A Cyclist Goes Camping? A self-depracating reflection on trees, feet, and love

An erstwhile post from your bicycle travel adventurer here! This will not be about bicycles however; instead, camping. A topic completely new to me I just feel compelled to expound about. That activity where you go trudging among trees with whatever you hope to eat weighing on your back, in addition to those items necessary for a bad night's sleep, all of which will most likely become filthy.  

This is how I defined camping until just recently. My only other experiences were a concerted effort to "get involved" during freshmen year via the outing club, where over October break I rented some ill-fitting gear and spent a miserably cold night in some Pennsylvania state forest with people I barely knew, so cold I was experiencing nightmares that if I could just get the equation correct in my calculus class my sleeping bag would warm up. It took many more years for me to try sleeping out again, where I slept alone, frugal, tent-less, on the edge of a bicycle trail in some state forest in Idaho, awoken by the tremendous sounds of some ungulate gulping a midnight drink from a stream. I arrived at the nearest log cabiny diner the next day, wide-eyed and very eager to eat a hot breakfast and not do that again thank you very much.  

And then, last year, I fell in love with a man who loves walking. And trees. The sort of man who hikes 20 miles a day in the California mountains for weeks on end. The sort of man who drives through snow storms to attach fancy add-ons to his boots and hike mountains through snow storms. He was crazy about hiking and camping and I was crazy about him. After months of hugging him and his smoke-filled hair back into civilization after being away, I wondered what all this was about. But I still dismissed it: camping required too much gear I didn't have, too much carrying, too much savvy, too much planning. Too much likelihood, I thought, for my sensitive odd little body to become cold or uncomfortable. He knew this about me and was too respectful to ask me along, except for occasional, "I wish I could have shared this mountain with you. It was SO beautiful." But something opened in me finally and for Christmas I gave him a handmade certificate, entitling the bearer to "any outdoor event excluding those outdoor events occuring below the temperatures of 50 degrees F and including those outdoor events involving sleeping bags." 

He had the gear to lend me, the savvy, the planning. I just had to set aside my old freshman self afraid of getting cold and trust him. 

My first experience out with him was a sweet short hike up to a camping spot on Bald Mountain in the Adirondacks, where he carried all the heavy stuff, lending me his uber-light pack and sleeping bag. At the top he magically produced two cold beers for us, from inside a pair of thick wool socks. We had the beers, a sunset, hot chili, and I slept the best I'd ever slept not under a roof. It was bliss. To wake up and see the mist yawning gently from the tree'd valley, the enterprising birds chipping away with no sounds of other humans, being with him and all his enchantedness and peering into his beloved world.  

This past weekend, plaintively grasping at the last of the wan warmth left before endless grey torpid winter, I suggested we go out into some Pennsylvania forest. A bit south, a bit back in time, perhaps some color left. This would be my third time out with him, sleeping on forest soils and walking a lot, and my farthest distance covered with a pack. Just under 20 miles hiked the two days we were out. Which for me, is a lot. We chose Loyalsock state forest, and no, I am not making up the name of that. "Wetsock" would have been more appropriate, given our second day of drizzle, however.  

The morning to depart for our sock-hike, I got dressed in my new thrift store down vest (packable warmth), a silk scarf in a clashing orange (packable warmth), my middle-aged-soccer-mom Supportive Footwear running shoes, and another thrift store gem of lightweight multi-pocket khaki pants a homeschooled tween girl would wear with gusto. "Ooooh you look so CUTE," he exclaimed. "What?!", I rebutted, "I'm dressed with no style whatsoever and these shoes are hideous and I'm wearing none of my cutest most interesting clothing." "But you're dressed like you're going out to DO THINGS," he countered. And he was right. I'm realizing that hiking and camping is about putting yourself into the very bosom of the world, trees and streams and quiet and mud and burs, and trying to take care of your needs as intrusively as possible while you relish these wild places. 

As we're getting ready to leave, I'm unsupervised for 20 minutes in the kitchen and he returns to find the counter piled with food. "I don't want to get hungry", I explained. Chopped, oiled, spiced and wrapped in foil was over half of a rutabaga the size of a small infant.  

Ever tactful, my boyfriend considered this enormous volume. "Is that enough?" I asked hopefully. Along with the soybean noodles, the bread, bananas, cheese, muffins, chocolate, peanut butter..... He found a kind way to reassure me we would have more than enough food, and counselled that I put half the rutabaga aside for baking at home later. 

I was eager to impress him with what I hoped would be my campfire cooking skills. The first time this had been successful; I had brought homemade buttery biscuit dough and made us fire biscuits roasted on the ends of fat sticks, pried off and filled with melting gooey brie cheese. When he tasted one I witnessed a catatonic religious experience. Even though when I had unpacked the food supplies at the fire circle, all of which he had carried to take the heavier weight, revealing my biscuit mix in a cute ball jar: "That's in a jar?!" he exclaimed, "I carried glass up here?!". Yup, thanks to your rookie girlfriend. Hehh. I know now that is what plastic baggies are for. 

One of my other rookie mistakes this weekend was my impatience with the rutabagas. Having poked them directly into the flames, they turned out like hard white board game dice with one side black, tasteless and unbecoming. 

But the rutabagas shortly became forgotten. Heavy rustling in the forest made us both sit up straight in the dark, ticking on our headlamps and shushing our story telling. Through the dim murky wall of tree trunks two bright eyed shone. A black bear. More rustling, which sounded as if it was approaching. Matthew stood up, grabbed a rock, and spoke loud and low. I stood up and felt fear and an impressed sense of the unknown. Rustle rustle, and the eyes shown from a greater distance away. Matthew explained that black bears are very shy and any encounters with humans were incredibly rare. He explained the protocol for self defense and reassured me all would be well. Heavy distant scampering, and eventually quiet. Matthew sat back down and continued his fire story. 

I couldn't get those glinting eyes out of my mind. 

Even though it was only 8pm, there wasn't anything more to do but get into our sleeping bags. Food had been eaten, fire had been satisfyingly made, and I hadn't thought to bring anything to read. Time to tuck in for the night. And it had gotten cold. My three sweaters and that vest are great, but he's letting me use his 4-degree sleeping bag and that will be inarguably cozy.

So you zip yourselves into a low-hanging flappy triangle, joking about quickly zipping up the flap to avoid letting the cold in the door. You pipe your body into an appendageless fluffy slidey tube and lay on something rectangular and partially inflated and also slidey, under some whispering trees very far from roads or any other people. Except your boyfriend, with whom you are very much needing to snuggle, to wrap an arm around.

Discovery: there is no satisfying way to snuggle when you are contained within an appendageless tube. You can't unpack and release an arm because it will become irrevocably cold. You can inch your way closer to him and his tube, but that only results in sliding him off his little rectangle.

So you're a fat singular larvae, as close to him as you can get, waiting for the next morning when there's light and warmth again and you can be a butterfly and drink hot tea and keep walking amongst joyful trees.  

Sleep came easily enough, because we had walked for 10 and a half miles. For most people I know who hike, this is like a boardwalk stroll. But for me, this is the longest I've ever walked while carrying life supplies on my back. When I'm bike touring, I'm inured to the heavy panniers full of back-up water and sunscreen and the aching butt from the bike saddle. Your butt always aches, and it's the fact of it, and you ignore it, and just get on with the wonderful activity you're doing. With hiking, it is feet and hips aching. When I first felt my feet starting to ache, this registered as a problem. Oh no, my feet hurt! I'm deficient! I lack some key heartiness! But Matthew explained, it's just the fact of it. His hurt too. It's ok. Accepting hurting feet was just going to be like accepting a hurting bike butt. 

But you walk along in the crisp roar of fallen colored leaves and balance across logs and admire neon green moss and smell the different types of trees as you walk among forest types. Yes, you can smell it. Your human senses become heightened in a way you can't get among offices and furniture and parking lots. 

So at about 6 a.m. I did Sphinx pose to peer out of the tent and will the dim sky to show nautical twighlight. I really wanted morning. I wanted to stop thinking of bears from a slidey tube.

He was still sleeping as if he had begun contentedly decomposing into the forest floor. I had slept such that every forest rustle sent a red exclamation point into my consciousness. As the night had wore on I did realize that a distant spooky regular sounding rustling was him breathing. I registered a single dry leaf falling from a tree, landing cacophonously in the leaf litter. A mouse scooting benignly through the rattling leaves was uproarious. But the bear never returned, and all was well. 

When I heard him stir, "I'm hungry", I announced, pathetically into the dark, "and I need to use the forest loo." Another activity, along with sleeping under trees and walking a lot and planning campfire food, that I had previously thought unachievable by me. He struck into action almost immediately, "this is the hard part" he said, leaving the warm larval casing to enter the cold morning world. 

"Fafafafafa" he went, pulling on cold pants. "The trick is to keep them under your sleeping bag so they're not so cold." "The trick is to not take off ANYTHING in the first place," I responded from my three sweaters.  

But the hot English breakfast tea we relished, made with stream water, and the bubbling can of beans for breakfast over another fire, these simple pleasures were heightened into richness you can never get inside a house. A richness cultivated from walking so far, from being cold, from some basic human instinct to rejoice in self-care in these circumstances. It is truly magical. 

At the end of the second day (rainy), after I was addled and tired enough that my sopping feet I considered somehow to be heavy quart ball jars of water, after we had walked and walked and entertained ourselves with rhyming games, and after we saw our parked car in the distance, I could only laugh in giddy pride to see the trail head sign from which we had launched over 24 hours ago. To spend so much time amongst these looming majestic living things, placing foot after foot, and to do this next to the supportive grinning master of all that, was just wonderful.