Two weekends ago (and yes, I’m late in posting, sorry), I went camping at Beaver Creek Valley State Park in the southeastern corner of Minnesota, just north of the Iowa border. The plan? To tour the Niagara Cave in Harmony, Minn., because we’ve all become amateur rock hounds.
We arrived late in the afternoon on a Friday, to discover the state park offered much more primitive accommodations than we expected.
Pit toilets.
Ugh.
But, since everything else was booked up, we set up our tents and resigned ourselves. We built a big fire, making shish-ka-bobs on a cast iron grill over the pit. We warmed water in the kettle to wash hands and dishes with, then made s’mores using our nice, metal turning sticks. Our friends arrived shortly after dark, and we helped them get set up before turning in for the night.
Temperatures dipped for the first time all summer. We were cold, but we’d planned ahead and brought wool blankets. Somewhere in the early morning, wolves howled from the top of the ridges that surrounded us. Owls called to each other all night. And in the blurry dawn of morning, I hustled myself to the pit toilets to confront a sign: Watch out for timber rattlers.
I shuddered for a moment.
We set up our Coleman propane camp stove, rather than starting a fire, and fried bacon and eggs for breakfast. My good friend at the site next to us, Shawn, had brought her Keurig cup-at-a-time coffee maker, but we found its electrical plug didn’t fit the one in her van floor. We toted it down to the toilets, where we found one three-prong electrical outlet, and took turns making our coffee, giggling as we noted on the way back that one enterprising camper had set up a picnic table with an extension cord. It was loaded with a coffee maker, a waffle-maker, an electric skillet, and a hair dryer.
Back at camp, we put all traces of food away, to keep it from raccoons and bears, and loaded up to go to the Niagara cave. My foster daughter spent the entire trip–all thirty minutes–mapping our cell phone coverage. We had cell phone coverage for maybe five minutes of that ride, but we know exactly where that five minutes was. Her new call was–”There’s a tower!”
I fretted as we got into Harmony, 22 miles away, that I didn’t have enough cash on hand; I’d forgotten to stop at an ATM. Fortunately, the cave people took credit cards.
The Amish quilt store and ice cream shop, however, didn’t. So I trekked up the street to an ATM to get cash to get ice cream.
As we left Harmony, I took a closer look at our map.
Burr Oak was less than 10 miles away.
Score!
A quick ride later, we pulled in at the visitor’s center in Burr Oak, with the Man of the Place rolling his eyes only slightly at my giggly excitement at visiting a Laura site–an unexpected treat in the middle of the trip. The only other time I’d been in Burr Oak, the Master’s Hotel, where the Ingalls had stayed, was closed for cleaning. This time, I got the full tour, with my foster daughter enjoying the tour with me, and saw the room in which the Ingalls family lived while Caroline cooked and served in the adjoining dining room. It struck me then, how tiny that room was for five–going on six–people. How did Caroline manage, pregnant and serving 75 people per meal per day? Or Laura and Mary, who had the horrible job of cleaning chamber pots?
It was only on the way back home that the irony struck me.
Pit toilets seemed a little less inconvenient.
Keurig coffeemakers didn’t exist a century ago.
We had lighters and matches to get our fire going, and propane when we couldn’t get it started.
We could travel 100 miles, round trip, in well under a day.
Cell phone coverage? The Ingalls wrote letters as often as they could, but mail was sparse, hard to come by, and hard to get to the people who wanted it.
And when wolves howled for us, we were awed–rather than terrified–because we had the safety of our tents, our vehicles, and park rangers within shouting distance.
We talk about the pioneer experience in terms we understand, but I don’t think we twenty-first century people really get the full magnitude of the conveniences we enjoy until we see these spaces, and face our own ironies.
Still, I think I’ll probably ask for an electric campsite the next time I go.
It will be easier to plug in the coffeemaker.