Finding Our High Road: Transition Day

Thursday, July 11, 2019

Transition Day

We awoke this morning to temperatures in the upper 60’s and
low humidity. A rarity in Iowa this time of year. We will enjoy one day of mild
weather in the 80’s as we brace for the next heat wave that promises to be hotter
and more enduring than our last blast of heat that lasted about 6 days. I’m looking
ahead to next weeks outside work with more caution than last week when I
succumbed to heat exhaustion. It was so weird. I felt fine all day, drank over
100 ounces of water throughout the day and was peeing clear. I was feeling
quite full of myself, thinking I had accomplished my task of mowing a large
campground, in preparation for the 4^th of July Holiday and believing
I was still 25 when I didn’t really notice heat. That all came to a quick end
when I got home and hit the cool conditioned air of the motor home. Within an
hour I was dizzy, vomiting and shaking. I retreated to the bedroom wondering
who had given me the flu, still not admitting I had overdone it in the 100-degree
heat that day. The next morning, I felt better and went into work. Ironically
the safety meeting topic was heat stress. There were my symptoms from the night
before laid out in nice bullet points under the heat exhaustion section of the
memo. I decided to work only the morning that day, purposely chose a shaded day
use area to mow, drank a big Gatorade and went home and slept all afternoon. Lesson learned as they say.

This morning I enjoyed a little practice in immersion, as I call it. There is a road behind our site about 1000 ft or so long leading down to the boat ramp parking lot. It divides two very distinct habitats. Shore line, meadow and towering Cottonwoods on the west side. Heavy timbered Oak Savannah on the east. When Champ saw me strap on my camera and sling my binoculars over my shoulder he decided to stay home, knowing my ‘walk’ would be more of a stand and look morning. It never ceases to amaze me how I can walk down this road for exercise at about a 3.5 mph clip and only notice the big things. The lake of course, birds flitting about, wildflowers along the roadside and the ever present Des Moines Skyline beyond the dam. A constant reminder that the concrete jungle is only 12 miles away. When I do a bird walk by myself taking time to immerse myself the real action starts to reveal itself. I usually identify 30 or so bird species along this short stretch of roadway. Depending on what side of the road I am watching the species vary a great deal. Red Winged Black birds, Orioles, Tree Swallows and shore birds dominate the lake side. Woodpeckers, a wide variety of sparrows, Indigo Buntings, Nuthatches and wrens populate the east side of the road in the timber. Just as I came back to the entrance of the village, I smiled at the irony of a river grape leaf eaten up by a bunch of Japanese Beetles. I liked it, an invasive species feeding on an invasive species. If only they stayed away from the good plants. These mornings have become a sort of practice of transitioning from my busy three days when I am working for Natural Resources and putting the newsletters together. Thursday mornings are the beginning of my work camping weekend, as it were. I am starting to think about topics for next week’s newsletters and basking in the fact that our work camping dream has come true.