28 June 2007
When my mother came out to California from Chicago in 1956, there were two things that impressed her about her new home. First, there was no snow to contend with. With four children who had always wanted to go out and play in the snow and who required kitting out in snowsuits, hats, mittens, shoes and galoshes, and who stayed out for a total of twenty minutes before coming back in and requiring that the above kitting-out be disassembled, this was a merciful release. And second, California was not flat.
California had mountains and trees and wilderness that Illinois did not have. It had waterfalls and national parks and mountain lakes and trails that led up steep slopes to one beautiful view after another. My mother fell in love with the California wilderness. And discovered family camping.
I was agnostic about camping when my mother first enthused about it. She had decided to buy a large eight foot by ten foot tent which would be our passport to The Wilderness. Or at least to a national park campsite with restrooms, showers and ranger talks complete with slideshows most nights.
So she packed us up in the Ford Galaxy station wagon with the tent, a Coleman stove and an icebox, and we embarked on yearly vacations to The Wilderness.
The downside of my mother’s passion for all things Outdoors, became immediately apparent. For a start, it seemed to involve getting up at an absurdly early hour (sometimes even eight o’clock!) to have a breakfast of bacon and eggs cooked on the camp stove. If that weren’t enough of a shock to the system, tents, as I discovered, have no heating. So as soon as I got out of the sleeping bag, the icy chill of the morning hit me. And it did not get better on leaving the tent.
Now this was not my idea of a vacation, but what was even less my idea of a vacation was spending the day hiking! I am a short person! I have short legs! Short legs, as anyone with them will tell you, are designed for short walks.
Inexplicably, however, my mother always wanted to know what the top of waterfalls looked like, which invariably involved trekking in an upwards direction. What was the point of finding out what the top of waterfalls looked like? They pretty much looked look like the bottom of waterfalls, i.e. a lot of water tumbling down and making a hell of a spray that drenched your clothes and hair. However this was my mother’s idea of pure pleasure and her spirit was not to be dampened by the whining of her younger daughter.
But, let me make my case against The Wilderness. For a start, my brother Steve always insisted on bringing a snake bite kit, which consisted of a tourniquet, two suckers and a thing that looked like a surgeon’s scalpel. The idea was that if you got bitten by a rattlesnake (you can see my point already, can’t you?) you should use the tourniquet to stop the venom from spreading to the heart, cut into the puncture wounds with the scalpel to help them bleed, and then suck out the venom with the suckers. Now, I really did not want to be anywhere where anyone needed a snake bite kit.
And then there were the bears. Every night at the ranger talks, which my mother insisted on attending regularly, the ranger would show slides of the local black bears and give us useful information about them. Did you know that you must never try to escape a rampaging black bear by running uphill? That’s because they have very powerful hind legs and can outrun you no problem. However, if you run downhill, they have difficulty chasing you because their front legs are thin and weedy. There was no advice about what to do if a bear is chasing you on flat ground. Now, I really did not want to be anywhere that I needed to know what direction to run if I was being chased by a bear. And don’t even get me started on tarantulas!
Everyone else in my family came to love The Wilderness. Keith would later put a few things in a backpack and climb Mount Whitney to reduce stress. (All it would reduce in me would be the use of my legs the next day.) Steve would disappear into the wilds of Big Sur on the California coast. And my sister Nancy would even go to a national park for her honeymoon! In winter! My mother said that it was only when camping that she could sleep soundly. Lucky her.
I never had a decent night’s sleep camping. First of all you’re sleeping on the ground. Why would anyone sleep on the ground when there is a bed back home which does not have rocks that stick into your back? My family thought that air mattresses were for wusses. Secondly, you just don’t know what’s out there and the only thing separating you from IT is a sheet of canvas.
One night when we were camping in Lassen National Park, I was lying awake next to my sister Nancy as the family slept. Soundly. And I heard noises. Not just, “I’m Lying Awake Being Paranoid” noises, but serious noises that really should not be there! It sounded to me like…bears.
“Nancy!” I whispered frantically, “I think there are bears out there!”
“That’s okay,” she said, “Bears won’t hurt you.”
Well I could have launched into asking why it is that we have to remember to run downhill from bears if they won’t hurt you. But I knew she would be unimpressed. Because my sister was asleep.
Nancy and I were as different as you could imagine. She was red-headed, blue eyed and fair, I was brown-haired, green eyed and could go out in the sun without subsequently looking like I had leprosy. She was unconventional, I spent my life trying to conform. She was neat, I was a slob. She could sleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, and I liked to talk. So she learned how to carry on a conversation in her sleep, which she was capable of doing for more than an hour and not remember a thing she said the next day.
While the family slept soundly, I had to listen to the heavy footsteps (pawsteps?), unearthly breathing and violent crashing that turned out to be the bears throwing the coolbox onto the ground until it broke open like a stubborn coconut and gave up the sweet fruit inside: milk, bacon, eggs, lunchmeat.
So why, a few years later, I begged my brother Keith and my sister to take me with them on a three day, twenty-nine mile hike up the Ridge Trail in Olympia National Park is, like the Holy Trinity and the limitlessness of The Universe, one of the great mysteries of life.
I have always been completely useless at any sport I was ever compelled to take part it. (Compulsion was usually the only thing that worked.) I was the kid who was the last to get picked for teams, and over which the two team captains would argue. Both of them always thought that having to take me should mean they got extra points. I was the kid who stood on the volleyball court, hands held rigidly in the air and hoping the ball wouldn’t come and hit me on the head causing brain damage. I was the kid who could bowl gutter ball after gutter ball achieving a perfect score of zero at the end of the game. (Although I refuse to recognise bowling as a sport. I refuse to recognise any sport that can be played by fat people drinking beer. You ever seen Pete Sampras downing a beer between sets at Wimbledon? I rest my case.)So I guess you could say I wasn’t the athletic type.
I don’t know whether it was because attachment to nature and all things natural was part of the unwritten Hippie Code (which excepted the ingestion of chemicals knocked up in garage labs that involved your brain in a wholly unnatural perception of the world for several hours), or because I wanted my brother to stop thinking I was a complete wuss (which was a lost cause because I actually…was).
The first six miles of the Ridge Trail were switchbacks up to the first crest. Six Miles! Nothing but up! And me with my short legs! By then end of that first day we finally got to a bit where we got to go in a downward direction (which meant we had to go in an upward one the next day)and made camp. The camping fuel canister turned out to be empty so, in the absence of decent firewood, we had to mix our freeze dried stew and powdered potatoes with stream water and eat it cold. Ice cold. Are we having fun yet?
We rolled out our sleeping bags and my brother proceeded to hang our backpacks up in a nearby tree. This, my brother explained, was because, if the bears smelled your food and decided to come after it, they wouldn’t be able to get at it. I suddenly remembered that I hate The Wilderness. I do not want to be anywhere that requires my backpack to be hung in a tree on account of bears. And here we were, in a small valley where the only way out was uphill.
My sister, well aware of my fear, came prepared (having been a Girl Scout) and gave me a Sleep-Eze. These were pills that you could then buy over the counter, which were supposed to help you to sleep. I don’t know what was in them. Barbiturates, probably, I don’t know. I took one. I took two.
My sister suggested she help me take my mind off the bears by telling me a story till the pills took effect. She had just seen the musical “Man of LaMancha” and started to relate the entire plot to me, including clips from most of the songs and long tracts of dialogue she had committed to memory.
I felt sleepy after about twenty minutes, but my sister was well into the story now and I decided to let her finish. It went on. And on. And on. And on. It went on so long that the pills started to wear off. And then I realised. She was telling it in her sleep!
After a night of no sleep, we made ice-cold oatmeal, broke camp, got rained on and had to complete the rest of the Ridge Trail in one day instead of two, arriving back soaked to the skin. I was never tempted to enter The Wilderness again.
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When my mother came out to California from Chicago in 1956, there were two things that impressed her about her new home. First, there was no snow to contend with. With four children who had always wanted to go out and play in the snow and who required kitting out in snowsuits, hats, mittens, shoes and galoshes, and who stayed out for a total of twenty minutes before coming back in and requiring that the above kitting-out be disassembled, this was a merciful release. And second, California was not flat.
California had mountains and trees and wilderness that Illinois did not have. It had waterfalls and national parks and mountain lakes and trails that led up steep slopes to one beautiful view after another. My mother fell in love with the California wilderness. And discovered family camping.
I was agnostic about camping when my mother first enthused about it. She had decided to buy a large eight foot by ten foot tent which would be our passport to The Wilderness. Or at least to a national park campsite with restrooms, showers and ranger talks complete with slideshows most nights.
So she packed us up in the Ford Galaxy station wagon with the tent, a Coleman stove and an icebox, and we embarked on yearly vacations to The Wilderness.
The downside of my mother’s passion for all things Outdoors, became immediately apparent. For a start, it seemed to involve getting up at an absurdly early hour (sometimes even eight o’clock!) to have a breakfast of bacon and eggs cooked on the camp stove. If that weren’t enough of a shock to the system, tents, as I discovered, have no heating. So as soon as I got out of the sleeping bag, the icy chill of the morning hit me. And it did not get better on leaving the tent.
Now this was not my idea of a vacation, but what was even less my idea of a vacation was spending the day hiking! I am a short person! I have short legs! Short legs, as anyone with them will tell you, are designed for short walks.
Inexplicably, however, my mother always wanted to know what the top of waterfalls looked like, which invariably involved trekking in an upwards direction. What was the point of finding out what the top of waterfalls looked like? They pretty much looked look like the bottom of waterfalls, i.e. a lot of water tumbling down and making a hell of a spray that drenched your clothes and hair. However this was my mother’s idea of pure pleasure and her spirit was not to be dampened by the whining of her younger daughter.
But, let me make my case against The Wilderness. For a start, my brother Steve always insisted on bringing a snake bite kit, which consisted of a tourniquet, two suckers and a thing that looked like a surgeon’s scalpel. The idea was that if you got bitten by a rattlesnake (you can see my point already, can’t you?) you should use the tourniquet to stop the venom from spreading to the heart, cut into the puncture wounds with the scalpel to help them bleed, and then suck out the venom with the suckers. Now, I really did not want to be anywhere where anyone needed a snake bite kit.
And then there were the bears. Every night at the ranger talks, which my mother insisted on attending regularly, the ranger would show slides of the local black bears and give us useful information about them. Did you know that you must never try to escape a rampaging black bear by running uphill? That’s because they have very powerful hind legs and can outrun you no problem. However, if you run downhill, they have difficulty chasing you because their front legs are thin and weedy. There was no advice about what to do if a bear is chasing you on flat ground. Now, I really did not want to be anywhere that I needed to know what direction to run if I was being chased by a bear. And don’t even get me started on tarantulas!
Everyone else in my family came to love The Wilderness. Keith would later put a few things in a backpack and climb Mount Whitney to reduce stress. (All it would reduce in me would be the use of my legs the next day.) Steve would disappear into the wilds of Big Sur on the California coast. And my sister Nancy would even go to a national park for her honeymoon! In winter! My mother said that it was only when camping that she could sleep soundly. Lucky her.
I never had a decent night’s sleep camping. First of all you’re sleeping on the ground. Why would anyone sleep on the ground when there is a bed back home which does not have rocks that stick into your back? My family thought that air mattresses were for wusses. Secondly, you just don’t know what’s out there and the only thing separating you from IT is a sheet of canvas.
One night when we were camping in Lassen National Park, I was lying awake next to my sister Nancy as the family slept. Soundly. And I heard noises. Not just, “I’m Lying Awake Being Paranoid” noises, but serious noises that really should not be there! It sounded to me like…bears.
“Nancy!” I whispered frantically, “I think there are bears out there!”
“That’s okay,” she said, “Bears won’t hurt you.”
Well I could have launched into asking why it is that we have to remember to run downhill from bears if they won’t hurt you. But I knew she would be unimpressed. Because my sister was asleep.
Nancy and I were as different as you could imagine. She was red-headed, blue eyed and fair, I was brown-haired, green eyed and could go out in the sun without subsequently looking like I had leprosy. She was unconventional, I spent my life trying to conform. She was neat, I was a slob. She could sleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, and I liked to talk. So she learned how to carry on a conversation in her sleep, which she was capable of doing for more than an hour and not remember a thing she said the next day.
While the family slept soundly, I had to listen to the heavy footsteps (pawsteps?), unearthly breathing and violent crashing that turned out to be the bears throwing the coolbox onto the ground until it broke open like a stubborn coconut and gave up the sweet fruit inside: milk, bacon, eggs, lunchmeat.
So why, a few years later, I begged my brother Keith and my sister to take me with them on a three day, twenty-nine mile hike up the Ridge Trail in Olympia National Park is, like the Holy Trinity and the limitlessness of The Universe, one of the great mysteries of life.
I have always been completely useless at any sport I was ever compelled to take part it. (Compulsion was usually the only thing that worked.) I was the kid who was the last to get picked for teams, and over which the two team captains would argue. Both of them always thought that having to take me should mean they got extra points. I was the kid who stood on the volleyball court, hands held rigidly in the air and hoping the ball wouldn’t come and hit me on the head causing brain damage. I was the kid who could bowl gutter ball after gutter ball achieving a perfect score of zero at the end of the game. (Although I refuse to recognise bowling as a sport. I refuse to recognise any sport that can be played by fat people drinking beer. You ever seen Pete Sampras downing a beer between sets at Wimbledon? I rest my case.)So I guess you could say I wasn’t the athletic type.
I don’t know whether it was because attachment to nature and all things natural was part of the unwritten Hippie Code (which excepted the ingestion of chemicals knocked up in garage labs that involved your brain in a wholly unnatural perception of the world for several hours), or because I wanted my brother to stop thinking I was a complete wuss (which was a lost cause because I actually…was).
The first six miles of the Ridge Trail were switchbacks up to the first crest. Six Miles! Nothing but up! And me with my short legs! By then end of that first day we finally got to a bit where we got to go in a downward direction (which meant we had to go in an upward one the next day)and made camp. The camping fuel canister turned out to be empty so, in the absence of decent firewood, we had to mix our freeze dried stew and powdered potatoes with stream water and eat it cold. Ice cold. Are we having fun yet?
We rolled out our sleeping bags and my brother proceeded to hang our backpacks up in a nearby tree. This, my brother explained, was because, if the bears smelled your food and decided to come after it, they wouldn’t be able to get at it. I suddenly remembered that I hate The Wilderness. I do not want to be anywhere that requires my backpack to be hung in a tree on account of bears. And here we were, in a small valley where the only way out was uphill.
My sister, well aware of my fear, came prepared (having been a Girl Scout) and gave me a Sleep-Eze. These were pills that you could then buy over the counter, which were supposed to help you to sleep. I don’t know what was in them. Barbiturates, probably, I don’t know. I took one. I took two.
My sister suggested she help me take my mind off the bears by telling me a story till the pills took effect. She had just seen the musical “Man of LaMancha” and started to relate the entire plot to me, including clips from most of the songs and long tracts of dialogue she had committed to memory.
I felt sleepy after about twenty minutes, but my sister was well into the story now and I decided to let her finish. It went on. And on. And on. And on. It went on so long that the pills started to wear off. And then I realised. She was telling it in her sleep!
After a night of no sleep, we made ice-cold oatmeal, broke camp, got rained on and had to complete the rest of the Ridge Trail in one day instead of two, arriving back soaked to the skin. I was never tempted to enter The Wilderness again.
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