The Great Outdoors!

After the darkness — realness — cynicism — whatever you want to call it — that last descended from my mind, I thought I’d quickly follow it up with something a little more lighthearted.

Like how much I love camping.

Camping, also known as “living outside for a spell,” is awesome for a million reasons a billion people before me have already described a trillion times.

For one, you get to absorb the unfiltered sublimity and beauty of nature. Two, you get to breathe in clean, unpolluted air. Three through eight, you get to go about your days simply, waking as you please, doing as you please, eating when you please, drinking when you please, and sleeping when you please. Nine through infinity, you see stars!

But I didn’t always love camping. In fact, I never went camping as a kid.

In sixth grade, I somehow opted out of the weeklong outdoor Ed trip most middle-schoolers cherish (or suffer through) — my parents probably just let me make my own decision and made zero effort to change my mind. As they saw it, I was making a great decision by sleeping in my own bed every night.

The first time I actually camped was the beginning of college for a whimsical little thing called “orientation adventure.” OA meant a couple seniors taking a bunch of freshman (who had literally just met) on one of a dozen different kinds of trips. I was in “Surfing B,” which meant surf lessons by day and camping near Santa Barbara by night.

But OA was setup. The gear was brought. The plan was laid. No thinking or self-reliance necessary. I didn’t actually camp for myself until forced to.

At some point in college, I woke up to find myself shivering in the Mojave Desert. But the shivering seemed strange because the sun had just risen. I thought maybe it was a dream so I closed my eyes.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in a different part of the desert but still freezing. The sky was slightly darker, as if the sun had reversed course, dipping back into the east. Maybe this was another dream.

Again I shut my eyes and reopened them to find myself still in the Mojave, yet back to the original spot. In the rosy pink of dawn, I recognized this as a dry lakebed. I still felt cold, but a bit insulated by my bulky, fleece-lined denim coat and hiking boots. But I was still homeless and hungry.

For the third time, I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and opened them. A breathtakingly bearded man had just leapt off a nearby hillside, and I watched in awe as he floated around heaven as if it were a perfectly natural thing to do. Again, I breathed in deeply, savoring the dry, desert air, and then bent back down to pound my last tent stake, driving it into the ground with a bulbous rock. After tossing my sleeping bag and backpack inside, I poured myself a beer and strolled over to the party.

I learned how to camp at an annual desert party not because somebody gave me a list of things to bring and do, but because I kept showing up with nothing but my body and a flask. In other words, my dumb, drunk college self repeatedly had to suffer through the experience of realizing “I’m hungry” and “I need water” and “I wish I could be warm and comfy” without being able to satisfy any of those needs. While strangers and friends alike were usually generous enough to help me out when I needed it most, nobody was going to take care of everything for me. So, slowly — embarrassingly slowly — I learned to bring my own essentials whenever heading to the desert.

GAS GUZZLERS AND GLAMOUR

The desert taught me how to live outside, but that’s not the last place I camped. My buddy held his wedding in the Sierras this past weekend, so I got to enjoy the art of “glamping,” aka glamorous camping.

We didn’t have to do a thing. Just cruised 7,000 feet into the air, steered off the state highway onto a dirt path, slowly meandered a mile and a half through the forest, parked, and dipped under the billowing canvas flaps to find a neat queen bed already made with Egyptian cotton sheets. The pillows offered just the right amount of fluff and support, the chairs made me feel like a post-industrial imperialist in some savage land, and the food arrived hand-delivered on a silver platter. Everything was perfect and lovely.

Earlier this summer, I flew up to Washington for another friend’s wedding. (I’m that age.) Following the wedding, the bride and groom invited a bunch of their friends for three nights of camping on Shaw Island — 7.7 square miles of forest and gravel roads in the far northwestern corner of these great contiguous 48 states.

Car camping is the chillest. You just pull right up to the campfire in your 2017 Jeep Grand Cherokee™ with a trunk full of gear and food and booze and your dog and your lover and your soul and you just… chill. Pour yourself a beer from the keg. Gnaw on a sausage. Execute the mafia members. Wake up in the morning whenever the hell you want. Walk down to the beach and breathe the sea salt air. Read a poem.

Our dog Taja was loving every minute of her first camping trip, partly because she still has that innate wolf instinct and partly because camping just makes sense. It’s the living every day of our lives enclosed by four walls that’s the real madness, she’d say. Breathing the smoggy city air, risking mangled death at every crosswalk. Nurturing carpal tunnel syndrome to make money to buy a future in which to lay eggs and fill the world with more hungry humans. Eating painkillers and holding yoga poses in a furnace. Driving out to dark warehouses and dancing like a loon.

Okay, cities are incredible… but still. There’s something toxic and unnatural about them, and Taja understands that intuitively. On Shaw Island, she only doubted for a second why we wanted her to get in the tent. At first, she seemed worried we’d never let her out again. But then she loved it. Sleeping on the ground is the best, she’d say. That’s where the world is. You can listen to the earth while you dream.

If I sit too long at my computer working on various TPS reports, Taja starts chomping at my ankles. On the island, we just walked everywhere and followed trails and climbed up hills and down ravines and sniffed things to know them better. Eat, pee, drink, eat, walk, sleep, and then wake up again because there’s still air to breathe and life to live.

METH AND SUNSETS

Our last two camping experiences on the walk illustrate the very best and the very worst of what camping has to offer.

We left our Couchsurfing host’s place just outside Stockton at sunrise and spent a good part of the day walking to Lodi. Starting early still mattered since the day’s high was forecasted to hit 97°F — bright and sunny.

Lunch in Lodi ended up being our first In-N-Out in a year, which should have put me in a great mood. But I downed the double double with some degree of cognitive dissonance because, just before the meal, I had confirmed that they source their beef from the fecal dust-blanketed murder factory known as Harris Ranch. I-5 travelers: you know the smell.

But that’s not what put me in a grumpy mood.

That honor goes to the California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer who stopped us on route 12 and, after the obligatory “how’re you doing?”, launched into an unnecessarily aggressive and condescending tirade against us for being brazen and dumb enough to walk along the “safety corridor,” the ironic name our government calls stretches of highway with abnormally high rates of fatal traffic accidents. It would be like labeling the vodka bottle as “water” or the caffeinated coffee dispenser as “decaf.” Or maybe it’s like calling a CHP officer a “public servant.”

“Where’s your car?!” he demanded to know. It’s in Daly City, buddy, which is where I’m walking once you get out of the way.

Because we weren’t breaking any laws, the officer went on his way only after he’d strongly recommended that we turn around and find another route. He told us that several miles ahead there was a ton of roadwork, reducing the shoulder to nothing. We continued on, of course, and got to watch the same angry white man in uniform pull over two separate drivers while we completed our last three miles.

Home for the night was Westgate Landing, one of a dozen parks managed by San Joaquin County. And it wasn’t too shabby. The price may have been a little steep for us lowly tent campers ($20), but we didn’t mind having a place to stay. No showers, but there was a full bathroom and sink. Nice, maintained grass. Plus, up a short staircase, you could access the Islemouth Slough, an inlet used by fishermen during the day.

My love and I shook off our shoes and dipped into the cool water. Gliding past us, one of the fishermen offered us some candy, which we willingly accepted. Sucking on chocolate, we stared at the big blue sky.

That was the last of our serenity.

When we’d first arrived at our campsite, there had been an RV parked a few spots away. Though it seemed ordinary enough at first, we soon realized that the couple to which it belonged were involved in a skirmish. The guy seemed quiet and innocent enough, but it sounded like he’d probably done something sinister based on the sporadic, frantic cursing and door slamming of the woman he was with. We minded our business, assuming the domestic quarrel would fizzle out as they always do.

At two in the morning, awoken by the same screaming lady and slamming doors, we realized this quarrel wasn’t going anywhere. And maybe it had more to do with methamphetamines than marriage. I must admit: it’s hard to sleep peacefully when you’re not sure whether your neighbors are drunk, drugged, or just insane. And it’s even harder when you think too much about the fact that they have the keys to a ten ton vehicle, and you’re sleeping on the ground.

So, as in ordinary life, camping is worst when you can’t trust your neighbors.

The next morning we woke when the sun’s rays broke through the trees and left at our leisure around 8:15 AM. You might imagine our later departure was due to the methheads waking us all night, but it was really by design: we heeded the CHP’s warning and hoped to avoid rush hour traffic on SR-12.

Nevertheless, both the guy fixing the drain at the campground and the “king of Terminous” (the old man running the local boat & RV storage) brushed aside our worries, saying we’d be just fine walking our planned route. The king even invited us inside his shop for some free coffee and cupcakes before we set out.

As for that stretch of SR-12 where the roadwork, roadside barricade, and steep levee drop-off would doom us to certain death? It was nothing. We just walked slowly, dustily, safely through the construction site. Not a soul protested. In fact, the workers waved and took joy in the strange sight of us.

Past the work zone and more busy highways, we turned into the Delta Loop and proceeded to hop from island to island, with one section returning me to Kansas.

Home for the night was the Brannan Island State Recreation Area, right on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Unlike Westgate, the state-managed Brannan Island campground features over a hundred campsites, restrooms with showers, boat ramps, RV sites with hookups, trails, and far too much infrastructure to be considered “the great outdoors.”

But the campground was so big that they had a special area dedicated to tent campers, meaning we didn’t have to listen to RV people watching TV. And even though it was a Friday night, we had the whole place to ourselves. We cooked our rice and beans on the wooden table and enjoyed our simple solitude, while the sunset put on a dazzling performance over our heads.

So, as in ordinary life, camping is best when you’re in the moment.

In spite of the busy bridge we knew we had to cross the next day, in spite of the walk ending soon and having to go back to work, in spite of the high chance of chemicals inducing that wild sunset, and in spite of the industrially-farmed nutrients swirling in our bellies, we were home — laughing, kissing, loving.