Best reason to go camping

Camping is a night spent practicing insomnia in the open air, a dance floor to skydiving centipedes, the audience for a lonely coyote.

This trip is not the point, but a dress rehearsal to whether we can camp. Whether we are camping people. I suspect that we are, at best, aspirational campers. Glampers, really. We imagine starlit memories, but we suspect mosquitoes and dampness.

Until hours before we were set to leave, I still could not pin down if I could get a permit. I still made the dinner I had intended to anyway: chicken tikka masala, rice, and roasted veggies. Not light fare, but surely someone in India has camped laden with the same. Only after Amber grows sick do I realize the sauce contained dairy, hardly what one wants before embarking on this adventure.

I offered to camp in the backyard as a half-measure--in a tent, but with the creature comforts--but no. We would be going to Ferncliff Forest. Nothing short of a thunderstorm was going to stop us, and I cannot be sure about that.

I would have liked to invite along more people, but Amber will tolerate only Kristina. By the nature of her familial obligations, she is unlikely to show. She messages me at 11:30 pm, saying that she is getting Chinese with her family.

More of the right sort of people would be a memory multiplier. Last time that I was here, it was with Kristina, her friends, and family. It was, at least, more active, even though I did not know most of these people and found a few grating.

I do not want to go camping. I want to be camping and I want to have camped, but the interstitial steps of getting there are unappealing. I have a cozy bed not far away, so why forsake it to, in a small way, rough it?

Because this is where we can make memories. Because COVID Summer will provide few more opportunities.

Without a formal vacation, I am hungry for smaller substitutions. In the absence of a bed and breakfast or a haunted site--ideally both at once--camping at a forest near our home would have to be enough.

In the entirety of our relationship, Amber and I have never camped. We have had gear for at least three years, but I could not induce Amber to use it. The existence of our cats means that she is not inclined to leave the house for long. (They need her feeding and reassurance, or they wander the rooms as though the apocalypse might have happened. They, lone survivors, are biding their time until starvation does them in.)

The site is a hundred feet from the only chemical toilet on the property, which serves hikers during the day and campers at night. Most of the sites--a wooden lean-to and a circle in which one might make a fire--are dotted at polite distances around a pond. Owing to the foliage, one cannot see the other sites, at least not from the one we chose. Ours is the most open one, in part because it is the only one that I realized existed and, as I've noted, is within a short stroll to the Port-a-Potty. I have my priorities.

One can donate to stay between one and seven nights. I cannot fathom how one would occupy seven nights in this tiny forest. What would be the point of it? Within a day of hiking, one has done all there is to do here, discovered all that may lay hidden. Is there comfort to these lean-tos that I am neglecting?

Though we are a thousand steps from the parking lot, itself on a rural road, it is not enough to allow one distance from the mufflerless, racing jackasses. It does impede one's communion with nature, cursing the god that allowed these crotch rockets and busted pickups access to public roads. I rarely have the opportunity to experience disconnection from the modern world even to this extent. I am going to have to hear their inadequacy instead of cicadas and bullfrogs. Would it please them to know how overwhelming their flatulent dirt bikes are?

Though I brought a tent, by the time I return from getting more supplies, Amber says that she doesn't want to use it. She wants to sleep on the lean-to with no further protection from the elements. She does not listen to enough true crime podcasts to be cautious. She seems not to be aware that bears exist. Not exactly at Ferncliff Forest, but within twenty miles, waiting to pounce on anyone not guarded by a thin layer of nylon.

I offer the compromise that we could pitch the tent in the lean-to. She twists her lips, then pronounces that this would be illegal. How could that be the case? Who is going to happen by tonight to enforce these lean-to related crimes?

I walk to get the final load, searching on my phone for any evidence what she is saying makes sense. If one were camping at a high traffic lean-to, hiking the Appalachian Trail, it would be prohibited. At Ferncliff Forest in early August when there are unoccupied sites and ample room in the lean-to even if I did set up out tiny tent, I imagine that a park ranger could could forgive my sin.

Looks cozy

When I return to the site, acknowledging that she has made herself acquainted with the letter, but not spirit, of the decree, she replies, "It will be good for your back."

I do not think she means this. It is merely one of those things that people say. Why would sleeping on flat, old wood, cushioned only by a thin sleeping bag, have a salutary effect on my back? There is nothing wrong with my back to start with, underscoring her insincerity.

Amber gets busy building a fire. This is the part of camping that she likes best. It may, in fact, be the only part of camping that she likes. For the duration of our night at the site, she is either gathering wood, artfully arranging it, or burning it. She does not ask for my help, so I assume she is doing exactly what she wants to.

It is a full moon, or very nearly. I am a bad witch and have only a passing awareness of when to expect moon phases. It is cloudy, skunking a full sky of stars, or as much as we would otherwise be apt to get. Next time there is to be a glut of shooting stars, I could want to be here.

While she makes the fire roar enough for marshmallow roasting, I sit on the bench near the pond and write in my notebook. I cannot see the other campsites, but I hear their chatter. A woman offers peals of laughter to outshine the bullfrogs. I would like to visit her camp with an offering of smores to sweeten the deal, but we are all in our private bubbles. I would have no business there.

Amber leaves me to my writing. We are here together, but we are also here with ourselves. We will leave early tomorrow to feed our hungry cats, and I do not expect I will want for more time. The investment is too small for this to resonate.

Here could be the place to have a conversation that would better bond me with a friend, or not have a conversation that would do the same. I have bonded with Amber already and I have no story that she has not heard; we will not have this sort of conversation.

What can I say to my wife that is not a rehashing of something I have said a dozen times before? How can I be new to her? We have our threadbare topics to which we have no new experiences that might reinvigorate. What is it that I do not know about my lover of nearly a decade?

When I mention this to Amber, she points out that any meaningful conversation I would have had with a friend would somehow devolve into discussing sex dolls. How dare she.

The night animals make a comforting chorus. That is, aside from the bullfrogs, who are assholes, much too loud for the rest of the forest, so like the drivers snarling down the street.

I distract myself in my daily life from the awareness that much of it has passed me by. This does not improve the experience of living, but it is a familiar habit. If nothing else, camping reduces the distraction, which allows the awareness of mortality to creep in.

It is only a few minutes into trying to get comfortable in the lean-to before I must accept the truth: I could never sleep rough. I have the constitution of a marshmallow. Anything less than my middle-class existence with a plush mattress and I lose all hope. One night is tolerable. Anything more than this and I would be begging passing cars for the use of their backseats.

I am, if I have any say in it, a side sleeper. My go-to position is the Swan-Diving Fetus, toes pointed, one knee up. It's an advanced technique, not for the weak. I am a well-practiced Big Spoon. Wood, for whatever reason, lacks the give one finds in even the cheapest of mattresses.

I do my best to rearrange my limbs into this sub-optimal position. Arms in the sleeping back until that grows too hot. Bag open and shirt removed until, in almost falling asleep, two fat centipedes plummet from the ceiling onto my shoulder. This is the sort of thing that inspires one to wish for a lightweight structure one could carry on one's back, some combination of nylon and the rods that would give it shape. Sadly, such a thing does not exist, else I would not have had the experience of providing thick, segmented insects a soft landing.

In the end, I wore my hoodie zipped up to my neck and stuffed part of my pillow above my hip so I could want to sleep.

Then, around three or four, I woke from poor sleep to hear the plaintive yet echoing call of what we decide is a coyote. It is too big for a fox, too high pitched and unsure to be a bear. I don't know what a coyote must complain about at this hour, but it does shut up the bullfrogs. They know when they are beaten.

I, woodsman that I am, decide the coyote isn't going to come to eat me, so I take half a tablet of my sleep meds and put in earplugs.

When I wake with the sun--impossible to do otherwise when there is nothing much separating one from the dawn--it has been far too few hours. When my fitness tracker syncs to my phone, it pronounces that I have earned a hearty five hours of sleep in the wilds of Rhinebeck, New York. I would love to have a warm breakfast over the coals of a campfire, some pancakes and eggs, but we did not bring anything like that. The cats will be beside themselves with their own lack of breakfast. We pack up in a gentle rain and rush home before the day has had much of a chance to introduce itself.

Once we get home, things are understandably fuzzy. I am not yet feeling the lack of sleep and have decided that I will choose not to. We shower off the grime of the night, more necessary for Amber the Fire Tender than me. I am not sorry for the warm baptism to wash away the sins of this otherwise sinless night (camping does not put Amber in an amorous mood). By the time that she has showered, I have changed the sheets. She says that she is going to stay up. I indulge this until after breakfast and then make clear that I will on no accounts be staying awake. She joins me after a few minutes more resistance.

Rarely has a bed felt so welcoming. I turn to my side to cuddle her and it is a wonder not to feel the pressure of old wood against my shoulder.

We spend the rest of Sunday in lethargy that was not earned, but we own it all the same.

last watched: Dark
reading: Prozac Nation