Usually there is a guitar resting on a guitar stand adjacent the fireplace at the nature center where I volunteer. Last week the stand was there, but the guitar was gone. When Cindy, the head naturalist, walked past the front desk, I asked her where it was.

“Someone snapped off one of the tuning pegs,” she said. “and we have to decide if it’s worth fixing. No one ever plays it. Why? Do you play?”

“I used to play camp songs when I worked at a residential environmental ed program in California,” I replied. “Even then I did not play much, because half of the naturalists on staff were better musicians than I was. Two of them even play professionally now. Anita is with a folk band in the San Juan Islands, and Larry is part of an environmental song group in northern California.”

“The Banana Slug String Band?” Cindy asked.

“Yeah! How do you know about them?”

“I use their songs sometimes,” she said. “Bats eat bugs, they don’t eat people. Bats eat bugs, they don’t fly in your hair.”

I was surprised that Cindy knew of Larry’s band and its songs. She has worked as a naturalist on the East Coast and in the Midwest, and I thought that the Banana Slug String Band never got out of northern California. Obviously I was wrong.

When I got home that evening I went through my old emails to see if I still had an email address for Larry. I found one, but it was over a decade old. Still I tried it.

The address was active, and Larry wrote back the next day with a brief two-sentence update. He lives in Santa Cruz, which is less than an hour from our old camp in La Honda. The Slug Band continues to perform, and he is also part of a folk rock band called Painted Mandolin.

The short correspondence with Larry got me to reminiscing about my years at SMOE (San Mateo Outdoor Education). Even though he and I worked side by side for two years in the early 1980s, my fondest memory about our time together has nothing to do with camp. It is about a cross-country trip we took after SMOE shut down for the summer.* Larry was originally from Michigan and I was from Wisconsin, so he and I drove east together to see our parents.

What I remember most about the trip is that neither of us had money for gas. Our plan was to stop in Reno along the way and play blackjack until we’d won enough money to continue on. When we arrived at the casino, he and I sat at different tables in hopes that one of them was hot. I’d barely exchanged my money for chips when Larry ran up to me and exclaimed, “Stop playing! Stop playing! I have the money. Let’s go.”

I know this story to be true, but it is still a hard one for me to believe. I do not doubt that Larry and I had no money. Our naturalist jobs, after all, paid $125 a week, so we were often broke. The incomprehensible part is that Larry and I both thought that gambling our way across the country was a good idea. If we had a backup plan, I do not remember what it was.

I don’t have much desire to return to the carefree recklessness of my youth, but I’d like to think that I’ve retained some sense of adventure and a confidence that things usually work out. Looking back on my SMOE days also reminded me that Larry always sang Dylan’s Forever Young to the kids on their last night in camp. The kids may have been too young to fully grasp its meaning, but I wasn’t. The last line of the first verse is, “May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung; and may you stay forever young.”

*  SMOE is a school program run by San Mateo County School District in northern California. Sixth graders stayed with us for week of nature study. SMOE’s season goes from September to May.

Last month there were days when I shoveled windblown snow in subzero temperatures. Meanwhile Manyu was picking fresh mangoes for breakfast from her sister’s small orchard in Thailand. On January 23, the temperature difference between our two locales was 110°F (-20 versus +90). I appreciate the wonder of it all, even if I’m the one on the wrong end of the temperature gradient.

Remarkably it wasn’t me who complained about the cold. Manyu called me on the phone one evening to say, “It gets down to sixty degrees at night, and Niensheng’s* house has no heat. I didn’t pack clothes for this.” While careful not to dismiss her discomfort, I did cautiously point out that 1) her sister’s sweaters and jackets, if the sister even owns any, would fit her and 2) I hadn’t enjoyed sixty-degree temperatures since Halloween.**

January 23 was the coldest day in La Crosse since 2019. I would have hunkered down for the entire day, except I’d already committed to sitting at the front desk of our local nature center. I live eight blocks from the center and realized that if I used my car to get there, I’d spend more time starting the car than driving it. In the few minutes it would take me to warm the engine, I could be halfway to the center on foot. I concluded that the best thing to do was to dress appropriately and walk. 

Walking turned out to be the right decision. The peaceful stroll through quiet neighborhoods became the highlight of my day. I could hear the din of traffic on Losey Boulevard two blocks away, but the residential side streets themselves were empty. No moving cars, no dog walkers, no one out for a morning jog. It was just me and the juncos.

The sky that day was cloudless, and the morning sun had just cleared the bluff. The crusty snow sparkled. Given the choice between -20° with blue skies and +10° with gray skies, I’ll take the colder temperatures every time. I can dress for cold, but not for dreariness.

Only a week earlier I’d gone to Riverside Park and was surprised to see that the previously frozen Mississippi River had reopened. I didn’t need to go back to the park that day to know that the river was again iced in. I was sure that the only open spots would be the churning waters directly below the dams. This congregates the eagles and makes for excellent birdwatching. Right now there are probably a hundred big birds in the trees immediately downstream of Lock and Dam No. 8. Not only does the water rushing through the dam’s gates create a large patch of open water, but the shad that get washed over the dam become temporarily disoriented and are easy prey.

As I review the draft of this blog for publication, I realize that I’ve described the frigid cold largely in positive terms. I do not like the cold, but I like living in a place that sometimes gets this cold. Does that make any sense? Also I am very confused by the photo of me on that cold day. In it, the balaclava on my head appears to be a two-tone gray and beige. It is actually, as can be seen in this second photo, all one color. What did the camera see that day that I did not?

* Niensheng is Manyu’s younger sister. She lives with her French husband Yves on a two-hectare compound an hour and a half northeast of Bangkok.

** I later fact-checked La Crosse’s daily temps over the past four months and discovered that there was a day in early November when the temperature reached the low 70s.