1960s Trilobite camping adventure

Instead of a story about one of our recent camping trips, I decided to tell about one of our trips that took place four decades ago. It occurred long before we'd ever heard about TrailManor trailers. We were young then and camping to us meant sleeping in a tent and holes functioned as toilets. Those were the years when one of our hobbies was fossil hunting. We collected petrified whalebone along the beaches, petrified wood in the deserts, ancient clam shells in the hills, and searched endlessly for those fascinating prehistoric crustaceans, the trilobites.

On this particular camping trip we drove from our home in the East Bay area of California to the town of Delta, Nevada. We were on a quest to find the trilobites located in outcroppings of shale outside of the town. Armed with a map from a fossil hunter's guidebook, we turned our Studebaker Lark off Hwy. 40 on to a side road road and headed for the hills. The asphalt pavement soon reverted to a caliche-paved one (clay). Dusk was approaching and rain drops began to splatter on the roadway. About 25 miles up the road we came upon a man, who appeared to be an old timer, and asked him where we might camp for the night. He suggested that we bunk in a hillside cave, that was used by miners, and gave us directions to it.

The rain had intensified by the time we found the cave. It was situated about 20 feet above the road. The lower half of its mouth had been bricked up with stones and rocks by previous occupants. The cave was about 12 to 15 feet deep and filled with trash and rubble, but, it was dry. Since there was no need (and insufficient room) to pitch our tent, we carried our cots, sleeping bags, and cooking gear into the cave. While cleaning up the cave's interior, my wife stepped on a nail and sustained a slight puncture wound through her shoe. We lit our coleman lantern to dispel the oncoming darkness. No sooner was it lit, though, when dozens of furry local residents, field mice, appeared on the brim of our low rock wall. They were the boldest mice we'd ever seen. Nothing, not even rocks hurled at them, dissuaded them from their goal of sharing the now well-lit and somewhat warm cave with us. When one especially bold one ran inside my wife's jeans and all the way up her leg, however, we decided to give the cave back to them.
When everything was packed up back in our car, we decided to head back to Delta for lodging. The caliche-paved road, though, seemed to have a mind of its own in deterring us from leaving the hills. The rain had turned the road into a slick, wet surface no less slippery than if it had turned to ice. With our car sliding almost from shoulder to shoulder as we inched along, we made very slow headway towards town. Two hours later we had almost reached the sanctuary of paved highway when our car finally slid off a shoulder on to a deep patch of wet clay, and, the car became bogged down in it. Putting my wife behind the wheel, I got out to push the car out of the wet clay. I instructed her to keep the car going once we succeeded in moving it forward. With my superhuman effort and her heavy foot on the accelerator's pedal, the car rolled forward. While my wife kept it rolling forward down the roadway at about 10 to 15 mph. I trotted behind as fast as I could but was soon outdistanced by our car. I don't know how far I ran in the darkness, but, it may have been 2 or 3 miles when I caught up with our car. My wife had stopped it where the caliche had transitioned to asphalt pavement. I took over the wheel and drove the remaining 10 to 12 miles to town.

We located two dark and shuttered motels sitting side-by-side just off Hwy. 40. It was after midnight and no one answered the doorbell of the nicer looking of the two motels. In disappointment we headed to the door of the other, run-down looking motel. After several rings of the doorbell, the youthful manager, now roused from sleep, let us in and found a room for us. We were so tired that we easily fell asleep, wedged together in the cavernous central valley created by the sagging of that old, worn-out bed. That night's lodging set us back $1.50! After a hearty breakfast the next morning we decided to give up our plans to hunt for trilobites. We purchased some instead from a fossil dealer. Oh, my wife got a tetanus shot in a small nearby copper mining town on the way home. That was the last time we've ever hunted for trilobites!

[YWORRYDOG]

Neat story well told, got any more?

[B_and_D]

Enjoyed your story, Larry!

I was wondering though, did you really mean for your wife to keep driving that far? I just have this vision of you tromping through the clay mud, waving and yelling at her...seeing the tail lights fade off into the distance...!!

What an adventure.

I was driving to work this morning and saw a fellow in an older Jeep, towing a cute little tiny 60's trailer parked by the bridge in Moss Landing...and it made me feel pretty nostalgic about the "good ol' camping days". Your story sort of added to that feeling when I read it...

But isn't it wonderful to have your TrailManor now? No mice crawling up one's pants, (btw, were they bell-bottoms?), you can be outside if you want, or in a cave, but if it rains, or you are invaded by rodents, you have a wonderful space to stay in!

B_and_D, that slick, wet clay was just like ice. If our car came to a complete stop, it was hard to get enough traction to move forward again. I did tell her to keep our car moving forward while I ran along behind it. That bold little mouse just ran up inside her straight-bottom blue jeans. My wife, who is a trouper, didn't scream at all but just shook her leg until it fell out.

When I was young, I camped on beaches, in the desert and in the mountains - sometimes shivering at night because I wasn't cocooned inside of a warm sleeping bag. These days we certainly are spoiled camping inside our climate-controlled trailers with kitchenettes, flush toilets, showers, and real beds - but most of us wouldn't have it any other way!

[G-V_Driver]

Ah, the old days.

Larry, I enjoyed your story and was reminded of the time our Oklahoma State freshman football team traveled to Fayetteville on a cold drizzly day for a night game at Razorback stadium. As the temperature fell throughout the afternoon, the streets began to freeze lightly.

The team bus couldn't negotiate the icy hills, so everybody jumped out and 40-50 of us pushed the bus when necessary to get up to the field house where we dressed. When the bus was able to make headway, we just ran along beside it. Seemed like a long way at the time, especially since the varsity homecoming game was scheduled for the following day and a large percentage of the student body seemed to be out on the streets. Most of them (or so it seemed) took great pleasure in heckling us as we made our way across the campus. Maybe that extra pre-game effort explains why we got drubbed.

And since you have extensive experience with both camping and medicine, I wonder if you can answer a question that has been in the back of my mind for more than 30 years.

Why is it that small children demonstrate a marked tendency to become nauseuous under the following conditions:
1. while tent camping in remote areas
2. between 2 and 4 am
3. when it is raining cats and dogs
4. when the thunder mug has already been used for its intended purpose and therefore not suitable for further use by puking children

I'm sure there must be a scientific explanation, but haven't heard it yet.

Thanks,

Wayne

Originally Posted by G-V_Driver

And since you have extensive experience with both camping and medicine, I wonder if you can answer a question that has been in the back of my mind for more than 30 years.

Why is it that small children demonstrate a marked tendency to become nauseuous under the following conditions:
1. while tent camping in remote areas
2. between 2 and 4 am
3. when it is raining cats and dogs
4. when the thunder mug has already been used for its intended purpose and therefore not suitable for further use by puking children

I'm sure there must be a scientific explanation, but haven't heard it yet.

G-V, I don't have any good medical explanations for nausea in the situations you posed above. In fact, this is the first time that I've ever been asked about why children become nauseated in these situations.

Let me present a possible explanation. In my experience the most common causes for nausea and vomiting in children have to do with disorders of their ears. Their eustachian tubes, which connect their middle ear cavities with the back walls of their nasal cavities, are short and of small diameter. Eustachian tubes serve to normalize pressure in our middle ear cavities. With nasal congestion (and we know that some kids have a lot of nasal congestion) tissue swelling in the nasal cavity blocks the entrance to one or both of the tubes. When this occurs, a middle ear cavity is sealed off. If the atmospheric pressure rises, the pressure within the middle ear cavity is lower than that in the atmosphere surrounding the child's head. This can cause ear pain, dizziness, and sometimes nausea. If low pressure persists inside the middle ear cavity, nasal secretions can be drawn through the eustachian tube into the middle ear cavity. These secretions usually contain a great deal of bacteria and some viruses. An infection is initiated in the normally sterile middle ear cavity with the formation of pus. Sometimes these low pressures just result in the formation of clear liquid in a middle ear cavity. Ear pain, nausea, dizziness all are common accompaniments of these conditions. Oftentimes, also there is fever. Most of these symptoms seem to surface at night. I don't know why this happens although a child's inactivity at night while trying to sleep may bring the symptoms to the forefront. In the close confines of a tent, in the early morning, and when rain keeps a child indoors and without the distractions of outside play are some conditions that may make a child aware of these symptoms.

By the way, what the heck is a "Thunder mug?"

[mjlaupp]

Originally Posted by Larry_Loo

.....By the way, what the heck is a "Thunder mug?"

Larry, Its apparent that you have never lived without indoor plumbing.
MJL

Originally Posted by mjlaupp

Larry, Its apparent that you have never lived without indoor plumbing.
MJL

My wife and I lived 3 months among the Cuna indians of the San Blas Islands and 7 years among the various Bantu tribes of Africa, and, you make the statement "It's apparent that you have never lived without indoor plumbing?" ;-) None of those people ever used the term "Thunder Mug" though.

We've lived among so many different cultures that we kind of consider ourselves experts in international toilet practices. For example, during our short stay in the San Blas Islands of Panama we lived 2 months on the island of Ustupu, an island about 1 mile long with over 5,000 people crowded on to it. Since I was a physician, the villagers bestowed honor on us by putting us up in the second floor of a concrete block building - right next to their island's dumpsite.

For a toilet we had our choice of using any one of the over water outhouses that ringed the small island. Since there was one close by our building, we began using it. This one faced the open ocean. There was an advantage to using this particular one: the swirling currents quickly swept away the fish-like objects that we dropped into the water. To get into this outhouse one walked on a 5' wooden walkway over the water and through its doorway. The commode was merely a wooden seat with an appropriate hole in its center. During the day one often could see small fish swimming in the shallow water below the hole (watching the fish may be just as entertaining as reading a magazine during this activity). Nighttimes, though, posed problems of a different sort, especially when the seas were rough. At those times we had to shine our flashlights on the incoming waves in order to judge the best times to get into the outhouse. On many nights either my wife or I would say to one of our two kids "Go quickly to the toilet" in between large oncoming waves. One child would quickly slip into the outhouse and do it before the oncoming waves splashed over the open top of the roofless outhouse.

One night at bedtime my wife took our kids to the outhouse alone. She returned with this sorrowful tale: on command Jessica, our daughter, had rushed into the outhouse and gotten on to its seat. My wife's timing was terrible because the next wave not only drenched her through the opening on top but also came surging up through the hole in the seat. Our poor 6 year old baby was soaked with water from above and below while sitting innocently in the darkness! We could never again get her to use the outhouse at night during the remainder of our stay on that island. ;-)

[G-V_Driver]

Larry,

In deference to the more refined and genteel members of this site, I actually used "thunder mug" instead of "slop jar" which is the term I heard used for much of my youth, when indoor plumbing was rare. The term "white rabbit" also used to describe this appliance, would have probably been even more confusing.