no white rabbits for me

Now Playing: Johannes Brahms, Violin Concerto in D, Op. 77 - Track 1, Allegro non troppo.

Last night, RUF had a campout at Lake Skiatook, about an hour north of Tulsa. At six o'clock, after I'd eaten some tea, I packed up the venerable Tank, which goes ten miles an hour faster than listed on its speedometer, and set out to join them. The early evening was beautiful, rich colors on the hills, sleepy greens and blues fading away into hazy distances as the sun began to set.

Off the interstate, driving down more tiny winding roads between high shoulders of grass eventually took me over a bridge over the lake, then down another gravel road, then to the campground, a thickly wooded peninsula (black oak) lined with campsites. Puttering slowly through the campground was an experience not to be forgotten. I scanned each campsite to see if I recognized the people, and at nearly every campsite I was greeted with the stares of tribes of quintessential rednecks: cut-offs, beer, cigarettes, fresh sunburns over old tans, faded baseball caps. I was exceedingly thankful finally to recognize the group standing round the campfire on the east side of the peninsula. Here dusk had already fallen. Ange and Alisha were eating hoboes by the picnic table. John was finishing cooking on the grill. Everyone else was gathered round the campfire on camp chairs: Joseph Tyree, Allison, Hannah, Jenny H., Philip, Matt, Josh Clutter, Rachel and Amy Scholz, DMac, Charlie, Spencer, the Knorr kids, and others. Eventually Asher and Leslie joined us.

Dusk fell quickly. The fire in the center of its ring burned hot and bright. Josh took the kayak out onto the water and paddled out to the big island east of the shore, a fair distance. From along the shore on either side came the noises of other people's camps--the generator of the RV next to us; the talk from the group on the other side. DMac, Spencer, Josh, and Charlie brought out instruments. A mandolin, a harmonica, a couple of guitars. They strummed for awhile, and the group round the campfire talked, faces becoming flushed in the firelight.

I sat back in the shadows at the picnic table with Jenny H., Alisha, and Charis. Alisha dozed off in one of the chairs, but Charis sat on Jenny's lap and wiggled for about two hours, pretending to dance, eating chips and cookies, singing pop songs and hymns along with Jenny. I sat beside them on a box and laughed. Slowly the sky turned from blue to black, and stars flowered, one by one, then in clusters, then in hundreds and thousands: the Milky Way was arching right over us, and the sky, just before the trees blocked it, teemed with stars, nameless millions. It was astonishingly beautiful.

So the evening passed. The guitars and mandolins strummed away; people drifted away to take the kayak out on the dark water or sat round the campfire and sang. For awhile, I sat with them and listened to the hymns they were singing, "For All the Saints", "The Sands of Time", "Be Thou My Vision", "There Is a Fountain". Alisha suggested a couple of Psalms from the RUF collection, but because they hadn't been sung in so long, Spencer had difficulty remembering the chords, and because I don't usually sing these versions, I had difficulty remembering the words.

I sat for a long time, and then I walked a little bit, though not far, for I wanted to stay in the darkness between the firelight from our camp circle and the lamplight from the people next to us. In that dark space I could see the stars. As a miracle, I slowly began to notice that the stars were actually reflected in the water. Jupiter's reflection danced on the tiny waves, and around it the other star reflections gathered. I had seen such things in a painting from The Silmarillion, but thought of them as only being something from a book--now, I was astounded by the sheer loveliness of the long starlight on the water. Superfluous beauty, in the face of God's eternal attributes of truth, goodness, beauty, purity, holiness--yet He chooses to sustain and support it. I, too, am infinitely superfluous, and so deserve nothing that He gives me. Looking back over my shoulder at the campfire, I could hear John telling everyone good-night; looking ahead out over the dark water, I could see the little red gleam of someone's headlamp where Alisha and Ange were out paddling the canoe.

Satisfied, I quietly walked back to the campsite, skirted the campfire, and lay down in one of the big tents in my clothes. I'd unrolled my sleeping bag earlier in a corner, and as it turned out, I was right next to Charis. Charis, also, had just crawled into her sleeping bag. We lay and pulled faces at each other for awhile. Then, just as we were both drifting off, someone passing by put one of the guitars down on my head. I bounced up, rubbing my head, and Charis and I both laughed.

It took awhile to get to sleep, of course. Voices, the flicker of the campfire, shadows going past outside the tent. Alisha and the Knorr girls, whose friend Arianna is with us, crept into the tent awhile later. I drifted off eventually.

This morning, it must've been about half six or seven o'clock when I woke up. At first, I could just see the pale silver of morning beginning to seep through the tent walls. Then I began to hear people moving around, Ange starting to try to find food to cook for breakfast. Someone started a jet ski down the beach. I wriggled out of the tent. I found Jenny H. We took Charis out in the canoe. The water was still quiet, the sunshine warm, beginning to be hot. Our campsite was quiet, too, Ange and John just starting to fix breakfast. Josh had already taken the kayak out. Jenny paddled for awhile, but then Charis insisted that she be allowed to paddle, so we let her stand in the middle of the boat and paddle away. We didn't go very far very fast this way, but it was still fun. Out near the island, we ran into Josh (literally), who splashed Charis (and Jenny and me in the process) because she had splashed him. We mucked about out on the water. Charis nearly paddled us in circles. After awhile, she turned us around, and we made our way very slowly back to the camp.

Josh finished with the kayak, so Jenny took Charis out in it: it was very amusing to see Jenny sitting in the stern of the little yellow kayak while Charis stood in front of her and poled as though she were a backwards gondolier. They inched slowly out onto the water, leaving a silver wake trembling behind. I went up to the campsite. Nearly everyone was up, though as Josh remarked to me, Philip is always the last one. Ange and John had cooked eggs and bacon for breakfast in three enormous metal skillets on the fire. I ate my share as well as a little bit of instant oatmeal, and finished in time to take the kayak from Jenny and Charis when they came back.

I'd been wanting to try the kayak since I'd arrived. It was lovely to be out on the water, surrounded by the quietness of the morning. I paddled out and all the way around the island and back again. The sun was rising white hot and bright in a heat-bleached sky. Boats were beginning to come out on the water, speed boats, jet skis, and little flat-bottomed fishing boats. As I paddled myself round the edge of the island, I spotted an osprey flying slowly low above the trees. I watched the beautiful endless patterns the water made around the kayak blades.

For awhile back at camp I sat under the trees with Matt and Alisha and listened to them talk about their work. Then I walked with Philip and Charlie over to "the rocks", a spot on the other side of the peninsula. Most of the rest of our group was already over there. We had to scramble down a sandy trail through straggling oak woods to get to "the rocks", and then we ran out onto a huge boulder and jumped into the green water below. The shock of hitting the water took my breath away, and my loving little brother helped so much by dunking me twice after. I swam, gasping, to a long narrow shelf of sandstone jutting just under the water's surface and perched there with everyone else: the Knorr girls, Rachel Scholz, DMac, and others. Charis was bobbing through the water like a little fish. Allison and Hannah came swimming up, having swam all the way out to the far shore (a low green stretch of land above which the far cliff rose, crowned with trees) and back. Alisha, Ange, and John joined us after awhile, coming slowly down through the trees. Alisha and Ange perched up on the big rock.

The Knorr girls, Rachel, and Arianna took the kayak out a couple of times, but they always managed to tip it over (five is way too many for a kayak), to the great amusement of the guys, who invariably had to swim out and help them tow it back to shore and empty it out.

I swam out into the lake and lay on my back. Tipped my head back: two hundred seventy degrees of hot blue sky above and around me, then the edge of green shore, then the flat expanse of water, blue where the sun hit it, green close by. I could watch everyone from here. Sky, then the thick oak woods, then the slouch of fallen sandstone tumbling down to the water, where everyone was perched at the water's edge. On either side of this fall of stone were two big sandstone boulders, and John was diving off the one on the right--beautiful compact dives and tight muscular flips. Josh and Charis were following him. Alisha and Matt were both trying to learn how to dive, and failing humorously. DMac and Joseph T. were skipping stones off the flat water. Most of the boys practiced skipping stones. DMac managed to skip a great big flat rock, about four inches thick, three times. We clapped for John's dives and laughed at Matt's belly-flops.

We spent all morning there. It was beautiful. I saw an osprey dive onto the water and then flap slowly back towards the sky again. Speed boats and boats with water skiers went past, casting up great green waves that crashed on the smoothed sandstone. The water out in the sunshine began to be hot, but in the shade it was still cool.

Around noon, people began to be tired and hungry. Back at the campsite, we ate lunch: bread, meat, mayonnaise, oreos. John sat in a chair in the sun and declaimed a long monologue about the wonders of oreos, while we all sat sleepily in the sunshine around the campfire circle and laughed. Far out on the water between the shore and the island, Jenny and Spencer were swimming toward shore. We spent a very relaxed hour lounging in the bright sunshine, eating oreos, talking quietly.

At about one o'clock, we started to pack up. Then I said good-bye to everyone and drove Hannah, Rachel, and Allison back to Tulsa. It was less than an hour's drive. Suddenly the big pale silhouettes of the skyscrapers loomed out of the bleached sky.