Nature, Life
My grandmother owns some property in the mountains north of where I grew up. Every three-day weekend we’d all pile into the suburban and make the drive, sometimes with cousins, sometimes without, soon to be greeted by crickets, manzanita, and daddy long legs.
When we first started coming out camping, we’d have to park at the road to the entrance of the property and cross the dry creek bed with our bags. (Me, bungling over the uneven terrain on skinny legs and my parents carrying the tent and then the cooler and then the camp chairs and then the babies.) Later, a bridge was built and we could drive across to a small clearing we’d made. The trees crowded round, and that was where we hid the five gallon bucket with the plastic toilet seat on top.
After the bridge, the pine beetles came, then the logging company. When we returned, the trees were gone, and so was the shade. The ground had turned to dust under the heavy wheels of the semi-trucks and trailers.
My aunt built an outhouse which became famous for many snake stories, or the same story told three different ways, and then came the ramada with the fireplace and the gas grill, and a well, too. We had a whole world up there, and all to ourselves.
We ran up and down the road, and through the ferns and prickle bushes that had sprung up where the pines had been felled and dragged away. There was no one for miles, except sometimes the roar of air brakes on the highway.
That was camping. That was how one spent time in nature. Just you in the fort made of river rocks, or rocking in the hammock with a pile of books brought from the library, or following butterflies as they staggered and flickered between patches of shade and sunlight. And at night, the Milky Way. An impossibly glittering and bright sea on those moonless nights. Had that always been there, hidden by the street lights? Or did it exist only in wild places, to people who stayed up late until the embers had nearly burned out, to people who had become nothing but two eyes and a nose peeping out from the recesses of a sleeping bag.
The first time I stayed at a state campground, I was appalled. You could hear your neighbors snoring through the thin wall of their tent, roaring generators, and drunk college kids laughing way too late into the night. I had left the city to get away from people, but some of them had followed me here anyway.
I was spoiled as a child, and I hadn’t even known it.