The Grit and the Glory: A Camping Experience

As we prepared for camping with my extended family, my Aunt Lee mentioned a canned stew they always take camping. “It’s really gross, but they love it,” she said, referring to her kids. “That’s what camping is to them.” Anyone I’ve ever meant who has camped with any regularity has some strong opinions on just what it is that makes any given woodsy experience camping. S’mores are a key component for me, along with speckled metal tableware, and the unmistakable sound of tent poles slipping against the canvas. For some, it’s not camping without ghost stories by the campfire or hot chocolate sipped in the dark. If you’re my cousin Oliver, it is all about the fire, tending it until the coals disassemble under the tap of a stick, to be restarted again with a blow from puffed cheeks.

If you’re one of the lucky offspring Jake and I may someday produce, you are in for a treat, because above and beyond our traditional burritos, some fork-flipped morning pancakes, a teepee style fire, and the smell of a certain green dish soap that will probably never run out, we are bent on providing a real psychological trip. Go to bed happy and full of puffed sugar, wake up at two a.m. convinced the camper across the way is going to axe your tent. Say what you will about how we set up camp, but we are two people exceptionally skilled in imagining our own bloody demise.

I have not watched many horror movies, but I am familiar with hubris, cognizant of the proclivity for bad things to happen in the dark, and a reasonable judge of events warranting ominous soundtracks. Horror movie heroes always look so silly, and we are ever crying after them:

“Don’t wander off alone!”

“Just forget about examining that sound, and find some light!”

“No, no, no! It is a bad idea to venture down that unbeaten path as the sun is setting!”

But then again, they aren’t aware they’re a horror movie character. They can’t hear the ominous music. No matter how reasonable your sense of foreboding, those little things (the matches you forgot, the significant look from the gas station stranger) don’t take on meaning until you know there is a potential killer on the loose and you’re heart is beating like you’ve just run a 3-minute mile. At that point, these little observations all assemble into the shocking realization that you are tragically doomed.

Jake and I camped two weekends ago at in the Cascade Lakes area near Bend. Things did not go as planned. The first night, the site where we planned to camp was full, and after touring a number of other packed campgrounds, we settled for a campground near the highway: acceptable, but no water in sight. The next day brought the same problem. We thought to get an early start on other campers, to snag a site right after checkout, but we again found ourselves rolling hopelessly past site after full site, each well-laid an assault on our campground short-fallings. “To hell with this,” we finally cried to the overstuffed campsite that became our last straw, where a young girl in a ruffled suit strode by with a pug, and a boy with spiky hair rode by on a bike. I swear they stared menacingly. I think their eyes may have gleamed a little. “To hell with this! We have a four wheel drive vehicle. We’re done with camping in civilization! We’re taking this to the forest roads, to the unchartered territory, the camps of the free!”

Cue ominous soundtrack as we turn onto National Forest Development Road 4209

“4209,” that’s what we call it, with a bit of scathing deference in our voices. 4209 and our car had met the day before, courtesy of a mistaken direction on GoogleMaps. Driving down then, we had deemed it all but impassable and turned around. But, campground vacancy, or lack thereof, worked in the favor of our sinister plot, and there we were, less than 24 hours later, a brand new hope for the same stretch of rubble.

4209 is unfit for travel by passenger cars. The road is like a riverbed in drought, rocks strewn hither and thither, enormous ruts, jutting boulders. Jake, in the driver seat, straddled the chasms and dodged buttes. There were moments we thought we’d never make it, thought we might turn back, but civilization had done us wrong.

As it turns out, so did the backwoods

There was the mosquito infestation, insects that swarmed as though they’d never before encountered human flesh, and still no more promise for a campsite. What ultimately slowed us down, though, was the other-worldly screeching emitting from our front right tire.

At first hint of this racket, Jake and I regard each other with dismay. We pull over and jack up the car, take off the tire, examine the brake. Jake bruises his forearm badly on the wheel well trying to loosen the bolts holding the brake to the rotor. I kick the car. Jake tells me not to kick the car when it is jacked up. I call my dad and get out the words, “car trouble . . .  camping . . . unimproved road . . . no one around . . . bad . . . reception . . .  can’t . . . hear . .  . ” before the phone cuts out. Jake swears at the car. We each have two flies circling our heads, their buzzing incessant, unmistakable mocking in their tone. I am standing 20 feet up the road and I begin to cry thinking that we will surely meet our end: If not starving to death, then devoured by mosquitoes. If not devoured by mosquitoes, then driven mad by these goddamn deer flies. But, we have a cooler full of food, the almost ripe huckleberries and the car’s shelter from swarming mosquitoes. Jake takes out his pajama pants and begins to swing them wildly around his head, cursing and gritting his teeth. So, it will be the third then.

***

It is Sunday night, and the neighboring campers at the campground we finally find are sparse–mostly fisherman and older couples occupying those sites directly on the lake. We have had our share of bugs, and are elated to have any choice of sites at all and so we choose a campsite far from the water, surrounded by dryness. We have one neighbor, who we don’t see all evening, but as we pass his site, Jake notes the neatness of the camp, a lamp hanging from a PVC stand, Coleman stove opened on the table’s end. “Who would have such a clean camp?” we wonder, and then we go to cook potatoes in the fire.

That night, I wake to a repeated rustling and the light of a flashlight scanning the nearby woods. Jake has left the tent. I turn over and close my eyes again, but the scanning continues. He goes to the car, then returns, then walks off in another direction. After ten minutes, I pull on some pants and go to investigate. Jake sits in the driver seat of the lighted car with his foot propped up on the seat, applying a band-aid to a hiking blister on his ankle.

“I walked by to catch a vibe, but he’s just sitting there staring in the fire,” Jake reports on our sickly neat neighbor. Evilly. Menacingly. I can hear these attributes in the undertones of his voice.

There is a sinister clarity that descends at 2:00 a.m., especially if you’re prone to embellishment and a bit of drama. There are things that might strike you odd about your camping experience early in the evening, but go ultimately unnoticed: perhaps an unattractive man-made fountain gracing the campground entrance, the fact that there’s no need to pay until morning, perhaps the presence of no one but a single RV parked behind the “Camp Host” sign, the owner of which insists he’s “not really the camp host, but just camp wherever you like.” Come 2 a.m., when you wake in a cold sweat, those details have sorted themselves into a rather gruesome story wherein the RV camper drowned the real camp host in the river, built a ramshackle fountain to lure people into a sense of beauty and security, but will personally see to it that you don’t pay in the end–well, you’ll pay, alright, but the currency won’t be money.

The onset of mosquitoes, the treacherous 4290 were clearly clever ruses to wear us down and weaken our resolve. Where we earlier joked about banishing a screeching demon from our wheel well, we now see the noise as an obvious incidence of foul play, an unmistakable intrusion of an ill-intentioned horror-seeking villain.

Finally, our neighbor’s neatness–at first, impressive–now seems too perfect and contrived: “Safari hat tipped against a water bottle, Coleman stove set up just so, lamp hanging from a pole, dish towel draping deliberate, yet casually, next to lamp as if to say, ‘Look other campers, I am just like you! I cooked my dinner and then did my dishes after a long day of wholesome recreation. I have no reckless and creepy intentions. I have no blood-stained axe stashed within my tent.’”

***

The dark is like a mirror trick, our image of this unseen camper’s face appearing like some flame-stained demon in the flickering of our imaginations, his expression contorted, his anguish palpable as he waits in silence for the last remaining variable, for us to slip back into the tent, so he can fulfill his perverse and gruesome plan. Smoke rises and it’s difficult to tell who is crazy, this nocturnal man staring into a dying fire, a beer in the crook of his elbow, or these robed strangers whispering conspiratorially by their unlit fire, one eye still fixed on the nearby camp.

Three times waking to a sound in the night, rising from the tent, sitting by the fire, going to sleep in the car, and it’s no longer something that happened by accident one night, and rather something you do. Perhaps this ritual has become a part of our camping experience like a certain handle-less corningware coffee pot is part of my parents’ morning, its inside stained brown in a ring three inches from the top, the exact depth my father fills when pouring water every day. My parents make good coffee, one with a rich flavor and sweetness to it that many an electric maker is hard-pressed to replicate. You could give them a new pot for Christmas, one with an internal percolator, but I’m certain it would go unused. Offer them a filter and they will say they like the grit. It’s possible they began by “roughing it,” making coffee in a ceramic pot, and grew so accustomed they began to prefer it. Whether that’s the case or not, it’s my sense that our camping experiences begin like that—making do until the clumpy canned soup, the too-thin sleeping pads become the norm, become fun. The grounds aren’t so gritty anymore, they make the whole cup better.

So, it might just be a case of “you can’t take the over-exaggerated gruesome fabrication” out of the camper. You can’t take it out because I think I enjoy it. Just a little. Just the part where the camp was less scary when Jake and I sat there together in the early morning, our shoulders almost touching, how the frogs became louder as our heartbeats grew slower.

Of course, I can’t guarantee our aforementioned offspring will view our horror movie ritual the same way. Perhaps they’ll see the late night flashlight, hear our whispers, groan and bury their head in the sleeping bag hood. Better, though, they will get the notion to start the fire, to cook another marshmallow, to point their sleeping bagged feet toward the center of the circle. Maybe they too will relish the stillness and the biting night air and our voices will droop heavy with sleeplessness as the moon slips into the Western sky.