It’s late autumn in the north country. The leaves are off the trees and the tourists they attract have gone home. The woods are quiet; songbirds have headed south, geese and ducks are passing through as they do the same. Nights are cold, mornings are frosty and afternoons gloriously warm with the heat inversions of Indian Summer.
For me, these signs trigger a response so basic it could almost be called instinctual. It’s time to go camping. Not summer camp, that’s something altogether different. I mean camping — sleeping on the ground in tents, or if it’s fair, stretching out under the stars, cooking over a wood fire and not necessarily doing anything.
I’ve hiked out of the woods to a pay phone beside the road today to call you. Back in camp, two of my old friends aren’t doing much of anything. We’re camped along a tributary of the St. Lawrence River, north of the Adirondacks, along the New York-Quebec border.
It’s raining this morning, so things in camp are even more desultory than usual. Coffee is the only certainty. We’ve located a spring running with cool, clean water and we fix pot after pot of camp coffee. If you’ve never made it, here’s how: fill a pot with water and throw a few handfuls of coffee onto its surface. Set it on the fire to boil. Be careful as you do this, because burning wood will crumble and shift. Keep the pot on the fire until it’s just about to boil over, then pull it off. Sprinkling a handful of cold water on it will cause the grounds to sink and you can pour the coffee off.
That method works fine for us, although I’m sure you could probably find a fancy camping coffee pot for sixty or seventy dollars. Our gear is old and patched and much of it is not specifically for camping. I don’t think any of us has a piece of polar fleece or a shirt that wicks moisture away from our skin. When our clothes get wet, we hang them by the fire to dry. Right now, nothing’s drying, so we just stay wet. Our camp looks more like a hobo jungle than a photo from an REI catalog.
Yesterday was warm and sunny and we were more active. My companions fished the fast-moving water and I carried a canoe upstream, above the beaver dam. The stream bank was thick with garter snakes, taking their last sun of the year. I kicked up three young partridge from their cover. A hornet’s nest hung from a willow over the stream and cedar, spruce and hemlock lined the bank. Waving sunlight reflected off the water and onto their boughs. I spotted a raccoon curled up in the bare branches of a hardwood, sleeping in the afternoon sun. At each successive bend in the stream, I would startle a member of a family of great blue herons and they would fly on before me.
This is only a partial summary. I can find more to write about in one day in the woods than I can in a week back home, plugged into the newspapers and telephone and world wide web.
There is no news here. There are no politics. By the fire last night one of my companions said, “Why should I waste time thinking about the president’s penis? He never thinks about mine.” Here, indeed, all men are equal.
Camping forces you to think about the basics, food and shelter. And the profound; at night we watch a waxing moon sinking through the trees. We listen to the nearby sound of moving water and a train’s whistle far away.
Not Necessarily Doing Anything
It’s late autumn in the north country. The leaves are off the trees and the tourists they attract have gone home. The woods are quiet; songbirds have headed south, geese and ducks are passing through as they do the same. Nights are cold, mornings are frosty and afternoons gloriously warm with the heat inversions of Indian Summer.
For me, these signs trigger a response so basic it could almost be called instinctual. It’s time to go camping. Not summer camp, that’s something altogether different. I mean camping — sleeping on the ground in tents, or if it’s fair, stretching out under the stars, cooking over a wood fire and not necessarily doing anything.
I’ve hiked out of the woods to a pay phone beside the road today to call you. Back in camp, two of my old friends aren’t doing much of anything. We’re camped along a tributary of the St. Lawrence River, north of the Adirondacks, along the New York-Quebec border.
It’s raining this morning, so things in camp are even more desultory than usual. Coffee is the only certainty. We’ve located a spring running with cool, clean water and we fix pot after pot of camp coffee. If you’ve never made it, here’s how: fill a pot with water and throw a few handfuls of coffee onto its surface. Set it on the fire to boil. Be careful as you do this, because burning wood will crumble and shift. Keep the pot on the fire until it’s just about to boil over, then pull it off. Sprinkling a handful of cold water on it will cause the grounds to sink and you can pour the coffee off.
That method works fine for us, although I’m sure you could probably find a fancy camping coffee pot for sixty or seventy dollars. Our gear is old and patched and much of it is not specifically for camping. I don’t think any of us has a piece of polar fleece or a shirt that wicks moisture away from our skin. When our clothes get wet, we hang them by the fire to dry. Right now, nothing’s drying, so we just stay wet. Our camp looks more like a hobo jungle than a photo from an REI catalog.
Yesterday was warm and sunny and we were more active. My companions fished the fast-moving water and I carried a canoe upstream, above the beaver dam. The stream bank was thick with garter snakes, taking their last sun of the year. I kicked up three young partridge from their cover. A hornet’s nest hung from a willow over the stream and cedar, spruce and hemlock lined the bank. Waving sunlight reflected off the water and onto their boughs. I spotted a raccoon curled up in the bare branches of a hardwood, sleeping in the afternoon sun. At each successive bend in the stream, I would startle a member of a family of great blue herons and they would fly on before me.
This is only a partial summary. I can find more to write about in one day in the woods than I can in a week back home, plugged into the newspapers and telephone and world wide web.
There is no news here. There are no politics. By the fire last night one of my companions said, “Why should I waste time thinking about the president’s penis? He never thinks about mine.” Here, indeed, all men are equal.
Camping forces you to think about the basics, food and shelter. And the profound; at night we watch a waxing moon sinking through the trees. We listen to the nearby sound of moving water and a train’s whistle far away.