California Camping

Until I married Don Starnes, I had not done much camping. My parents preferred our family cabin on a northern Minnesota lake. I had done some car camping in California, but nothing on the scale of what Don liked to do. He was intent on not letting his family live a ‘second hand life,’ and programmed the summers during which Jesse, his son, was with us with serious camping adventures. It wasn’t about seeing the country. We returned to the same two or three campsites again and again. It was about setting up an outdoor home and living outside of rectangles, under the sun, the moon and the stars as often as possible.

China Camp

At first we used the walk-in campground at China Camp, not far from our house, as our base. We would set up tents, hammock, bring plenty of food and enjoy the outdoor showers. This camp was in a laurel forest, with its lovely, utterly benign canopies high above. Each of the sites had a picnic table and a food locker (no real security from raccoons, however) with an iron fire ring in which to make fires. Over the years we hosted huge picnics here, particularly at Thanksgiving, fire-cooking, spit-roasting and grilling all manner of foods and often making paella on the ground.

China Camp was close enough so that Peter, my nephew, and I could come home from work, get on our bikes and ride out to camp. I especially loved riding into town at six in the morning, watching deer and jack rabbits jump ahead of me in the early morning light on my way in to work.

One day in July when we were deeply involved in Alexander Dumas’ Three Musketeer series, I wrote this: “Don and Jesse are playing chess, having drawn a board on the manila envelope which holds the pages from The Man in the Iron Mask. Jesse, playing black, is a French king and Don, playing white, is Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh. This morning, during our reading, the old Duchesse de Chevreuse discussed the fate of M. Fouquet in a carriage with M. Colbert, using chess play terms. It is easy to see that chess was once very much alive. Jesse names his pieces D’Artagnan, Aramis, Porthos and Athos. Don has Buckingham. “If I was Buckingham, I’d have a really cool palace,” he says.

“The important thing is where we are playing chess, outdoors at China Camp. It’s warm, but rather breezy, so I stay in the sun. My hair is wet. I am trying to dry it. The sun has come to the hammock, where I am lazily writing. I face the hillside which climbs above the dry creekbed, away from our camp. A wild turkey meanders down the slope, scratching in the dry laurel leaves. I see someone above on the hillside, transporting his light tent on his shoulders, the yellow silk billowing in the wind. The laurels are green and whispering to each other, their thin trunks tall and graceful, the top branches swaying dangerously on thin stalks. The most delicious light filters down into the campsite at all times of the day.”

When we had gotten our camping chops down, Don took it all up a notch and we began backpacking out to Angel Island, a mountain island in San Francisco Bay. It required getting up early the first day reservations were allowed at the beginning of the year! It also required taking the ferry or hiring a boat to get us and our packs out to the island. We usually took camping spots on the east side of the island, taking the switchback trails cut into the slopes. Our packs held the tents, sleeping bags, dishes and camping stoves we needed (no open fires were allowed), but also lots of food! They were heavy. “No retreat, no surrender,” said Don.

Having made the effort, however, the campsites were amazing. I can’t help quote from notes from that same July: “After breakfast I read Don and Jesse a bit from Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which brought on a spate of haiku. I doubt these will be the last. This is such an incredibly lovely place and I begged that we just stay here today, as we only have one full day to watch the sun rise and set, and then the huge, almost full moon as it rises. The view of the bay is incomparable. The sun is quite hot in the morning at breakfast, but we retreat to the pines and drink our tea and read a bit more of The Man in the Iron Mask.

Angel Island

“By the time we have a late lunch, the shade of the pines covers the picnic table, set on the hillside beside an exquisite dead tree, its twisted branches perfect for hanging our towels and our water. At lunch Jesse crushes mint in the water and Don cuts up basil to eat with cheese and tomato. We soak our bread in olive oil and have a piece of grilled eel, which Jesse picked out. ‘This is what life is really all about,’ says Don.

“In the evening the shadows are long, and the views of the sky and water reflecting each other, turning opalescent, again take our breath away. Later I come down from the road, where there is a water faucet, watching Jesse and Don bathed in moonlight at the table. The string of jeweled lights on the far side of the bay glitters. We read in the moonlight beside Jesse’s tent which is pitched beside the dead tree. We read with the aid of a flashlight, but we can walk about without one. ”

Would anyone believe these ecstatic days if I put them in fiction? I did put quite a lot of our camping adventures in this book: Living in the Flatlands.