A couple of hours ago, we all sat on a tarp playing cards, eating our hot dogs, and drinking some beer under my LED camp-lights and the light of a full moon in the somewhat dismal Sunset campground that is more like a tailgate at a football game than a real campground with a gravely parking lot, neighbors on either side of us, and campers running their generators.
Now, the temperature is perfect for sleeping under the stars but the wind has picked up and is really starting to gust. Max and I sleep on a tarp on the outside of the tent even though I’ve pitched the tent and literally nailed it into the ground with my rusty nails that are about the size of railroad spikes. I don’t think twice about securing the empty tent or someone else’s tent I saw tumbleweeding down the road earlier.
I mind the strong moonlight more than the wind and place my riding jacket over my head. The wind gets worse gusting to thirty miles an hour, maybe more.
I can hear all the tents flapping violently in the wind. A blast of wind rips by. I hear what sounds like something sliding over the rocks. I remove the jacket from my head in time to see the tent slide, flip over, and then once the wind grabs the water proof bottom, the tent lifts into the air, clearing Chris’s tent, flying like one of those cows you see caught in a tornado in the movies or like the makeshift sail in “Castaway” that finally leaves the raft in a violent storm.
I jump up and give chase in my underwear, my bare feet ignoring the uneven gravel in the heat of the chase. Max secures my inflatable mattress, sleeping bag, and pillow as they try to chase after me.
The tent cuts perpendicular over the road and then over a couple of campers before landing and rolling coming to a stop about hundred feet away having just narrowly missed four different groups of unsuspecting sleeping campers. Where have the nine inch nails gone as the tent flew? I have grisly images in my head of the nails sticking out of the forehead of one of the hapless campers I just ran over.
Max and I aren’t the only ones sleeping under the stars. Amazingly, the tent has held together. Back at the campsite, I disassemble the tent and hold it down with heavy objects like our cooler, equipment bin and rocks. In the morning, I will discover that top pole is bent about 45 degrees at the tip. All the equipment I left in the tent including my very expensive camera was dumped out when the tent first turned over and didn’t go along for the flight. My wallet and keys are still in the stuff bag I secured them in. Max and I move our tarp and sleeping bags behind Brooke’s car the wind still gusting. I manage to get plenty of sleep. In the morning, the fifty mile view of Death Valley of yesterday has turned into the haze of sand hanging in the sky like a fog bank over the ocean. Both Max and Brooke say they didn’t sleep a wink. Aside from my midnight run, the perfect temperature and the wind help me get a very good night sleep.
I feel the lure of being outdoors living in the rhythms of the day of hot and cold and bright and dark, subject to the patterns of the weather, not in control, but continually adapting and finding my own rhythms leaving the blandness of a completely controlled environment at room temperature with constant light staring at lifeless walls that protect but don’t move, live, or breath. I enjoy actually being in the environment, of smelling it and feeling it. As much as I value abstract thinking and ideas or how my mind can make a grouping of words come to life or empathize with the dancing pixels on a TV screen or lose time in a problem, it doesn’t seem real unless I can touch it. When we lose contact with some one, we say we lose touch. Touch is intimacy, with another person, with a rock, a tree, or a trail. I like to trade the habits of my normal day, not thinking any more that each day is a stepping stone for improvement to the next, but embracing what each day has to offer, each day within its own horizon.
