Camp Stories: Revisiting Old Haunts, Rereading Old Books

We go camping over the Fourth of July, ostensibly for our dogs who have been prone to become drooling, shivering messes if we stay in town and attempt to survive the "celebrations" of our fellow citizens that turn our normally quiet, tree-lined neighborhood into a booming, smoke-filled, fiery war zone.

Our favorite getaway spot is a small, primitive campground midway up Mt. Adams in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Called Paradise Creek, it's nestled in the deep old growth forest north of Carson, Washington, at the intersection of its namesake Paradise Creek and the Wind River. With no electrical hookups and rusty-but-potable water pumped from a creaky old-fashioned cast iron hand well pitcher pump, it (mostly) discourages the big rigs and generator-dependant types from rumbling through the tents and small trailers dotting the two loops. 

We realized on this trip that we've been camping there almost every year for the past 20 years with our tent and queen-sized air mattress—a step up from the backpacking tent with two zip-together down bags on insulated pads employed by our younger selves. We've gone through only two Coleman camp stoves if you don't count the white gas Coleman borrowed from my parents that had already survived 30 years of Bauer family campouts, and tents ranging from that first two-person LL Bean backpacking tent Dave had bought used from a college friend, to a Columbia Sportswear Bugaboo that Dave (at 6'4") could stand up in to our current "two-room" giant from REI that we've dubbed the Circus Tent.

We try to snag a non-reservable, first-come, first-serve site a couple of days before the holiday, preferably along the creek, and this year we lucked into a double site* set back from the road, enabling us to listen to the creek burbling along about 50 feet down a thin thread of trail opening onto a shady private "beach," perfectly suited to a couple of camp chairs and an afternoon spent reading.

Dave wanted to finish a couple of books he'd been trying to get through for awhile, and I'd brought along the relatively recent and well-reviewed "James," a retelling of Twain's Huck Finn from the perspective of the slave Jim, by Percival Everett, which Dave had read and gave the thumbs-up to. My first choice, however, was "Angle of Repose" by Wallace Stegner, a book I'd read ages ago and remembered liking despite its intimidating 600 pages. It got me on a Stegner kick back then, so I thought I'd give it a reread.

It turned out to be a perfect vacation book, at least for me, a story (and a writer's voice) you get immersed in without much effort, though it's not what I'd call a light summer read. Told from the perspective of a 1970s-era retired history professor, Lyman Ward, Stegner's incredible prose and well-crafted story follows Ward's attempt to understand and document his grandmother's story of moving from a privileged East Coast society to move out West to follow her husband's itinerant career as a mining engineer.

Like many writers whose work I admire, I found myself stunned by Stegner's ability to bring people alive on the page and gobsmacked at his descriptions of places and atmosphere. For example, his description of the relationship between a writer and his characters, real or imagined, as expressed through Lyman's struggle to see and experience Susan Ward's life from her perspective:

“There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.”

It's no wonder it won the Pulitzer, and got me started on a Stegner jag.

Read other Camp Stories (with more here) from our years of tent camping in the Pacific Northwest, as well as our best hacks to make it easy and fun.

* Double sites, if you're not aware, are generally intended for two or more tents and, at $45 per night, cost more than single sites. (We also can't use our National Parks Senior Pass for double sites, which halves the cost per night of a regular site.) But honestly, considering what a room rate or rental house would run, it's more than worth it.