Living the Life

CONTEMPT TO CAMP

Colin Macphail

COLIN MACPHAIL

When you could bake a pizza on the sidewalk in Calistoga, a family’s thoughts turn to camping. Time to head to the coast for some cool air and sea breezes filled with those calming negative ions.

Sarah picked Gualala. The kids like it there. I like it because it sounds like we went somewhere exotic in South America, not just a couple of hours from Calistoga. We go to a private campsite by the Gualala River.

The river was so low and sluggish this year that I asked the kids not to swim in it. It looked like a pool that had had hundreds of occupants daily for weeks and no chlorine additions. The oceanfront time was the best — salty air and messing around with stones, sand, and shells. Gualala is far enough north that the coastline is very sparsely visited.

At the campsite, you tent cheek by jowl and pretend you can’t read the sell-by date on the packet of sausages your neighbor is about to grill. We occupied an upscale shanty town, studiously ignoring each other to create the illusion of being alone in the great outdoors.

For Campbell and Alice, the trip seems to be mostly about burning stuff. Poking a fire and waving burning sticks makes up about 70% of why they are there. As soon as they woke up, they asked, “Can we start a fire.”

I counted 99 campsites, and as it was a busy weekend, the park was packed. Everybody had a campfire going. My throat was raspy for three days. It sounded like I worked in the music business in Nashville and I felt like a smoked mackerel hung up to dry between two giant redwoods. Our immediate neighbors had brought in their wood to save $20. It smelt like they were burning an old sofa.

A nice split log becomes the new currency of the campsite. “I’d sell one of my children into slave labor for four nice dry pieces of oak.”

This was the first trip I’d encountered dexterous raccoons. It’s disconcerting that they are not scared of you at all. I woke up to the sound of munching. After opening four different zips, five different ways, I finally found the combination that opened the tent. There is nothing louder than a zipper on a sleeping campsite at two o’clock in the morning.

With a peg-pounding hammer in hand, I approached the raccoon. The raccoon did not run away. It looked at me and ran the risk analysis, “It’s dark, you can hardly see me, you are tiptoeing in bare feet, and you think you’ll hit me from there with that hammer? I’ll take my chances...”

I finally pestered him enough to go open someone else’s food containers, but he did so grudgingly.

Some people bring an incredible amount of stuff. A nearby family of about a hundred occupied three sites and had a full mobile kitchen set up with a steel frame for pots and pans that included a surprisingly extensive BBQ spice rack. Up against the side of one of their RV’s was a flat-screen the size of a pool table. From dawn to dusk, they sat in their reclining camping chairs watching American football and action movies.

As for the campsite bathrooms, don’t even get me started. If there were one reason not to go camping, trudging over there bleary-eyed at seven in the morning would be it. The stalls are so close together you can hear your neighbor’s thoughts.

Campbell loved my story of his Uncle Tommy’s mischievousness as a youth so much that he persuaded me to let him buy Super Glue. Then he snuck to the bathrooms and glued a quarter in the middle of the floor. He was pleased with himself.

Yes, camping is all about the family memories. One of my special moments was when we pulled up and parked behind some folks heading down to Bowling Ball Beach. They were entering the trees as I pulled up in the truck, and we started piling out. Thirty seconds later, the guy returned to the bike rack on his car. He got a cable out and started laboriously locking up their bikes. I guess our camping attire and appearance had degraded to “suspect” after three days.

My most cherished beach memory is Alice struggling to find the best word to describe how nice it was to lie in a shallow lagoon luxuriating in the splendid isolation and womblike water temperature. “Dad isn’t this… so contemptuous!”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.