Happy Valley wasn't happy enough for me so I went away to Happy Camp.
Happy Camp isn't a summer camp, actually. It's an old logging camp tucked into a corner of northern California so remote that residents don't think of themselves as Californians at all, but as citizens of Jefferson, the 51st state.
A statue of Bigfoot welcomes the visitor to a downtown so tiny it makes Happy Valley look like a bustling metropolis. It has, for example, only one pizza joint, which is where my son Ethan and I went for dinner the night we arrived.
At one table sat a group of firefighters enjoying a break from battling dry-lightning strikes on the national forest. At another table were a couple of weathered-looking longhairs who were partial to the Jimi Hendrix tunes on the jukebox. I was not surprised the next morning when they turned out to be two of the five guides for our journey down the Klamath River.
Our flotilla consisted of three minivan-sized passenger rafts, four one-person kayaks and two gear boats piled high with our clothes and camping equipment and enough food and cookware to keep the 20 of us (10 parents, 10 kids) as stuffed as cruise ship passengers for three days.
Ethan and I volunteered for the first kayak shift, though I'd have preferred to ease into the river experience in a boat with a professional oarsman at the helm. I'm the type of swimmer who likes to poke a toe in, then wade while slowly working up the nerve to get my head wet. (I hate splashers.)
The river has no time for such delicacy. When the moment came to put the boats in the water, I simply had to march into the drink and flop into the kayak, which was already wet. And the river does not wait for you to get used to it. It has places to go and once you're in it, it takes you along. Quickly, we hit our first stretch of white water and just as quickly, I was wet through and would remain so for most of the next three days.
The reason to go for that long is to forget the world. The river world has no e-mail, no phone reception and no news. It has only otters and mink, herons and ospreys, light and shadow, warmth and coolness, the sound of water washing over rock and the starry grandeur of the night sky.
The day goes like this: Eat breakfast, glide down the river, eat lunch, shoot a few more rapids, make camp, eat dinner. The guides, by the way, do all the work. While we, the paying customers, frolic in the water or skip rocks or hike up to a waterfall, they prepare the feasts. Hey, you work up an appetite watching osprey dive for fish.
There was only one bad moment on the Klamath. Darkness had fallen. We were chatting on the bank when we heard gunshots coming from across the river. We stood around stupidly for a minute, then hit the deck. I lay on the rocks with my arm around my boy, counting the rounds. There were 12. Then we saw headlights recede into the distance and resumed breathing.
It was the first time in my sheltered life that I had taken cover from gunfire. We guessed someone who had seen our flashlights thought it would be fun to scare us. He succeeded.
But after an uneasy night the sun rose and we glided downriver some more and ate some more and we were happy campers once again.
To send birthday greetings to Russell Frank, write to rfrank@psu.edu. His blog, "Spankly Freaking," appears most weekdays at www.centredaily.com