Sometimes, when I'm feeling useless and hopeless I need to remember that I've been places and done things. Maybe nothing great but at least I haven't simply sat and stared at walls. I've watched grass grow. I've watched other things grow too. I've grown my own herbs and tomatoes, I've grown corn and California poppies, tulips and hibiscus, lilies and peppers. Ok, I grew one ear of corn, the row didn't cross pollenate and I only had room for one row beside the house. I wouldn't call myself a gardener but I enjoyed myself.

I've always felt that I was oriented oddly, a rural-urbanite or perhaps an urban-ruralite. I've always felt pulled in opposite directions. When I've lived in the city, I longed for the country and vice versa. Maybe it's because I lived on a ranch between the ages of 18 months and four and a half. When I lived in London, I lost much of my American accent. When I lived in Australia, I lost more of it. Nevertheless, I wore an American flag on the left shoulder of my Belstaff motorcycle jacket. When I came back to the U. S. I put an Australian flag over it. I had to smirk at myself while I was doing that but I never wanted to forget that I'd been there for six years.

As a teen, I used to hike the Sierra Nevada with my grandfather. For days. We called it going back packing. We would walk from Lake Utica near Hwy. 49 down to Hwy. 108 then hitchhike down to the Family cabin in Pinecrest. Usually it was rented out so we'd camp in the public campground. I spent a good part of a lot of summers at Pinecrest. I've also hiked the Grand Canyon from the north rim to the south rim. I believe I've mentioned that here in an earlier post.

Camping was always a big part of my life. My first camping trip, again with my grandfather, happened when I was eleven. Somehow, he managed to convince the ranger in Berkeley's Tilden Park to let him camp in a eucalyptus grove that was basically only accessible by foot. It was along the road to a Nike missile base in the park which was closed to the public. If I remember rightly, it was a three mile walk from the ranger station to the campsite. Or maybe it just seemed three miles to my eleven year old legs. I never actually measured it. Over the years, as I used and visited that campsite, the walk just kept seeming to get shorter.

I've camped in the Australian outback. "Out the back of Bourke" is an expression that means in the middle of nowhere. I had to go to Bourke and "out the back." A friend of mine, Bill, and I drove out there for a long weekend jaunt. We had a good map and found reasonably good roads. at one point we found a spot, pulled off the road and just camped. No preparations at all, we just threw our sleeping bags on the ground and slept. The next day we continued up the road to a spot on the map that was marked "bore." I guess it was an artesian bore as what we found was a pipe maybe eight feet tall that curved around like a cane. On one side of the pipe was a faucet. When we turned it on, water gushed out. Except for a very small settlement we came to that day, we didn't see another person or vehicle along the fifty or sixty miles we covered "out the back of Bourke." At one point, the pasture land we were driving through turned into desert with very red sandy soil. I'd hear of the "red desert" but had no idea how red it was until I saw it for myself. Even then, I understood that this was only the fringe of desert that stretched three thousand miles across the continent. At one point we came to a fork in the road with a tree in the middle. A dead tree with gnarled branches reaching arthritically to the sky as if begging for rain. We were transfixed by the desolation. The sheer emptiness is devastating. I've experienced what I would call desert hypnosis quite a few times but that was the first. We kept saying that we had to go but kept finding reasons not to get started. I suspect that was the day I first fell in love with deserts.

I've done a lot of camping in my life. When I worked the Southern California Renaissance Faire there was Pig's Gulch, the campground for all the actors. I stayed there for several years or otherwise pitched a tent in various places around the fair site but that wasn't camping, that was sleeping in tents. I've stayed in a lot of public campgrounds where that was more like camping with campfires to cook on and so forth. I used to take my daughter camping when she was small. We would camp out at least one night over the Thanksgiving weekend, and then go for a longer trip into the desert during Christmas vacation. The nights were cold but the days were usually up into the eighties. It took more than a few trips for her to learn that it was smarter for her to stay in her sleeping bag where it was warm until I could get a fire going in the morning. "I know you're cold but I can't hug you and build a fire and make coffee at the same time."

My favorite camping was outside of National Forests and Parks, mostly on BLM land where the NPS restrictions didn't apply. Pull my jeep off the road, set up my tent, drag some stones together for a fire ring, find a dead shrub or two, some wood from a fallen joshua tree and build a fire. I always carried a camp stove of some sort, usually a backpacking sized one but I preferred to cook over the coals of a camp fire. Even with the jeep and a huge carrying capacity, it took me years to make the transition from "light" camping to "heavy" camping where I could carry a two burner Coleman stove, a Coleman lantern, a cast iron dutch oven and a comfy six man tent. The Coleman stove was perfect for making my morning espresso while I built the morning fire. Among other things, I used to bake soda bread in the dutch oven. The other thing about camping in the Bureau of Land Management wilderness is the lack of amenities. There are no toilets, and usually no water. You have to bring enough water for your needs and a shovel or trowel for digging toilet holes. Just outside of Joshua Tree National Forest, I was camping with a couple friends. When I was setting up my tent, I saw a spider come crawling out and thought that was trouble. next morning, there was a small bump on my foot with a red ring around it. Apparently it was a brown recluse and its bite wound up taking eleven weeks and a visit to the emergency room to heal.

One of my favorite places to camp was in Saline Valley. There are several hot springs there. There are privies there, just outhouses over holes in the ground with a coffee can filled with ashes by the door.  Over the years, regular visitors brought concrete,building supplies and other useful things to "improve" the springs and make them more amenable. The effect is similar to Aboriginal camps which were often set up like houses but without walls or roofs. The lower spring is very popular in the winter season while the upper spring is far less populous. In the summer, the lower spring is virtually uninhabited with the exception of Rich who lived there year round. The BLM limited a person's stay on BLM land to six months. For some reason they made an exception for Rich, eventually they made him the caretaker of the hot springs. Rich was quite a guy. Over the years I used to go to Saline Valley, he never forgot me and even remembered my name. One summer, I was in the spring with several other campers when there was a little rain shower. A wind blew up from the valley floor bringing a huge cloud of sand with it. we all ducked as low as we could in the water with our faces away from the wind. When it was over, Rich was chuckling but didn't say anything. About ten minutes later the wind reversed bringing all that sand back down toward the valley. That's when Rich told us why he'd chuckled.

I recently looked at a map of Death Valley which is now called a National Park and seems to have expanded to include Saline Valley. I guess that's a good idea, for the preservation of the area but I also mourn the loss of the freedom of the wilderness in the same way it makes me sad that if you want to hike in the National Forests in the Sierra Nevada you have to make a reservation and book in advance with the nearest ranger station.

I had intended to write about other things today but I got side tracked. That's why these are musings. Somewhere I have a to-do list of topics I plan to write about but somehow I can't seem to get to them. I guess they seem kind of like school assignments and I was ever a procrastinator when it came to writing papers for school. I have no idea if anyone reads these things or what they think about them. I kind of wish folks would leave a comment even if they think this is all drivel.