I wake up in the morning in Minneopa Park, where we are camping outside Mankato, a town of 50,000 people. The campsites are very private here, with none of that disarming feeling of sleeping on the ground with other people’s cars going rolling by, hoping they don’t get off the road and wander onto your tent.

I go out for a bike ride first thing and see three cottontail rabbits. There’s a large screen of trees between our tents and the road. The trees are not large, perhaps 20-25 feet, but there is grass between them, and boulders, round and gray granite ones, that were probably pushed here by some glacier that came out of Canada. I must ask my father where they started.

He’s here, in the campground, though like everyone else he’s still asleep. I suppose we can forgive that, it’s only 7:30. They didn’t wake up even when I train went by very close below us, down the bluff. We are sitting on a kind of ridge, just above the Minnesota river valley. Far off, in town, I suppose, you can just hear the interstate a kind of hum like a beehive, but it doesn’t sound like a center of civilization, like at home, it sounds like an outpost. I have the sense of being in the provinces.

I drink my coffee – percolated camp coffee, spiced up by putting a half pack of instant cocoa into it, for an instant Minneopa Park Latte – and listen to the birds. There are so many. One that goes eee—-oooo, and one that goes chucka chucka chucka, and one that goes more or less tweet tweet tweet and one that sounds a lot of R2D2 – and then a dog barks but the birds could not care less, they are up in the trees, safe, and they keep right on going. The camp sleeps. I drink my coffee. It’s peaceful, is all. That’s all there really is to say about it.  I feel less worried than usual, I drink my coffee, I listen to birds, and I relax.