There Sleeps Titania

{Vermont Woods via Scamp}

If the National Park system is a big, rule-enforcing, highly-organized Catholic school with a strict curriculum, then the Forest Service is Montessori: there are very few rules, and as long as one plays well with others and doesn't litter, one is pretty much free to do whatever she pleases. This all makes for very good Scamping, so P, Mac, the Hound of Love and I sped north to Vermont's birchy, beechy, old-growth Green Mountain National Forest, chugged down an old logging road for thirty miles and, just as dark was setting in, found an idyllic, mossy clearing next to a stream. We unhitched the Scamp and rolled her into a majestic little spot overlooking a series of small cascades (made of fiberglass, she weighs less than a mule and can be maneuvered by hand by two idiots in flip-flops). We heated up two cans of Amy's organic soup on the Scamp stove, opened a bottle of excellent Côtes du Rhône, made up the bed with crisp ironed sheets and fell asleep to a chorus of sylvan trills and chirrups, the rush of mountain water over granite stone. In Scamplandia, one can live large while living small, it seems.

Ours must have been the very spot Oberon described in A Midsummer Night's Dream; see midpage, here.