by Mary Jo Draper
We're on Pfeiffer Beach at Big Sur, drinking a bottle of fine, cheap local zinfandel. The water slams against those sharp upended rocks you see in calendar pictures. The clouds turn pink, orange, red, the way they do over oceans. Most of the beautiful California people who paraded along the water's edge and unleashed their dogs to chase the gulls have gone away with the sun.
It's just us, two Midwesterners at peace.
We designed our camping vacation with this kind of moment in mind. In fact, there were several episodes of non-verbal, beauty-drunk ecstasy, the perfect antidote to long days of computers and telephones and demanding bosses.
Perhaps the reason we could enjoy this postcard-perfect moment is that we have made so many camping-vacation mistakes.
Vacation Mistakes Lead to Great Wisdom
We learned to camp when Richard Nixon was president. We slept in mildewed, closet-sized tents and ate cans of beans and once even backpacked through ice pellets in Glacier Park, thinking that would be fun. This year we knew we didn't want to get rained upon or so cold we ended up watching television in the superbudget motel. We wondered ourselves if we'd gotten too soft, too spoiled, old.
When we learned to camp, we lived in houses in college towns with 14 people and 6 dogs; we didn't mind sleeping on an old mattress on the floor, and we didn't know how to cook anything more elaborate than tuna-noodle casserole.
Now that's changed. We sleep on a feather bed and have learned how to cook homemade pasta and chicken enchiladas with tomatillo sauce. Anything less than a Pepperidge Farm cookie isn't good enough.
Camping Changes the Pace of Life
Our friend Mary Anne couldn't understand why anyone would ever want to give up the comforts of home unless a luxury hotel was involved. But for us, there's still a draw to camping.
It's a way to get to the beautiful places we really can't afford, like Big Sur, where even cabins cost as much as
$150 a night. There's something comfortable about having all the tools you need to live in the trunk of your car. It's refreshing to spend a whole week almost completely outdoors, with no roof overhead.
Best of all, camping changes the pace of your life; rather than rushing down to breakfast so you can get an early start on visiting all the tourist attractions in a big city, camping forces you to concentrate on one thing at a time - making coffee, frying a pancake, which takes on a Zen-like quality of being outside of time and absolutely essential. It's a return to the rudiments, an escape from the everyday clutter of our minds.
Planning makes perfect
Alas, perfect camping moments are rare and they call for a very intense kind of planning. For the Big Sur trip, we paid special attention to having the right equipment.
We visited outdoor stores and updated our gear. We tried to sell our old backpacking-style dome tent with the complicated system of poles at a yard sale but had no takers. Maybe the rest of the world has been smarter than us for years. We ordered L.L. Bean's family dome tent, made to sleep six, which really means it's comfortable for two. Who in the world would ever want to sleep with five people, anyway?
We bought thick, bulky air-mattresses to replace our lightweight backpacking pads. We even bought a battery-operated pump to blow them up. We bought space-science-engineered long underwear, pricey Gortex coats, a two-burner propane stove, a lantern for reading at night and a stainless steel pot for cooking pasta.
Finally we designed THE LIST we've always talked about making. It reminded us to pack soap, silverware, a garlic press, matches, a corkscrew, buckwheat pancake mix, raspberry syrup and a new fancy coffeepot before we left home.
We organized all these essentials into two large duffel bags, which we checked at the airport. When we arrived in San Francisco and picked up the rental car, the only other thing we needed was groceries. We stocked up on a week's worth: fresh fruit, chicken, local homemade tortillas, a pound of fresh peeled garlic, bread, local wine, hot peppers, milk, cheese, garlic salsa and cans of black beans.
We'd made reservations in advance for Pfeiffer Big Sur Campground. The guidebook called it "the closest thing to an outdoor hotel" available in a state park. It had white-tile toilet stalls, cleaned and shined twice a day, and lots of hot water for showers. Our campsite was in a grove of redwood trees. We had a fire pit, two picnic tables and quiet neighbors.
About a mile from the campground is an unpaved unmarked road that winds down to the ocean. You wind down it for a mile or so and dead-end into a parking lot with some restrooms and nothing else. If you follow a little trail, you're transported to a humbling spot: eerie fog, huge rocks, mammoth waves, tall mountains - big big big. Some people may go on vacation for other reasons, but we went for this, to be overwhelmed, two writers with nothing to say.
We hiked out the first day and sat against a rock reading until afternoon. The next few days we made short day-trips. We went south to San Simeon, the home of William Randolph Hearst, a fascinating monument to what a quirky man could do with millions of dollars. We went north to Monterey to see the aquarium and Cannery Row, and drove back along 17-Mile Drive with its rugged shoreline and views of the Pebble Beach Golf Course.
Surveying the pile of new equipment we'd assembled in our dining room before the trip, Mary Anne made some under-the-breath comment about yuppie camping. So what? We finally got camping right. We read six books apiece and ate fine meals like flour tortillas with black beans, chicken, feta cheese and garlic salsa. We slept fairly well, didn't get bored and after we got home, at least we had something to show for our credit card bill.
Nirvana
It was our final day at the beach that approached camping nirvana. We made a plan. We got up early, had breakfast and coffee and packed a lunch. By 10 in the morning, we were on the deserted beach. We found the most remote and comfortable spot, put down our blanket, and laid out our books, our apples and binoculars. We watched a few people arrive, shivering and holding hands. More people came and took off more clothing and played in the sun and left. At sunset we were almost alone on the beach. We opened the wine as the sky began to glow rosy.
(This story appeared in the Kansas City Star.)