And where is your campsite?

Woodsmoke and morning coffee in the Manzanos--5 by 7 watercolor, 300 # d'Arches,

Woodsmoke is responsible for this.
Smelling the aroma of a pinon fire the other night on my back porch made me realize how long it has been since I was camping.
The answer is too long...actually March of 2012 at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. Alone, after visiting my uncle Mike in Santa Fe. My sleeping bag was good to almost 0 degrees. I still almost froze to death, but the time alone was medicine.
"I need to go camping," I said to myself the other night. That's what's missing. Yes, I'm too old to sleep on the ground anymore, and camping is often uncomfortable, but there's something essential missing if you don't endure it.

Camping in Chaco Canyon

Camping puts you in touch with eternal values I think. It certainly puts you in touch with Abraham, who spent his nomadic life "pitching his tent." Our Plains Indians knew those values. When you're in a tent, or under the open sky, you know how small and impermanent you and everything else is. How much a part of a bigger Nature you are--wildlife, landscapes. How big the universe is. How unimportant time is. How you don't "own" anything but are "just a-passing through." You learn to appreciate warmth, food, your surroundings, the stars, other people.  We are all immigrants, nomads.
I started thinking about all the places I've camped. It's a long list, and the memories are filled with family, friends, loved ones. The times that stand out most tend to be when not everything went perfectly, and of special places visited.
One of the best memories of camping there or anywhere is having to roll out of the sleeping bag in the cold morning, see your breath fogging in the air, shiver,  fire up the Coleman stove to start coffee, and try to stir last night's campfire into life for warmth.
Where is your campsite? Your favorite? The memories?

My brother and an "Army" cot in the Manzanos, 1955

My first memories of camping including sleeping on "army cots," canvas stretched over wooden frames in the Manzano Mountains southeast of Albuquerque. We were building a cabin up there, and my brother and I would either sleep in a big center pole canvas tent, or outside under the stars. As pre-teens my friends and I would often "camp out" on the lawn outside our house on Sandia Base.

Mom and our tent at the Grand Canyon, 1954

 I also remember camping near the south rim of the Grand Canyon on a family vacation with Uncle Mike along, using that big green tent. Later as a teen, my friends and I made a fishing camping trip to Fenton Lake in the Jemez wilderness in New Mexico. I also camped with my best friend in a tent,  his family in a trailer,  near the Pecos River, with a danger of black bears. 
My two favorites are in New Mexico--several times at Chaco Canyon and Jack's Creek in the Pecos Wilderness. Chaco because its 25 miles off a paved road, because the Anasazi still inhabit the 1,000-year-old ruins. I've been there alone and with family. It's traveling back in time, human and geological, and your imagination runs wild. You can see time here--in the stars wheeling overhead, or the yip of coyotes in the early morning, or in the shadows climbing the sandstone cliffs early or late in the days. Mostly it's quiet.
Jack's Creek is at the end of the road  above 9,000 feet, near the headwaters of the Pecos River. There are aspen and fir, and a trailhead into the Pecos Wilderness. My family and I camped there several times, either in a tent, or in a Coleman popup tent trailer we had.  
Great memories.

Where else have I camped? Many of my memories involve that pop-up trailer and cherished family memories, but not all.

• New Mexico--near Cloudcroft, in a pouring rain storm. Chama, near  the tracks of the Cumbres and Toltec steam locomotive. Conchas Lake. Story Lake. Coyote Creek. In Taos canyon. At Tesuque Creek  campground, above 10,000 feet near Santa Fe. In the Manzano mountains.
• Texas--Big Bend National Park, where we were afraid the wind would blow away our popup trailer. And outside Amarillo, downwind from a feedlot.
• Alone in the Arkansas Ozarks.
• One windy campground in western Kansas.
• Wyoming--in the Wind River Mountains, in Yellowstone, and in the Tetons, where our van was broken into, and they stole our medicine bag, thinking it was my wife's purse.
• Utah, in the Wasatch mountains.
• Montana, on the Canadian border--third favorite spot, and it would be first if it were more frequent and closer--Glacier National Park, with family, and also, the last time, with son Trav.
• Pennsylvania, just 20 miles from Gettysburg.
• Maine--near Portland.
• Vermont, on the banks of the Connecticut River, where  we found a graveyard with dates back in the 1600s.
• Oh, Oklahoma? Not much. Maybe at Waurika Lake. Definitely with the pop-up trailer on a sand bar southwest of Waurika on the Red River with men friends, running trot lines and having a good time, just a few feet from the south shore, which is Texas.

Another great memory of camping is at the close of day. Tent's up, sleeping bag unrolled inside. Coleman stove is cooking some chili, and I've started a fire. The flames send up the  woodsmoke, and as the day darkens and the stars come out, the embers glow like little universes. Night sounds of insects or wildlife break the silence. You can sit and stare into the fire, drink coffee or something else, think, and smell the woodsmoke.
Or more recently, with best friend  Mark Hanebutt at the now extinct (sold and bulldozed for an expensive cookie-cutter housing development} at Melo's, a small private lake and campground on OKC's far nw-side...an evening of sparse food and drink, laughter around a fire, woodsmoke , and sleeping in a tent, no matter the glow of metro lights to the southeast. Precious, connection with what matters.
It's past time to go camping.

Road trip without roads, a book of summer

Road trip! We're traveling 350 miles plus into northwest Oklahoma, and then, staying on the back roads as much as possible, into Colorado, covering 2,000 miles in about seven days.
But before you get to the Western scenery, you need a book to listen to on long stretches of highway. 

Susan found an audio book that just fit, and I downloaded it on Audible. Thus Horatio's Drive became the first book I've "read" in July, my eighth this year.
It's the story of the first American cross country automobile road trip, in 1903, undertaken by Horatio  Nelson Jackson,  his mechanic Sewall Crocker and his dog, Bud.
No paved roads, sometimes no roads, no maps, no gas stations. 20-30 miles an hour was high speed in an open  20-horsepower Winton "touring" car he named "The Vermont." Starting in San Francisco and ending in New York, 61 days later, winning a $40 bet that it couldn't be done in under 90  days.
It's the book by Dayton Duncan, written for Ken Burns' 2003 documentary for PBS Horatio's Drive. The book is hard to come by in print, but easily available as an audio, and you can buy the documentary film too.

You know about Ken Burns, of course, including his recent documentary on The Dust Bowl which had its premier screening here in Oklahoma, in April, 2012, and we were fortunate to attend thanks to former student Ashley Barcum at OETA. Here's my report on that Dust Bowl documentary.
Duncan has also written other Burns' PBS films, on the West, Lewis and Clark, the National Parks, Mark Twain, and more. He's won many awards, including a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum here in Oklahoma, A conservationist, he's been involved in New England politics. The Audio book has an introduction by Ken Burns, beginning with a quote from Walt Whitman.

What a trip. Go take it. 

"Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road," --Whitman

"The Vermont" is in the Smithsonian, plus this display.