Just A Satellite Away

A week and a half ago I moved to Yosemite for the summer. I live in a little house just up the hill from the Tuolumne River. It is cold at night and hot in the day and my feet are still relatively clean but I know that won't last for long. There are mosquitoes and lizards and I eat with hundreds of other people at every meal. Finally I have figured out when the showers actually have hot water. Perhaps most importantly of all, I passed the swim test and am now allowed to go unaccompanied into the pool.

I am living at a summer camp and working as an educator there for the next ten weeks. It is beautiful here but very remote so email that I get from my colleagues, educators at other camps, makes me laugh: "What's your mobile number? We should talk during rest hour some day and compare notes!" Maybe that works at a camp just outside Cleveland but here in the Sierra Nevada mountains the nearest cell service is an hour away if not more, as is any restaurant or store or movie theater or medical facility of any size. Being here can feel very isolating sometimes.

How then, with only one phone line into camp, am I writing this post? Our Internet access comes to us via satellite, I learned yesterday. Fascinating. So access is very slow and sometimes if too many people are checking their email or actually trying to get work done you can't get online at all...which is why I am writing this at 7:30 in the morning, not even having gotten out of my sleeping bag yet, while most other people are getting ready for breakfast and the Internet is available all for me. So while I feel very distant from the rest of my life, it is somehow reassuring that the outside world is just a satellite away.

And, a Special Note to my teaching colleagues and dear friends whose life is measured by the academic calendar: Happy summer vacation--you made it :)