June 20, Friday – YES!!

The setting was spectacular with ocean surf and wild horses; grassland islands lying low in the water on the bayside. But the insect life dominated your every minute. During the seven days I spent at Assateague National Seashore, I had a nightly routine. Thirty minutes before I went to bed I would turn on the bathroom light and leave the door open then turn off all the other lights in the RV. Grabbing the 9 volt flashlight I start prowling the interior looking for mosquitoes clinging to the cloth ceiling. Also in my flashlight hand I would hold a new “Wet One”. I would try to pinch the mosquitoes between my fingers but if I missed the first time (which was surprisingly often. Am I getting old?) I just flat hand them on the ceiling leaving a crushed carcass in the cloth. But if she were a nasty, piss ant, blood-sucking mosquito, my blood would squish into the white cloth. All hunting stops as I work the “Wet One” back and forth overhead across the whiteness to remove the messy slaughter evidence.
I’ll take mosquitoes inside Snee-Oosh any day. They are easy to spot and kill. It’s their other winged cousin that takes superior elimination techniques for removing them from the inside. The sand gnat, or “no-see ‘ums” are about the size of a pencil tip and can easily go through the window screens – by the hundreds. As I mosquito hunt the darkness of the RV with my flashlight while swatting the gnat bites on my hot humid body, the gnats are also being drawn toward the light in the bathroom. When the sweep from bow to stern is over, I turn to the real problem critter. For fifteen or twenty minutes I focus on just killing the gnats attracted to the bathroom light. At some point the plastic light globe gets so hot that when the gnats touch it, they stick to it and die. The globe begins to look like pepper grains. I wipe them off and let their crumpled bodies fall in a pile in the sink. They continue to suicide into the light globe. The sink gradually turns from white to black. I contribute to the miniature butchering by finger squishing hundreds of them climbing up the white bathroom walls and again wiping up the blood spots when I kill one that had been nursing on me during the mosquito hunt. This massacre goes on until the kill numbers start to drop. When 10 or 15 seconds go by without me seeing one to destroy, I start to think about collapsing on the bed naked knowing that I will not be swarmed. So went my nightly routine.
This morning I traded this paradise for an inland state park called Martinak. When I stepped down from the cab in the thick oak forest, there was peace. YES! No cloud of insects. I can leave the windows open and the screen door in place. A gentle woodland breeze moves through the rig. And I have an electrical pedestal so I can close the windows and doors and fire up the A/C; an option that the I didn’t have at the seashore unless I ran the generator.
I learned a lot at the beach. I learned that I could “dry camp” - no hookups - for about five days. I didn’t practice electrical conservation and the house batteries let me know when they were running low by the inverter (changes DC to AC so that I can charge the phone and the camera batteries plus run the computer and listen to NPR) letting out loud beeps. Also I found out that when the freshwater tank gets low, there is a beeping sound every time the pump turns on. This last event occurred just at dusk last night. I was hoping that my fresh water would hold out until I could water-up at Martinak State Park. No such luck so rolling off the leveler blocks, then pulling them out of the way, I headed for the sewer dump and the freshwater hose. The dump station was situated near tall grass, prime mosquito habitat. I did the mosquito dance; pulling, connecting waste hoses; opening valves; stroking out the hoses into the dump and flushing out the waste hose, stowing things away. Then moving forward and taking out the supply garden hose and filling the freshwater tank just enough to get me through the night and morning. Dancing, dancing and smacking my bloody legs. I was raw meat and it was pay-back time for the winged biters. Then cruising out onto the main road and back into the entrance to the campground to my pad; stop; re-locate the levelers; drive up on top and stop. I was beat; and I couldn’t open the windows due to those flying minis out there.
Martinak is really the paradise.