There were very few people out on Monday, the windiest day I ever spent at Palisades Park.  It was so windy that for the first time I understood what it might be like to be out in a hurricane.  But the regular nappers were all there.  They are a hardy group, and anyway, they know that the earth wiIl protect them.  It reminds me of something I read recently in the novel "All Quiet on the Western Front", about the soldier's relationship with the earth:

"To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier.  When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever...Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man many fling himself and crouch down.  In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-one life."

This guy was napping so peacefully that there never was such a contrast; he really didn't move and he certainly didn't seem to notice what was going on above him.  To look at him you would have thought it was a quiet summer afternoon.

The park felt like undiscovered land and I stayed a long time, caught by the day.