I’m going to try this again. I’m a day late, but I’ve got my A blog ready to go. I know I haven’t finished this series in a number of years, but maybe this year will be different. I need to start writing again. I need to commit to something besides work. So. Here we go. I plan to make this blog about my recent adventures in Mexico: how we ended up there, what we discovered, how it turned out. I may also sprinkle in a few tidbits about vanlife and how that is all unfolding: the challenges, the benefits, the weird and unexpected things that pop up.
Category: camping
G is for Going
Mom is moving next week. For the past six years, she’s lived the good life at a top-of-the-line Memory Care facility where she has watched friends come and go, die and “move around the corner” into more acute care as their dementia worsens. She’s maintained a sort of equilibrium since arriving, definitely on the slow train to full on incapacity, and that’s why she has to move. She’s out of money. She spent every last dime over the past six years on care so good, so top of the line, she has thrived. For someone with Alzheimer’s she’s pretty sharp, but not sharp enough. So, she and her dog Charlie are moving to a Medicaid facility in Oregon, nearer my brother. Thank god she can take the dog. Her life centers around that dog.
This afternoon I sprung her for an hour to show her my new RV—I showed her around, sat her down, and fired up the generator right there in the Memory Care parking lot so I could make her a cup of mint tea with sugar and milk. We sat and chatted. She admired the seats. I tried to keep the conversation on things she remembered, mainly the past, the grandkids, my brother and me. Mom talked often about getting an RV and traveling around the US in the years before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but she never quite got going.
While I was growing up, my parents were always going. We moved around a lot when I was a teenager. I went to four high schools. So, when I moved to Bellingham to attend college, I planted myself. I completed my four years and immediately signed up for graduate school. Then, I met a woman who wanted to have children, so we did. I stayed through divorce, and bought myself a house, and remarried and divorced again. Meanwhile, kids graduated and went to college. Got married. Moved away. I went to college. Again. Graduated. Got an office. And then, spent two years working alone in my house.
That working alone for two years did some stuff to us all, didn’t it? I noticed my house in ways I hadn’t before. Noticed its slow decay, realized all it would cost me, money/time/effort to keep it limping along into my dotage. Decided I wasn’t up for that much commitment. To a house. Plus, I looked on Zillow. It was a good time to sell.
The money certainly was nice, but I also realized that my house had served its purpose—it had held me for 23 years, through many starts and stops and ups and downs. Many lives lived in those four walls, and that’s just me. I did a lot of growing up while I lived in that house—the bulk of my adulthood, 23 of my 58 years. I loved a lot of things about my house. And many things about it truly annoyed me. It was not the place in which I wished to grow old. That place is somewhere else. I don’t know where yet. I’m on an adventure.
I’m going. Going to figure it out.
I is for Imagination
I often say that I write non-fiction essays and memoir because I lack imagination. I’ve never been good at making stuff up, and whenever I sit down thinking I’m going to write a short story or embark on writing a novel, I get a few pages in and stop, overwhelmed by the apparently limitless options.
Taylor, my youngest daughter (she’s nearly 20 now), loved to watch SpongeBob SquarePants when she was little. She loved SpongeBob so much that we had a SpongeBob bathroom (The Little Woman painted it SpongeBob blue and yellow with hand drawn and painted replicas of Patrick and SpongeBob on the walls) complete with a SpongeBob shower curtain and SpongeBob toilet seat cover. Taylor’s bedroom was also SpongeBob yellow, and she had SpongeBob posters, blankets, pillows, sheets, Legos . . .
Of all the characters populating childhood during those years, I found SpongeBob endearing and definitely the least objectionable. He was happy, undaunted by failure, cheerful, a good friend, a hard worker, compassionate. But most of all I loved SpongeBob because he had Imagination.
That Taylor loved SpongeBob made sense, because she too had a great Imagination. I could give that kid two sticks and a small rock and she could entertain herself for hours, making up stories, creating characters, playing alone in her own world.
When Taylor was eight, the two of us went on a three-week camping adventure across Washington and Oregon. We set off without much of an agenda, except that we were going to see Grandpa in Bend, OR. Other than that, we were footloose. We started our trip by meeting some friends and floating the Yakima River. I worried a bit that T would be bored, hanging out with three adults and our friends’ high school-aged son, but she proved to be an excellent traveling companion.
As I set up camp, pitching the tent and getting the camp stove ready for dinner, she played in the hammock, creating entire worlds from just leaves and twigs. What amazed me the most, I think, is that on her own T wasn’t much of a reader. She loved for me to read to her, but she wasn’t one to sit in camp (as I would have done as a child) with her nose in a book. Instead she was engaged, making up her own stories. I so admired that quality.
We spent a lot of time at the beach on that trip, and while I went to the beach to read, T went to the beach to play, to create. Every foray was an adventure for her, a chance to create new worlds, to see everything in a new light, with new possibilities. I stopped taking my books with me because I ended up pulled into her world each time, building sand castles, searching for agates, creating new worlds.
When we had fires on the beach at night, they weren’t just for roasting marshmallows or for keeping warm.
Each fire presented an opportunity to create, even fleetingly, something new—Taylor delighted in burning sticks and then running to the water to put them out, creating steam. Or, drawing in the sky with the red ember end, writing words for me to guess.
One of our stops, a little town in Northeast Oregon called Shaniko, had been a ghost town and was now just a town stuck in time for tourists to wander through. I didn’t find it particularly interesting, but I made a point of walking around with her, reading some of the historic descriptions. I think we got ice cream cones that melted rapidly in the eastern Oregon summer sunshine. I didn’t think it would hold much interest for T, but she still talks about “that town that was just full of old people.” Something there captured her imagination.
Our last stop on our adventure was Manzanita. We pitched the tent at the campground on the beach and walked the shoreline into town to have some dinner. We’d heard about the great pizza place, and found it jammed. We finally got a table, one that could easily seat more, and so when I saw two women come in who wanted to sit down, I invited them to join us.
Taylor started telling these women about our trip. She didn’t leave out a single detail. And when I thought she might run out of material, she started embellishing, sprinkling in details about my personal life, adding a few false statements, entertaining the women who joined us. No one else could get a word in. On our walk back to the campground, I thought I’d take the opportunity to discuss the difference between talking about our adventures and sharing personal and/or made up details.
She looked at me and said, “It’s just imagination, Mom.”
That’s it–just imagination. No need to be overwhelmed or caught up in the details. Find some kelp to turn into palm trees. Make the sticks talk to the leaves. Just put my stick in the fire and write in the sky.
On the Road to AROHO Day 3: Sandstorms, Guns, and Pretty Rocks. Oh My!
Well Dear Reader, I made it a little over two days without a shower, but now I am happily ensconced in a faux campground replete with showers, a pool, laundry facilities, and Wi-Fi. I will not avail myself of the pool (too many children and we all know what that means), but I’ve taken a shower and it felt so very good. Now that I’m all shaved, showered, and FDS’d, I’m sitting in the A/C and waiting for my clothes to get clean. It didn’t take long for me to start sweating again after my shower, but the bonus is that I can take another one. And another one if I want. I know I’ll take one more before I leave, for sure.
Yesterday, after I left the Starbucks in Twin Falls where I last posted, I made my way south, through Salt Lake City and Provo to camp at Utah Lake. The drive through SLC proved harrowing as there were 50 mph winds and a dust storm (and I hit it during rush hour) and with it fairly low visibility. I was very happy to not have taken the top off the Jeep. I have to say, Utah drivers are insane. Didn’t seem to matter that dust was flying and cars were being blown about on the interstate—they still zoomed along at 85 mph.
I had to get off the freeway for a while, just to take a break and regroup. It’s a little unnerving when the hood of the Jeep gets hit by a gust hard enough for it to strain against the rubber straps that hold it down.
I’d had a text conversation with my brother, who just happens to be in Denver this week. He had read my blog about staying in scary Idaho and recommended I sleep with a gun rather than with a hunting knife. I ran that foreign thought around in my head for a bit. I’m not much for guns, but still, I worried for my safety, and there was Cabella’s, so what the hell. I pulled off to have a look.
For starters, even the smallest guns run $350, far more than I wanted to spend (yet, I asked myself, what is my life worth?) I looked around furtively, not really wanting to engage with a salesperson, and decided that since I’d not handled a gun, let alone pulled a trigger, since I was a kid (seriously, I had a rifle when I was 12 but that’s another blog) I’d probably be better off just staying at less remote campsites.
So here I am in Moab, practically in suburbia, in a family campground full of children, but unarmed and feeling safer.
I spent the day driving to Arches National Park—I took the top off the Jeep since the temperature seemed to be hovering around 80, and cranked the stereo, happy to be on the road. Happy to be headed to AROHO.
On the Road to AROHO: Feel the Fear (and the Heat) and Go Camping Anyway
Good late morning from Twin Falls, Idaho, Dear Readers. I’m about a third of the way to my destination, Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, NM.
Let me just start by saying that if you’re in menopause and experiencing random and frequent hot flashes, camping in the desert southwest might not be the best way to travel the 1700 miles between Bellingham, WA and Abiquiu, NM. Too bad I didn’t consider this issue before I was pitching my tent in 102 degrees last night.
I’ve been planning this trip for several weeks, but somehow camping in the heat didn’t really cross my mind. Perhaps because I’m a PNW “blue-tarp” camper. Whenever I think about camping, all that comes to mind is rain and cold, wet sleeping bags and damp fires that never quite get started.
Nonetheless, I had a somewhat satisfying camp experience last night—I managed to get some sleep, at least until some Muslims pulled in around 1 a.m. and started cooking goat. I kid you not. I listened to these two guys speak in a language I did not recognize before some English speaker started talking to them. As I lay there not sleeping and cursing their bad campground manners, I learned a lot about middle eastern cooking and spices, the Muslim response to 9/11 (at least these Muslim’s responses), and why these two young men were going to college in Idaho.
Ironically, the fact that two middle easterners were camping in the remote hills outside of Boise actually made me feel better about my own choice to camp alone. If they weren’t afraid, I wouldn’t be either (though I did sleep with my hunting knife within reach). I have to say, there was so much unsolicited consternation about my decision to drive to New Mexico that my confidence started wavering soon before I left, and as I looked for a suitable camping spot last night, I had to beat back my fear.
I thought a lot about Cheryl Strayed’s adventures in her memoir Wild—what she had to say about Fear came rushing back to me as I set up my camp and perused my surroundings: “ I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid.”
So, fear conquered, at least last night. I woke up partially refreshed, made myself a thermos of coffee and hit the road. I stopped at a payphone to check in with my sweetie since there was no cell service, and steered the Jeep toward Salt Lake City.
This morning I thought I might get a hotel for the night, but as of this writing, I’m not so sure. If I can camp in 102 degrees in remote Idaho, surely Utah has even better experiences to offer.
Some random observations: it is far too hot to take the top off the Jeep which is rather disappointing. I have to stop every hour or so and scrape the dead bugs from my windshield. Gas is getting cheaper the farther south I go. Drivers here are much more polite and aware than drivers in Washington State (i.e. they move over and don’t hog the left lane on general principles). The landscape is very dry—many side of the road fires, and one very large one near my campsite last night (extinguished the day before I camped).
Pamela Helberg 