Return to the great outdoors
I had a notion that this year I wanted to do some camping, not the kind of camping I did at TerraSante where I slept in some sort of vehicle and used the campground’s kitchen, but the kind where I pitch a tent, cook over a fire (the solar oven having met a sad demise) and accept the refrigeration limit of a cooler full of ice.
I bought a tent in a secondhand store just before I left Massachusetts, then didn’t get it out and look at it the whole drive down or in fact until I was getting ready to leave Florida. I opened it up for the first time in the yard of the Creepy Cottage. Well, surprise! Whoever packed that thing away before donating it forgot to put in the tent poles, and these were specialized tent poles that were actually pipes with custom connectors, not something you could pick up at REI. Furthermore, once I had it open, it seemed to magically expand until it took up about four times the volume of its bag. Clever rolling and rerolling, plus strenuous pushing and shoving, were only adequate to get about half of it back in.
So I gave up. I asked the host if she knew anybody who would want it given the shape it was in. She said someone in her family could use it and came for it that same afternoon. Thing cost me seven bucks, so no great loss.
The next week, Orlando Craigslist connected me with a woman selling a bunch of camping gear including a two-person tent. She said the tent was fine, that she was selling it because they had bought a camper trailer, but when I got it back to the cottage and set it up, I found that it’s a factory second. The inner tent, the thing that keeps out the bugs and holds the poles in place, is in fact fine, but the rainfly, the outer tent that ties on top of the poles and keeps the weather off, is sewn wrong. It has one pole of its own and that pole didn’t fit.
I say “didn’t”, past tense, because I have a little toolbox with a little hacksaw in it. I lopped about an inch and a half off one end of that pole, filed the cut edge smooth with a nail file, and thus made it fit. The overall rainfly shape is still a tad distorted, but usable provided I do some strange things with the poles and stakes.
My first actual use of it was at a campsite I found on Airbnb, deep in the forested backyard of a house in the mountains of southern Virginia. The property is mostly very steep but a nice, flat campsite has been built in the form of a sort of terrace consisting of a vertical wall of heavy logs retaining gravel of the chip type (noticeably different from the local rocks, clearly trucked in) with a layer of soil decent enough that, in the years since it was created, some sizable trees have grown on it. To this, the current host has added, on the actual tent sites, about four inches of soft redwood mulch, which made for a nice night’s sleep once I was set up, but which made me nervous when I drove stakes into it because it was so soft that I knew they’d pull right out in the face of a good, hard wind. (Being from tornado country, I have seen tents like mine rolling merrily across the landscape, chased by frantic campers.) Meanwhile, the chip gravel thwarted staking completely. I ended up pulling some big chunks of half-rotted wood out of the underbrush to tie the tent lines to, where there wasn’t a conveniently placed tree. Happily there weren’t any good, hard winds, so it stayed in place just fine.
That first couple of days, I ached so much! During quarantine I’d become even more sedentary than I already was, so the amount of physical movement needed to do the absolute rock bottom camping basics was seriously exhausting. But by the third day I was getting comfortable.
It was, in a way, the beginning of hope. Back when I lived in Hubbardston, I had tried to reintroduce myself to exercise by paying a friend who had just finished yoga teacher training to come to my apartment once a week and give me a private lesson. I expected to ache afterward, and I did, but I expected the ache to fade after a day or two and it didn’t. In fact, it got worse, and worse, until finally I ended the arrangement. Various attempts to find out why this had happened got me no solid answers, so I had more or less given up. And yet, now, my body was having the normal reaction to resumption of exercise after a sedentary period, aching for a couple of days and then feeling better.
Have I healed? Possibly. That Hubbardston apartment was the one that turned out to have black mold. My black mold sensitivity manifested, not as the usual lung troubles, but as a loss of range of motion in my right shoulder. That was also where I was living both times I had Lyme Disease, which also does a number on one’s able-bodied-ness. In the years since I moved out of there, I have gone to great lengths to repair my health. (This is when I started taking all the pills.) My experience at this Virginia campsite shows that it’s started to work.
But at the Virginia campsite I also found a tick on the back of my hand. I don’t think it was on there very long. The back of the hand is a place where a person notices. The tick was also tiny and flat and skinny. Didn’t seem to have fed much at all. And I haven’t noticed any Lyme symptoms. But I realized that I am too paranoid about ticks now. I don’t want to camp in the real woods, with paths so narrow that the undergrowth brushes against me at every step. I want to camp in civilized campgrounds with wide well-maintained paths.
One more strike against staying in Virginia: the 17-year cicada emergence was just getting started. The various North American Magicicada species aren’t dangerous, but this is the largest insect emergence in the world. For four to six weeks, the things are bloody everywhere, and I really don’t like stepping on them. So I veritably galloped up Route 95, happily sleeping indoors every night, until I made it here, to Pearl Hill State Campground in Ashby, Massachusetts, which has a normal dirt surface that takes tent stakes in a nice, firm grip. It’s too far north for Magicicada. There’s hardly any undergrowth to speak of, just really tall trees, mostly pines, with a lot of shed pine needles and cones under them and a little sparse grass. Off at the edges, the mountain laurel is blooming. I found two trees the right distance apart to hang my hammock.
The first night I was here, I was reminded of why I started snowbirding in the first place as the temperature plunged to 46° F, but I had adequate warning and was prepared. Lots of carbohydrates before bedtime, long underwear, and hot water to take my first-thing-in-the-morning pill with, and I was fine. No hours of pain. But I may have made a wish, a little inadvertent wish for some Florida weather, and now we are getting a heat wave.
According to the news, this year’s Zone of Exceptional Heat and thus exceptional fire danger, extends from its usual coverage of California and Arizona all the way up into British Columbia, into the southern Rockies, and eastward across Texas far enough to overlap with the destruction left by Tropical Storm Claudette, which did some damage in every Gulf state and the southernmost end of the Eastern Seaboard - and it’s just the first big storm of the hurricane season. A big chunk of the Midwest, roughly centered on Chicago, is either flooding or at risk of flooding. So I guess we shouldn’t complain too much about this little preview of August. It’s not even out of character for New England.
It’s good to be back.