"You're going to do what?" my daughter asked incredulously. "Camping," I replied. "I'm going camping for the weekend." She shook her head in disbelief. "Does he know about you? Does he know that your idea of camping is a two-star resort?" I laughed at her. "I think you're underestimating me," I said. "I've done it before." She rolled her eyes and said, "You were younger, then." She also said that she hoped my relationship would survive, and made some snide comment about sheets and thread counts, but I completely disregarded her rudeness.
I was going camping with my boyfriend for the whole weekend. Sleeping in a sleeping bag on the ground, in a tent, with bugs and no showers and no makeup. I have done it before- I used to backpack, without a tent. I've hiked the Inca trail to Machu Picchu and camped all around Easter Island. Camping for a weekend- well, it should be no big deal. That said, I am still trying to convince myself that hot flashes give you that dewy, glowing look.
We were going off to check out a piece of my boyfriend's past. In his college days, he found this pristine canyon where he built a tepee as a weekend retreat. It was a place, apparently, to take vast quantities of psychotropic drugs and have sex with random women. "After all," he said, "it was the seventies."
Well, of course. That explains everything. However, I was alive in the seventies; I didn't have these kinds of adventures. Maybe because he's so much older than me....
Sex and drugs aside, it was a place he went with his dog to escape the stress of college and the grind of work. He rode his old motorcycle in, dog in his specially built box, walked down the hill, feeling the weight of his life drop off as he approached his retreat. He told me of the hours he would spend in the quiet, sitting on a limestone ledge overlooking the steep walls of the canyon and the creek, listening to the birds, tuning into himself. His love of nature stems from his time there. The man he is today has a lot to do with the time he spent there.
He found out about the canyon originally from an old recluse who built a cabin in the canyon, not actually knowing to whom the land belonged. The recluse cobbled out a simple life for himself there. In the winter the creek turned into a raging river, and the recluse built a cable with a chair attached to it so you could be pulled across the wild water via pulley. The tepee was across the creek from the cabin. A couple of years after the cabin was built, the land was bought by a speculator who planned to develop it. Apparently back in the seventies there were plans to dam the creek, which would have made the tepee and the cabin lakefront property. Those plans fell through. Nevertheless, by the time my boyfriend gave it all up to join the world of job-marriage-children-mortgage, there was already tension in the pristine canyon.
Recently, there had been a huge fire in the area. So, we were going to see what was left of of the halcyon days.
We were camping by a reservoir near the canyon. It was pretty beautiful, and the weather was warm. There were mosquitoes at dawn and dusk, and yellow jackets when food was out, but otherwise, it was great. He set up the tent, and the sleeping pads, and did all the cooking. He built a roaring fire, which shooed away the remaining pesky insects, and after dinner we made S'mores.
S'mores might be one of my favorite things.
We went to sleep pretty early, unlike the twenty-somethings camped near by, who partied late into the night. Our slumber was interrupted by automatic weapons fire, echoing across the lake. My boyfriend was convinced a mass murderer was going around the campground, shooting into every tent. "Don't you think there'd be screaming?" I asked reasonably. "You can't scream if you're dead," he said. Meanwhile, the twenty-somethings partied on, which I pointed out. No mass murderer was going to ruin their weekend. Eventually my boyfriend relaxed, the gunfire stopped, and we went to sleep.
The next day we went off to the canyon.
The terrain was rugged, and quite beautiful. The scars from the recent fire were evident on the steep hillsides as we drove down into the canyon. It was hot and still; our dust and the sound of our truck were the only disturbances in that remote place.
After a few missteps, we found the locked gate, parked, and climbed through. The land was posted now, with huge "No Trespassing" signs all over the place. It was silent. As we walked down the hill we started to see large appliances on the side of the rutted, dirt road. Old stoves, dishwashers, a washing machine, in various stages of rust and decay. A plywood house, with a metal lean-to full of more decrepit appliances. A generator. Car parts. A refrigerator leaning tiredly against a dryer, both missing their doors. A window was open in the house, and a dirty white curtain hung out against the house, silent like everything else. I felt like we were being watched, even though no one was around.
My boyfriend was uncertain. He couldn't tell if he was in the right place or not. "It could be," he said. "But it's all so different." He pointed at the house and said it belonged to the son of the speculator who bought the property.
Thirty years makes a huge difference. Trees grown up, a dirt road put in, and every type of used appliance in the county draped about in some state of decrepitude. We continued down the steep, dusty dirt road. We got to the bottom, and looked around. The creek babbled, but there was no cabin. The dirt road ran alongside the creek, going off into the distance.
"Where's the cabin?" he said. "This must be the wrong place." Then he saw the cable attached to a tree, and underneath it, the remains of a broken, old, wooden chair, covered with weeds and trash.
This was it.
We crossed the creek on a rickety bridge built in the eighties, according to a hand-lettered sign. We looked around the meadow where the cabin had stood- nothing left. What had happened to it? We found a piece of charred wood with some nails sticking out of it- had the cabin burned? Did the speculator bulldoze it? There was no one to answer any of these questions.
We looked at the wall of limestone where my boyfriend used to sit and think, for hours on end. We walked down the road that didn't exist thirty years ago to the place where the tepee had once stood. The dirt track followed the creek around the corner out of sight. In place of the tepee there were a couple of depressing one-room plywood shacks. No one was around.
My boyfriend was really sad.
Here's the thing about your past, and your memories. They belong to you. Eventually, everything changes, including us; it's inevitable. So the only thing I can say is to always enjoy the present moment. And know that no one can ever take the memories of your past away from you. This place, the way it was, would always be a part of him.
We left soon after that, walking up another dirt road that had once been a deer trail. We drove back up through the canyon to the reservoir, where we swam in the lake, and had a picnic. Later that night, after dinner- more S'mores by the fire. No guns interrupted our sleep.
Our relationship survived camping. In fact, we are planning to go again. I know a two-star resort on the Yucatan Peninsula that is just perfect.
