The map calls it “Oxbow Regional Park,” which feels like an insult—definitely not a national park. Not even state. This is a local park. Not “local” as in farm-to-table, either, but as in “the locals,” said by someone to whom those words are synonymous with “the hicks.”
Yes, I know that’s a lot of heat over a (regional) park name. I also know that whoever named it is (or was) probably spending their days caring for our public lands and getting very little pay or thanks, in addition to being constrained by rules outside their control. Why am I this defensive on behalf of a park?
I’ve been to Costa Rica, but never to a tropical island; and even in Costa Rica, the time I spent on the beach was my least favorite part. I was not yet twenty, wearing a plaid bikini and feeling self-conscious about every inch of my body that it covered, and every inch it didn’t. I did not then and do not now imagine paradise as a tropical island. But I feel, after two nights camping in Oxbow, the way people talk about feeling after a week on an island that has silky white beaches, turquoise water, and guava cocktails: as though I have been somewhere else, and have come back new.
The trip was organized by my friend Beverly, whom I met at the morning stop for Lucy’s kindergarten bus three years ago. She booked the group site at Oxbow and invited anyone at Palisades (Lucy’s school) to come; and sixteen families did (Tanya confessed to counting the tents). The trip was, from the get-go, wonderful because Beverly was there, with her husband Doug and their two boys. I have always been impressed by the way their haircuts match: Doug’s head is shaved, and Beverly and the boys have faded buzz cuts sporting parallel zigzag cutouts on the sides. (The haircuts, I believe, are courtesy of Doug’s mom Louise.) It was also wonderful because all the families there were ones we were likely to see again at school, so it felt like we’d get to keep whatever connections we made.
There were a lot of kids, roaming about in several posses, shrieking “A DEER! COME SEE—THERE’S A DEER!” followed by, ”STOP YELLING SO LOUD YOU WILL SCARE IT AWAY!!!”
This call and response usually continued for some time while the deer in question stood staring, or munched contentedly on leaves three feet from the shriekers; the deer were nearly unfrightenable, having become accustomed to eating out of people’s hands. (Some of us kept this custom going, while others attempted to obey the signs that enjoined us not to feed the wildlife.)
One morning before breakfast, Beverly heard the tiniest girl in the group, helmet on and grasping the handlebars of her miniature bike, announce “It’s time to put the metal to the pedal!” And that afternoon, Lucy and her new friend Dani were digging in sand and I heard Dani say, “I like to pretend my feet are bad and so we have to bury them.”
Along with the kids, there were a lot of adults, spread out over a sizable area of clean-floored forest with the perfect sand-mulch texture to receive tent pegs easily but hold onto them well. And these adults, plus the fact that the kids were in groups, plus the fact that we were not on the banks of a body of water or a large road, meant that we all felt free to let the kids roam. This freedom relaxed and delighted everyone.
Jim came into our relationship with backpacking experience (and equipment). I, by contrast, come from a family in which both parents agreed never to camp. For my dad, who’s 6’3”, this was about comfort, because everything was usually too small and too short for him. For my mom, it was about raw labor. “Why,” she would quote her own mother approvingly, “would I go on a vacation that is more work than staying home?”
Jim and I have our parents’ dynamic, roughly reversed. I, like my mom, am not really working for pay but am watching kids a lot and (in theory) doing a lot of housework. But I’m unlike my mom and very like my dad in that my tolerance for dirt and clutter is quite high. Jim is the one who usually points out first that the bathrooms are dirty, and until I vacuumed some flour I spilled on the family room carpet a few weeks ago, I think he was the only person who’d ever vacuumed our house in the seven years we’ve lived here. I cook almost all the meals, but Jim sweeps under the kitchen table before each one. Jim is Mr. Logistics in our family, and Mr. Get-It-Done. And Jim loves camping, because it gets him all the way away from his job. I love camping because I love being outside, because I love deep conversations and camping usually means at least one meaningful conversation with other adults, and because Jim and the girls love it. The girls are instantly entertained once they leave the tent. Jim is relaxed and happy, and Jim’s logistical efficiency makes the whole thing (relatively) easy.
This was only our fourth time camping as a family. The prep was plenty brutal, even with Jim’s experience and the lovingly-annotated packing list he had made after our last trip, two years ago, with Theresa. I was working all week at Peregrine, my recurring temp job, where I help apartment tenants pack up their belongings for temporary relocations (in the current building, the Sally McCracken, they’re getting their windows replaced and A/C put in).
The week before Oxbow, I got the girls up in the morning, fed them breakfast, made them lunches, got them in sunscreen, and took them to art camp. Then I made sure I had my own lunch, a snack, my bus pass, phone, travel mug of iced coffee with heavy cream, my partially frozen Nalgene, sensible clothes (not too warm, in case we were in a room without A/C; but not too skimpy, in case we were in a room with a jumpy dog, or there were unexpected sharps around; and an extra layer for the heavily air conditioned bus ride home). I sprinted the mile and a half to the PCC Sylvania stop and caught the 44, usually by the skin of my teeth, and daydreamed for 35 stops to NW Everett, where it dropped me twenty steps from the doors of “The Sally.”
I worked all day at the most unexpected job I’ve ever loved (more on that another time), then caught the bus back from 5th and Davis, rode home, staring out the window or texting for forty minutes. Then I walked back from PCC, a hot but gorgeous walk along forest paths. Sometimes I called a friend.
I arrived home just in time for bedtime, and often Jim had managed not only to feed the girls, but to take them to REI in order to get the camping supplies we had missed last trip, or the ones we needed as a family with a 5- and 8-year-old but hadn’t needed last time with a 3- and 5-year-old. He even ordered the awesome teal-and-gray collapsible kettle Theresa had brought along last time to boil water in for coffee.
Sometimes the girls had not had dinner; once he called me from the ice cream parlor while I was walking home. I was furious that they were out, with no plan for dinner, at nearly-bedtime. He was furious that I had no appreciation for the fact that he’d worked all day, then driven in traffic to camp pickup, then worked with all the post-camp feelings, and fit in a walk and a trip to the library.
In addition to the dinner-and-bedtime fight, we got into version 103.5 of our current favorite fight:
Jim: “It’s Wednesday. we’re supposed to leave in less than a week. What have you gotten ready? Why do I always have to be family project manager? You sign up for all the things but then I have to follow through.”
Me: “…yeah, sorry, you’re right—this really is coming up, isn’t it?”
Jim: [stares at me, speechless]
Me: “I, um, what’s that habit tracker called that you’re using, again?”
Jim: “Harsh.”
Me: “Right. Like ‘harsh taskmaster.’ Maybe I do want a lesson in that. Can I still get one?”
Jim: “I’m supposed to be catching up on work. They want me to make a sales plan.”
Me: “For the thing they haven’t built?”
Jim: “Yeah. I can’t do this. I can’t keep track of all the things.”
The girls were in Nonstop Meltdown Mode on Saturday, the day before we needed to leave. But Jim and I were holding up well; I’d organized sensible but delicious food, and he had fit half the gear in the trunk of our blue Ford Focus, with the brand-new dent in the hood from the deer I murdered in Olympic National Park earlier this summer. I packed our littlest French press in a soft kitchen rag, and Jim ground coffee. Then I realized we had no coffee cups. I remembered, with longing, the beautiful stainless steel ones Theresa had brought last time, double-walled for insulation and shaped like stemless wine glasses. “We have a lot of cups,” Jim said. “Don’t we have some thermoses somewhere?” He went out to the garage, returning with a large thermos with a wide lid like a small soup bowl. “Couldn’t we just share this?”
Now it was my turn to stare. “I am not going to get up,” I said, my neck getting hot, “cold and stiff from probably not having slept well, and then boil water over a propane burner with the girls complaining that they want hot chocolate, and then make coffee, and have to wait till you finish yours—or feel rushed while you wait for me—or have the girls fussing for their turn because it’s our only cup. I want my own cup, that I can sit with in peace, and have for as long as I want without anyone hassling me.” This was hypocritical; usually I love sharing things, and Jim is the consummate gentleman about food and would graciously have passed the lid-cup back and forth so neither of us had to wait. I glared at him, gesturing at the plastic-lined lid. “And anyhow I don’t want to drink out of that.”
“Fine,” Jim said. “But at least get something that stacks.”
I went upstairs and spent an unreasonable amount of time on Amazon, searching for stainless steel wine-glass-mugs that would arrive in time (there were only overpriced ones with gaudy marbled patterns). Finally, exhausted by searching and cranky from knowing I was being high-maintenance, I found stainless-steel non-insulated cups that stacked and came in a green canvas bag. They get too hot to handle with fresh coffee in them, the reviews said, but I didn’t care. I’d hold it by the rim. It would be fine.
“Those are pretty,” Jim said when I showed him the cups on my screen. “But we’ll burn our hands.” He thought for a bit. “I guess we could get cozies,” he said.
“Sure. We could probably stop at a coffee shop on the way and get them to give us four extra paper sleeves.”
Jim went on as though he hadn’t heard me. “Maybe we could make them.”
“I mean…” I said, gesturing broadly at our house.
“We could crochet them,” he said dreamily, again as though he hadn’t heard me. Susi, my German friend, one of the ones who’d met us in Olympic for two wonderful weeks in a huge airbnb, loves to knit; and when we spent a day in Port Townsend, her one request was to visit a yarn store. We went to Bazaar Girls, and spent a delightful hour there, coming out with knit and crochet patterns for stuffed foxes, one each for the girls and me, and instructions on how to make the knitted one using something called a “magic loop.” We also got yarn from the free bin, for practicing. Jim was not in Portland at the moment, he was back at Bazaar Girls. I shrugged.
“Sure. If you want to pack stuff to take along, we could crochet there.”
“Do you have yarn?”
“Yeah.”
“Thick yarn?”
“Yeah. Probably too thick.”
“And crochet hooks?”
“Yeah. Here, I’ll show you what I have.”
I got the yarn and hooks and went back to enlisting the girls’ help with packing. After dinner, I found Jim in his office, his huge screen split between a cup cozy crochet pattern and a blog tutorial on crochet stitches.
“Um,” I said, “can I get help with bedtime?”
“Sure,” he said, a bit distantly. I began to feel mildly alarmed; we call this condition “being slurped,” and he was showing the symptoms of a serious case. “This is really hard,” he said, showing me a lumpy bracelet-sized ring made of two rounds of crochet stitching.
“Yeah,” I said. “I can imagine. Can we take it along and make it there?”
He didn’t answer.
I felt like I was there for it all! The sketches, schematics, glimpses into the pre-trip and the stay itself with conversations, coffee considerations and crocheted anxiety. I think we need a dog to add to the human, deer, bike, tent mix. Thing Three anyone?
We had an old 10x10 canvas tent that folded up into something a out the size of a small refrigerator and weighed only slightly less ... it was stiff & smelled ... I am drawn to Jim's diagrams. Sadly, with things 1, 2, & 3, there were not enough possible combinations. Just saying "camping" makes me weary, but I miss it. Donna doesn't for obvious reasons. 'Nuff said. She likes roughing it easy -- someplace with a couple of queen-size beds, no alarms, no agenda ..., and good restaurants. A great piece. I'm jealous. Thanks for sharing.