Oh The Great Outdoors

I recently said “YES!!!” to a three day camping trip with friends in the wonderful Golden Gate Canyon Park. I lived through dangerous chipmunks, sleeping in a cave, storing enough smoke in my hair to last through three showers, and coming to the sad realization that I looked like a drowned cat. Apart from that, it was worthy of a campfire song. Who wants to come out of the mountains looking like normal people any ways? Quite accidentally we came out looking (and smelling) like wilderness women—our hair matted, our clothes wrinkled, our eyes watery from smoke and our skin painted with dust. In other words, it looked like adventure (and lots and lots of rain) had been bestowed upon us in a particularly rugged way.

We got off to a kind of crooked start. Our two room party tent could not possibly fit on the platform provided. So we pitched it regardless, leading later to the stuffing of all seven of us into one room of the party tent. We then quickly started a fire and deemed ourselves rulers of the outdoor world. I bet the great outdoors was laughing at us. Yes, laughing so hard that it cried and the rain began to pour down. The occasion for the trip was a birthday party, and we hurriedly engulfed our cake and nervously sang happy birthday as the thunder and lightening grew more sinister. Then we jumped up and ran to our cars, laughing in the breathless way you do when your butt has been thoroughly kicked.

What the great outdoors engaged in then was Chinese water torture. With all seven of us stuffed in one room, there was no escaping the drops of water from above than infiltrated our tent. Plop, onto the forehead. Plop, right into the eye. Plop plop plop. Water pooled around the edges and soaked the two people sleeping on the outside. We were, as far as the story is concerned, sleeping in a cave. A cave with party lanterns, but a cave nonetheless.

At this point our teenage sense of invincibility was flickering out. We were exhausted, cold, smoky from the choking tendrils of the fire we needed to regain some warmth. But of course we didn’t go home—every adventure has some good and some bad, and we weren’t about to give up after just living through the bad. We explored. A big rock (perfect for Titanic poses), a hike, frisbee and campfire talk. We played the game Quelf—a game of strange rules for a strangely determined kind of person. My rule was to laugh when anyone else laughed for the duration of the game. Another’s task was to speak like an irritable gnome. Another still was to bark if anything living came within a 15 feet radius. This did not bode well when new campers moved in.
The most surprising thing was that the food was delectable. I’ve never had so many smores in my life. Preparing a hot dog over the fire felt like a sacred ritual, one I gladly ate. An awesome camping meal is a breakfast burrito in a bag—bacon and sausage broken into small bits, cheese (of course!) smushed together with a cracked egg in a ziplock bag. It is then put into a pot of boiling water and plopped on a tortilla. Yes, it is definitely weird that I miss the food part of it, but I think without infinite possibilities we felt more grateful for what we did have. As our stomachs survived on gooey sticky often blackened camping food, our minds survived through picking each others thoughts. It was good to fall into the goofy teen stereotype, and to laugh like crazy when rabid chipmunks jumped on our table and stole mouthfuls of food (even an apple!). But it was also good, in as serious of mindsets as we could muster, to recognize one of our last times together, in a beautiful place, before the world receives us back to reality again.