, and sediment have erased the first people’s name. The Lakota came here in the seventeenth century; followed soon after by European traders and immigrants. I merely sense a quiet that soothes yearning, consoles the clang and crush of want. Here for this brief moment I have no want. To hear the wind is to sit down akin with coyote, rabbit, and swallow. It is to watch brown hawks circle the gilded-blue haze then swoop down into the tan grass and clasp a yellow snake.

This embrace between bird and serpent evokes Quetzalcoatl; it weaves sky and earth worlds together in the natural gravity of to eat and to be eaten, the first dance of the hunt ended in the ceremony of wing and claw meeting belly and spine. The earth respects the curved beak screaming down through soft winds, and sometimes she lets slow flesh crawl past. The songbirds earn their roost on the branches of sky as speakers. They hold the right to say, and we are like them standing upright, keeping our roosts by speaking for all that is not dancing or gnashing, by speaking for all that asks for dreams on the order of bird songs, for dreams of all that is good.

[tracingbuffalo-blog]

5

Camp is quiet. Without fail the heat of the sun wakes me at about 7 a.m. The walls of the tent become golden, and my sleeping bag transforms from a downy nest into a sweat robe. Even getting back late last night from town I feel good.

Chadron is a rough and ready country-and-western town. I am sure the locals would disagree with me, but it has wide and quiet streets, inhabitants wear jeans and cowboy boots, and there is not too much subtlety. They call the local coffee shop and snob beer bar—anything that costs over $3 a bottle is snob beer—the Bean Broker. The ceiling is of pressed tin panels. Before a mirrored wall of glasses, Torani syrups, and whiskey bottles a tall girl with dreads and tan arms stands like an athletic, jam-band version of Manet’s barmaid at the Folies-Bergère. She pours my Belgian-style ale brewed in Colorado into a frosted glass, and gives me a smile.

At one table the village idiot who works for the hospital tells me he’s going to a performance of Grease at Fort Robinson. I tell him he’ll have a good time listening to the music, but the mention of that Fort … an un-sacred, calamitous center of nineteenth century military power. It was a base for the Buffalo Soldiers to suppress ghost dancers, tracing survivance in cruel twists of historical nightmares under “Black Jack” J. G. Pershing, persisting in Jamaican lyrics, fighting on arrival / fighting for survival.

That’s the nation though, just as an SCSU student told me, “Yes, colonialism’s sad prologue, but no one really wants to live the old ways. You can hate Progress, but you can’t stop it.”

Whoa! We all want to get along, I guess as thoughts of international oatmeal corporations and steel pan assembly lines undergirding my breakfast run through mind. How did this conversation about Lakota land struggles over the series of treaties from 1860 – 1880 that shrunk the Paha Sapa into the dusty Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations devolve into slapdash fatalism? Somehow, as W. C. W. writes, the stifling heat of September seems to destroy us: the stifling heat or the facile, binary construction of modern, factory-farm earth, seven billion and counting versus primitive, camp-fire tribes facing extinction.

Reparation is a bugbear. In his election-winning response to Reverend Jeremiah Wright Barack Obama calls slavery the country’s original sin. Eden cannot be restored, but a more “Perfect Union” cannot ignore history. As William Faulkner and as Obama quoting Faulkner argue, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Dennis’ favorite photo in Fort Robinson is a group shot of about twenty black Buffalo Soldiers in leather football helmets posing as a team on the parade grounds.