Isolated. Adjective.
- Far away from other places buildings, or people; remote.
- Having minimal contact or little in common with others.
I’m guessing you are tired of the word, and the reality. If there’s someone in the room with you, you may be gritting your teeth and glaring at them, because they deserve it for just being there and wearing the same shirt, every single day.
Now, if I’d have asked 12 months ago, would you have said the same thing? How about a little stay-cation? Friday I’ll ‘work from home’, you might have said, ‘sounds great,’ and then proceeded to hang around the house, binge on some crappy-but-delicious food, and whatever series is next on the streaming list. Blissful.
For me, around twelve months ago I was tired of the word, and the reality. I had rounded up my family and decided to spend some quality time together. For four months. In a tent.
I love my family. I also love the outdoors, and can hardly think of a better way to spend time in the outdoors than camping. These were things I believed to be foundational truths about myself. Four months of camping made me question my foundation at times.
What I can tell you, however, during these times where isolation seems never ending and may have you feeling lost with a weird feeling in the pit of your stomach, is that I came out the other side after four months. I still love my family. I still love the outdoors too. And I still love camping, though doing so for four months was a questionable.
To perhaps give you hope that you too can come out the other side of whatever isolation you are feeling, you might gain solace in hearing about one day, a snapshot of four people in the depths of it.
Panther Flat Campground, Site 37. Somewhere near Gasquet, California
Breakfast always happens, no matter what. It is part of the unhurried daily routine of camping that never changes much. First priority is to boil water for coffee, because that can take some time and it is usually the first thing on my mind after getting upright. Next consider your options for food: yogurt and granola — easy to prepare, not much cleanup, semi-healthy. Eggs and toast. Bit more work, but super satisfying camping fare. Eggs taste better when you are in a forest, for some reason. And if you do go with eggs, why not throw on some bacon as well?
Decision made, water boiling, coffee brewing, food cooking, eating. Then After Breakfast, which is like the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the day. You can usually tell what kind of a day it is going to be by what happens after breakfast.
My 10-year old son Oscar is across from me at the picnic table finishing up silver dollar sized pancakes.
I’ve just strewn my little pancakes with fresh blueberries and a handful of nuts and dried fruit from a bag. The blueberries are the same color as the beat up camping plate. I then realized that the fruit and nut mixture included dried blueberries. Now that’s a bit much, I thought to myself.
On this day everyone — my wife Katie, and my two boys Henry and Oscar — is slowly moving off on their own. This Wednesday is going to be a quiet one.
Sometimes you don’t want to do anything, see anyone (especially the three other people you’ve been living with for months), so you retreat. You need your own bit of space. That’s one thing that camping affords you, most of the time, is space to spread out.
On one end of the picnic table lay a tattered copy of The South River Recreational Area Map and Guide, which provides good information about hiking and things to do near our campground. It’ll probably just end up getting thrown in the fire, unfortunately, because in times like this, convincing everyone to get out and spend more time together would be like getting them to run barefoot back and forth through the campfire. So the day before I went out by myself and ran up a trail to the top of something called French Hill.
It was not a particularly long run, and true to the name it was basically a trail up a hill called French Hill. Truthfully, French Hill could have been a hole in the ground but I wouldn’t have cared. This outing was about being alone for a while.
That’s usually when people show up at random.
I finished my run and was standing next to the road stretching, when a guy on a road bike stopped and said ‘You running up the hill?’. An unassuming bearded man like myself on the side of the highway attempting to touch his toes does not usually spawn curiosity, but this guy felt inspired by the sight for some reason. He was a local, taking his bicycle for a ride up the highway. We went on to have a 5-minute conversation which covered ultra-marathons, the beauty of the State of Maine where his son was living at the time, and the strange laws in California related to the homeless.
One day earlier, a unicorn on a bike stopped us and said to watch out for rattlesnakes because her uncle found one under his car and killed it. We were walking on the road that loops around the campground, headed for the wild blackberry bushes that could be found hidden in the far corner, when she approached. She was probably only 7 years old, but seemed to know what she was talking about. We took note and checked under our car when we returned to our site.
Campgrounds are full of people, you might be thinking. They offer plenty of opportunities to meet new people and socialize, staving off those feelings of isolation. And sometimes that is true. In Glacier National Park we made friends with a family that we still keep in touch with. All through our travels, we had multiple people invite us to stay with them in their homes if ever we passed through San Francisco or Albuquerque or Salt Lake City.
In North Carolina we met Michael. He told us about a time he was camped next to a retired policeman who had been riding his motorcycle around the country for two months, staying each night at different campgrounds. As a cop, he’d seen some darkness, some of the worst of people, and it had effected him. But, he told Michael, the kindness of the people he’d met while on the road and particularly while camping had restored his faith in humanity.
More people are not always the answer to isolation, unfortunately. Sometimes they are more of a backdrop, a bicycle riding unicorn side show, than something fulfilling. And meeting new people and then leaving them, every couple of days, can be bittersweet.
Jimi Hendrix was on the radio crooning ‘The wind cries Mary’ as we drove north through Montana toward the border of Canada a few weeks prior. Northern Montana is a wildly idyllic landscape of towering mountains, empty green forests, long pristine lakes in hidden valleys, and vast fields of chartreuse-colored flowers. We were contentedly taking it all in, except Oscar, who was in a melancholy mood. He initially resisted our attempts to find out what was wrong. But finally he broke down.
“I hate traveling,” he said, crying softly. “You meet all these people and make friends and then never see them again.”
I’ve never been in a Holy War myself, but I think I know what it feels like.
Having finished his pancakes, Oscar sat across from me reading the book Ender’s Game.
“How are you liking Ender’s Game?” Henry asks, because he’d just finished blasting through it. The book had been given to him, and I suspected that he accepted it to be nice but never really intended to read it, because it is longer and more complicated than anything I’d ever seen him read before. But he gobbled it up and did the same to the sequel we bought at Powells Books in Portland.
“It’s good,” Oscar replies. “But I won’t nerd out with you about it until you read that book,” he says, referring to a Star Wars book sitting at one end of the table. Henry had picked it up a few weeks back but was ignoring it.
It was nice seeing Oscar and Henry having a civil interaction for the moment, Oscar’s bit of snarkiness aside, because it was not the norm on our road trip. Relationships go between fiery extremes when you are in isolation with other people.
Henry and Oscar’s relationship reminds me of Israel and Palestine. Henry’s like Israel. He’s bigger than Oscar, and confident of his greater status in the world. Henry never shies away from an opportunity to illustrate this to Oscar, usually through some act of violence or disrespect like finding and eating candy that Oscar had been saving for weeks.
Oscar takes on the unfortunate role of Palestine. He’s much smaller and is always getting taken advantage of. But he’s proud and scrappy, and won’t be dissuaded from taking shots at Henry to let him know he’s not going to be taken without a fight. Sometimes Oscar will shoot a bottle rocket or two across the border at Henry, knocking his hat off or poking him with a few sharp words. To which Henry responds by leveling Oscar’s city, punching him hard.
‘Peace in the Middle East!’ I would shout at them.
Next to me is my old beat up black water bottle. It’s dented and scratched, particularly on the bottom where the paint is coming off. The majority of this damage occurred because it is too big for the cup holder in the car, so it sits next to the me where I forget about it until I open the door. It then falls to the pavement, landing with a sound like a bell, and rolls underneath the car. This first started with our Toyota Prado in Australia, and continued in the US with the Toyota Highlander we were driving on our road trip. Stupid tiny Toyota cup holders.
My water bottle is not a Nalgene, but is temporarily sporting a black Nalgene screw top, black and beat up to match the bottle. It doesn’t have one of those handy loops to keep the top attached to the bottle. A few years back Henry chewed through it, for unknown reasons.
It is a shame too, because those rings are pretty useful for keeping your lid from getting lost. A water bottle without a lid is basically a small bucket. What good is a bucket on a hike? It’s also a shame because I’d had that old Nalgene for about 20-years — I think it even contained BPA, just like the good ‘ol days. I’d kept it in a pretty unmolested condition until Henry came along. I guess that’s what kids do, come along and chew through your stuff in one way or another, and challenge your sense about what’s important in the world. Kids and dogs.
When you spend many hours, weeks, or months in the same company, you get comfortable with each other in a way that nothing is sacred. This is especially the case when you are always dirty and you’ve had to carry your own poop in a bag.
In front of me on the table is a burning mosquito coil, which I am sure serves no purpose but makes us feel positively about winning another day’s battle with the pests. The mystery bookmark from the Bookworm is leaning up against a bottle of Cutter ‘Skinsations’ insect repellent, which I purchased because it was on sale. The bottle says it has a clean, fresh scent, which is true, and that it repels mosquitoes, which it appears to do, as is evidenced by my largely unblemished legs and ankles. The bottle also mentions added Aloe and Vitamin E, which have done nothing for my skin. On the contrary, mine looks like it is going to flake off in places.
When you are camping for long stretches, good showers are few and far between, so a permanent layer of filth becomes normal and acceptable. So losing a little skin from bug spray chemicals would come with the benefit of taking some dirt with it, leaving me temporarily clean.
There’s a dark green Coleman lantern at the far end of the table. We got it mainly because it looks cool, though not as cool as one of the ones that you fill with something flammable and then uses fire as the light source. Using one of those you get to feel like a real frontiersman, like Clint Eastwood would have used to see the bandits in his front yard whom he’d later take out with six-shooters. Or to spot a stray bear that you’d have to run off your land. Our lantern uses batteries, so you’d probably use it more for checking to see if your marshmallow is overcooked, or to find your way to the toilet.
The toilets at the Panther Flat Campground are decent. They flush and are reasonably clean, on account of the daily wash down they receive from the two salty gentlemen who are the campground caretakers.
Our experience has been otherwise mixed.
Outside Portland, we were provided with a bucket inside a teepee. I’d never spent much time in teepees, and it surprised me how small they are inside.
“You’ll want to pee elsewhere,” our host told us, motioning to the woods. “Save the bucket for the number 2.”
In Seattle, we camped in someone’s backyard. Our hosts had built a small shed to house a bucket to which they attached a toilet seat. Inside the bucket was a bag. The shed had a window, and was clean and tastefully decorated with lace curtains and a memorial to a pet bird named Dasha who had died 16 years ago. There was plenty of air freshener and also a copy of Muscle Mag provided in case you wanted to spend some time reading while sitting on the bucket.
A sign instructed each user to remove the bag after use and to carry it to a garbage can outside. I did not want to spend time in the bucket shed if I could get around it. Katie felt the same, however did not have the fortitude to hold out until we found a more attractive public toilet somewhere. So she headed off down the hill.
This was something that needed to be discussed afterward, like any new experience. We had a very frank debrief, which did not seem at all out of place.
“Did you go?” I asked.
“Yes,” she answered, solemnly.
“How was it?”
“It was weird,” she said. “Carrying your own poop, like with a dog.”
“Was today a heavy one?” I asked.
“It was so heavy!’ she remarked. Maybe she didn’t follow the advice given, to save the bucket for number 2.
Straight ahead of me is our tent. Katie is there, hiding in the vestibule and knitting.
Off to my right, hanging between two trees, is my orange and gray hammock. This is not a leisure time crappy-beer-after-you-finish-mowing-the-lawn hammock, it is where I sleep. Not that there is no room in the tent for me. On the contrary, it is made to sleep six people and I had slept in it on many occasions earlier in our trip when the weather was cold.
When you are together, all the time, it is nice to have a space of your own where you can retreat to be by yourself. The act of saying goodnight to everyone and then being able to head in the opposite direction and be alone in my hammock, swinging slowly while reading a book, helped keep me sane. This is regardless of the fact that I could still hear Katie and Henry inside the tent arguing about various things — the correct way to zip up a flap, leaving lights on, reasons to stop farting on your brother, someone’s headphones on too loud. The options for pre-slumber arguments in the tent are endless. There are no arguments in my hammock. It is a conflict-free zone.
Standing next to the hammock, I situate my sleeping mat. Then I swing myself up and zip the bug net as quickly as possible. I’d experienced sleeping in the closed bug net when mosquitoes had somehow gotten inside, and it was like trying to grab a quarter when you’re rolling around inside a clothes dryer.
I then proceed to wiggle around vigorously in an attempt to get situated in the sleeping bag, which is complicated by the fact that I am lying on top of it. Imagine someone trying to change the sheets on your bed while you’re curled up sleeping. Awkward.
A quick adjustment of my jacket-cum-pillow and I’ve reached a happy, comfortable equilibrium. The hammock sways slightly, and in between murmurs from the tent I can hear the wind rustling the trees. I usually fall asleep faster than expected, wondering whether tomorrow we’ll all be back on speaking terms again. Maybe we’ll even go on a hike together.
One thing I always fell asleep knowing is that tomorrow will come. Tomorrow always happens, no matter what.
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