Okay. I’ll talk.
Eight days.
For eight days I lived in a tiny wilderness tent village, population of twenty. A 10×15 canvas wall tent served us as kitchen, closet, shelter… as everything we could need outside our small, stretched-nylon bedrooms.
For eight days, I escaped the world of bills and bullshit and apartments full of appliances and collected possessions. I brought what I could carry and I rose before 5:00 AM daily so that I could be ready to work at six. We worked ten-hour days in the heat and the mosquitos, the biting flies with sawblades for mouthpieces, who would tear holes in your skin and make you blow up like a balloon for days.
For eight days, I recorded data on forest understory. To put it simply, for eight days, I wrote. I sat in whatever shade could be salvaged and I recorded species codes and cover percentage as it was shouted out to me. There were some plots with over sixty species, each bearing a six-letter epithet abbreviation that was proclaimed as a word. LIGPOR. CARSIC. PSEMON. BROCIL. OSMDEP. Each became a unit, a newly-invented word, to be added nebulously to my vocabulary. Not always finding a plant to cling to, most of them float through my mind still, troubling and distracting like poorly-remembered song lyrics.
For eight days: find plot center. Locate a piece of rebar driven into the ground at a given azimuth, 25 m in either direction. Run tape from Point A to Point C. Place 2 x 0.5 m frame at precise location on tape. Count species. Identify species. Move frame. Pack up, remove tape, hike up steep slopes so densely vegetated it tore at your pants, grabbed at your ankles and arms like some desperate green monsters hungry for your blood. You fell countless times in a day, slamming knees and scraping skin on rock, filling your skin with cuts and thorns to be picked and cared for when there was time.
Ten hours, not counting lunch. For eight days we worked for ten hours in the blistering sun, menacing thunderstorms and impenetrable thickets. After work, it was time to begin dinner. I cooked every night. Village cook for a town of twenty. When you’re out there, your perception of food changes. If it’s there, you eat it. If it’s good, you horde it, saving your unrefrigerated leftovers from dinner for tomorrow’s lunch to avoid that questionable lunch meat at the bottom of the melted-ice kiddy pool of a cooler.
Water is brought in with 5-gallon jugs, as many as we can fit. Water, at times, runs low, requiring runs to town where as many as possible hop into the jeep and drive down forty-five minutes of dirt roads for the chance to sit underneath a drainpipe of hot, sulfurous spring water and jump into the icy, shallow river. The chance to wash your face is treasured. The sight of people and cars, after only a few days, becomes a bit overwhelming.
By day six or so, nobody knows quite what to think. Is it almost over? Is it impossibly long? Should I celebrate? Should I cry? After dinner, someone quietly begins to build the campfire, camp chairs circling around and guitars being lugged out from who-knows-where. Someone plays softly while a girl with a beautiful voice sings gently beside. Eyes glue to the center, wistful, restless, content, reflected fire serving as an unintended window into the soul. Eyes close slowly and guardedly as the smoke switches directions. The sound of our family giggling at a distant tent reminds us of our closeness.
We’re located on the edge of a canyon, a veritable rim with a tumultuous fall beneath, dropping hundred of feet to a meadowy creek bottom. Pines line the cliffsides densely, and clouds and mountains provide ample backdrop. Finding another restless soul, we wander the rim in either direction, finding precarious perches on which to sit and watch. He knocks off a rock the size of the basketball; we hear it tumble for about a minute.
The smoke and the sweat, the odor of bacon and insect repellent; it becomes an unnoticed theme amongst us and conjure in me memories that wash over with a distinct warmness. We smile gently at each other in passing, share what we have without a second consideration. For eight days, we silently agree, we become something different. Something special. Something outside and natural in some deeply-fulfilling sense. For eight days, we live that way, freed in some fundamental and ancestral way.
Shocking. It’s the only way to describe returning to the city. Harshness. Right angles. Clean floors. It’s strange. You isolate yourself for days after, trying to readjust. The night after our return, we reconvened for a small potluck. It wasn’t the same, but the campfire and the community sense helped ease the shock and the civilization.
Around the fire, one turns to me. He is a Marine and we clash. “Hey,” he says to me, “I wanted to tell you…” Hesitation. “You really rocked on this trip. First trip– well, you know– everyone has a rough first trip. But you really rocked this one. And I wanted to say thank you.”
I smile and drop my eyes to the fire. I don’t know what to say, so I ask him if he’d like a beer so I can excuse myself long enough to wipe the welling tears.
Eight days of discomfort and interdependence. Eight days make me wonder: how many more?
