It is 11:05 P.M., and everybody but me is asleep as the rain patters down on our metal bus roof, collects in the gutters and rolls off without even splashing the windows.
As Vince noted, we were rescued as all the other campers in the park stood around, watching helpfully. One camper noted that he had been in the same predicament many times when his ships ran aground in the Navy. During the high stress, V and Anna wisely chose, like cats, to sleep through it. We were beached from 3 P.M. to about 7:30. One camper offered us his place and we accepted gratefully. We built a big fire in the wood stove, got out of all our wet clothes and hung them to dry in the stairwell. We had a gigantic supper of macaroni and cheese with asparagus. We drank hot chocolate and saved the last peach for J. We tried the television in vain, sang a little at the piano, talked about how surreal the whole thing was. Vince did the dishes.
Now we're ready for a week of no adventure at all. If we hadn't gotten out of the ditch, we were going (we decided, out of the rain, with full stomachs, on level ground) to lower the other three wheels, declare ourselves a national monument and sell tickets at a dollar apiece to see the great underground bus. We considered selling the bus to the Museum of Modern Art as an environmental sculpture. Anna drew her own version of the AAA rescue.
(We are grateful to Mario Marino in New York City, a video archiving expert, for restoring most of a post-rescue movie, which had been transferred from 1971 film to videotape, where it mildewed and degraded.)
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