Camping

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I am absolutely going to make time when I get back from the CC tonight to fold up the tent and vacuum. My house is a shambles. Everything that can be messy is.

So I went out camping this last weekend. A couple of other girls and I were going to cycle out to the camp site, but at the last minute, they decided to go early and drive rather than bike, and ditched me. That is cool. No big deal. I am a big boy who can handle getting himself to camp on a small island.

And getting ditched actually turned out well for me, since I was late getting out of work and traffic was terrible. When I finally got out to the Anacortes area, I was definitely going to miss the 5:35 ferry.

I decided to park at the Park & Ride about ten miles from the ferry because 1) I thought a cool 20-mile ride into the campsite would be fun exercise, and 2) I was not sure about the parking situation ahead and did not want to have to drive back. Uncertainty and adventure; the maker of all our best decisions.

The ride to the ferry was fine as it could be and was only ten miles long, but it turned out that the next ferry was not leaving till 6:50, and what with arriving at Orcas around 8pm, I ended up with about twenty minutes of light before I was pounding along in the dark, trying to find my way to the others.

Thank god for the GPS.

By 8:15 or 8:30, it is effectively pitch dark. After a hill that somehow climbed to 300 feet and back down to sea level without ever actually going downhill, I have found the ?resort? but I cannot find our campsite. When trying to turn around on my heavily lopsided bike, I fall over.

I just lie there in the road, looking at the stars, taking a break from even worrying about how I am going to find a bunch of people I barely know in the dark. Maybe I will just roll out my sleeping bag on the beach there and find them in the morning, I think.

?What happened?? I hear from a cabin a dozen yards away.

?He fell over.? A second woman responds.

?Is he hurt??

?He ain?t moving.?

?Does he need help??

I figure I better say something before they call me an ambulance or administer CPR. ?That hurt.? I observe from my prone position.

?You okay??

?Yeah, I?m fine, thanks. I?m just gonna lie here for a few minutes.? Says the boy, me, still lying half-trapped under the bicycle. ?How are y?all doing??

?We?re okay,? she says, with the inflection indicating that she is not so sure about me.

?Good to hear it.?

After a few minutes, I get up and finally find the campground, but not before bursting into a cabin that I thought was the office but was not. A poor little six-year-old, alone in living room, stared at me in terror.

?Is this a cabin? This isn?t the check-in office?? I asked, hacking the child to bloody pieces with a large ax.

?No,? the wide-eyed child says, lying mortally wounded in his imagined pool of blood.

?Oops, sorry,? I say, sucking the eyeballs out of his skull.

As I get back on my bike to continue searching, I hear the deadbolt slide into place behind me.

But like I said, I found the campsite. They warmly welcomed me, and the beauteous D~ helped me set up my tent. Initial plans for wide-spread tent-sharing apparently came to naught, as we ended up with six tents set up for the nine people there. But that was cool by me.

Less cool was the burn ban. The campfire is half the camping experience. And, it suddenly hit me, if there is no campfire, that means no crackling warmth in the morning. I would have to get up in the freezing cold with no succor in sight. Ugh.

The weekend was wonderful, though. Hiked on Saturday, which was fun and beautiful and not a little strange to drive for twenty miles in order to walk two (another group then took the ferry to Lopez in order to cycle around, which is the same weirdness; driving and taking a boat in order to ride your bicycle).

I paddled a canoe around for quite a while on Sunday, which cemented my already-not-insignificant sunburn. Little sea lions, or otters, or whatever they are when they are not orca whales, came up and visited me.

I would be paddling along, and all the sudden notice that six or ten feet off to the side, a little white puppy head would have popped up and be watching me. ?What is a dog doing way out here?? you ask yourself. They do not come when called, though. But the roll they do to submerge is a beautiful clockwork of graceful movement.

We drank in the hot tub, I bought a grill and ate steaks, and insane amounts of junk food was consumed. We played Taboo with rules modified to mandate that all clues had to be sexual in nature. It was a good time.

Everyone except me left early Monday morning, for reasons that were unclear to me. I was thinking, if you are taking a three-day camping trip, make the most of all three days. Why go home before the evening of the third day?

Notwithstanding, by 8am I was alone. Used as I am to being infallible, I have to admit that everyone else won that call. It was drizzling in the early morning, and the weather settled down to rain in earnest as the morning wore on. I kept thinking it would stop and my tent would dry out, and then I could pack up and go home. No dice.

?The day has infinite potential until 1:30,? I kept telling myself, trapped in my tent in the rain. ?But if it has not cleared up by then, I am going home.?

I finally gave up, and when the weather settled a bit, quickly packed up my wet tent, wrapped it and the sleeping bag in a plastic tablecloth I lifted from another campsite, strapped everything to my bike and headed home.

The ride to the ferry was great, excepting the initial hill straight up through the nine circles of Hell and up Everest on leaving the campsite. I stayed almost entirely dry, and I pulled up at the ferry just as a bonus unscheduled ferry was pulling up to the dock, so I pretty much rode straight on.

But when the ferry pulled into Anacortes, the rain was bucketing down. Before I was a mile from the dock, I was soaked to the skin. Shirt, jeans, everything. I could feel little puddles in the toes of my All-Stars. It was funny enough that I almost did not mind.

I finally made it back to the Park and Ride, and stripped nearly to the point of breaking obscenity laws right there in the parking lot. On the way home (through ungodly traffic for the first ten miles), I had to stop to buy gas. I felt silly pumping gas wearing nothing but soaked jeans, but there was no way I was going to put on my clammy wet clothes again, and everything in my pannier was soaked from the rain as well. I am sure I was an Arco fashion plate: barefoot sexy sunburnt boy manfully fueling his car.

When I got home, nothing felt so good as putting on warm dry sweatpants and a sweatshirt. Perhaps the whole point of camping is to make you appreciate anew the small daily comforts of home.

. . .

It occurs to me, reviewing this, that this is not really relating the parts of the story you are most likely to care about. ?So he murdered a small child,? you say, ?who cares? Why has he not talked about when he and K~ sat on the beach for an hour after a night of drinking and communal sexualization of every possible event? Is it not noteworthy at all that they were never in danger of touching, much less engaging in some hanky-panky??

?And what about D~? Were you two flirting over the non-fire, or was she just cutting loose? What are your thoughts on that? And are you and J~ going to come together over the pretext of socializing your dogs? It is such an easy and innocent introduction to alone time to find out each other?s stories, how can you not chase that? And how did S~ respond to hot tub drinking and flirting??

?And while not as directly interesting, the story of how J~ and T~ came together is truly darling and gives one hope for set-ups to build into really nice relationships.?

?But you are not telling any of those stories. Instead you are bitching about it raining when outdoors. Well... duh! What were you expecting? Why are you telling me obvious facts instead of interesting people stories??

I do not have a good answer for that. In a way, I do not think of those bits as my story to tell. Or perhaps it is telling tales out of school about people that I do not know well enough to gauge their receptiveness to being talked about. An interesting question, certainly.