The Camping Clause

So my darling fiancé confides he can’t possibly commit to a lifetime of harmonious matrimony until we have officially camped together. Dirt. Tent. Sleeping bags. Pork & Beans. Spiders with legs like Heidi Klum. Peeing over poison oak in the pitch black with mosquitoes feasting on my ass. Camping. Did I mention I work for Hyatt? We are actually entitled to free room nights. Free. That is usually something he can get behind.

Historically the only aspect of camping I enjoyed in my naïve youth was the cornucopia of jumbo marshmallows. They always seemed to taste better around a bonfire, but that was before I realized how many calories were in an entire bag and before I wore contacts. The way I see it, contacts are my crutch. An evolutionary signal, if you will, that if I were primed for the outdoors – I would’ve inherited perfect version. As it stands, I would have been mauled long ago by some saber-toothed cheetah or fanged wild boar while I stood by, squinting, and wondering what the heck was tearing off my arm. The truth is, it’s just not in my blood.

I confess the notion of zipping up in a cozy nylon tent with my honey in the middle of nowhere with the crickets chirping and the wind howling sounds rustically romantic. But, I am not some savage pioneer woman who chops wood, churns her own butter, and gives birth on the floor of a wagon train. I hate to set a precedent that camping will be alive and well in our future. In my defense, I don’t think Brad would classify me as high-maintenance. I still don’t know how to apply eye shadow, I refuse to buy jeans that cost more than $60, and most of my shoes are flat with rubber soles. (The ones that do have heels more closely resemble toddler’s building blocks than deadly instruments that could be used to impale an intruder). But, I do like hairdryers, arugula on my salad, and the clever names on nail polish bottles.

Weeks later, the invite comes: A 40th birthday / high school reunion celebration with Brad’s hometown friends. Our camping site is four hours north in Little Bear, Wisconsin. (I think I will be the judge of their size – thank you very much) The torturous part being that the rest of the crew will be rationally slumbering in the well-appointed farmhouse while we will be bear bait on the back lawn. But, these are the sacrifices we make for love.

We opt to start our drive from Chicago in Brad’s CRV – incidentally, the car without air conditioning instead of my effeminate Smurf-blue PT Cruiser with air conditioning that reeks of mold.

“It will get us in an outdoorsy mood. We are roughing it this weekend,” Brad declares while playfully punching me in the arm.

I pack the car with toilet paper, pillows, towels, diet coke, and enough Wet Ones to change an entire nursery. The temperature reads 91. About ten minutes into the drive we acknowledge in mutual defeated silence that we have made a colossal mistake. The regret pulsates through the car as exhaust fumes and damp heat plow into our pink cheeks. I focus on a tiny droplet of sweat on Brad’s earlobe. Somehow the idea of retreating and repacking the PT Cruiser seems more barbaric than driving four long hours through Hades. But, we probably had heat stroke.

The Gods smile upon me as we approach a pee stop near Lake Geneva. As the Cubs’ radio announcer alerts us to a nasty storm system brewing due West, the clouds roll in – big boorish cumulonimbus threats that promise to wreak havoc. I have horrific flashes of sinking into a muddy sleeping-bag soup later that evening as buzzing mosquitoes lay their larvae in my belly button. But, as the first droplets smatter onto the windshield and smear the insect guts, it dawns on me... this could be my out. Only a crazy person would pitch a tent in a thunderstorm. Tent poles and lightning - not exactly soup and sandwich. I am fairly confident Brad did not intend to martyr us in effort to fulfill this wedded-bliss camping clause. Sensibility will prevail and I begin to do a nonchalant rain dance with my toes.

The storm is torrential. Hailstones, strobes of lightning, trees snapping like toothpicks. We drive on through the countryside and my mood brightens as the sky darkens. We arrive just before sundown to a house with one convenient extra bedroom and puddles in the back yard.

Before we lie down in a creaky attic bedroom on two twin beds, I inspect the mattresses for bedbugs. After all, it is the country. Satisfied that I won’t be devoured by microscopic Pac-mans, I coo my remorse to Brad with as much sincerity as I can muster.

“I am so sorry the camping didn’t work out tonight. I was really looking forward to a night in the great outdoors with you. If it wasn’t for that darn storm.”

“That’s okay, honey,” he pats my hand softly and rolls over on his side. “We’ll just have to postpone the wedding.”

Something Marvelous

On a beach in Korea with seasoning-salt sand and the breeze combing through palm fronds, I pulled out a stiff new paperback, creased the spine a few times and flexed the pages like one might warm a muscle. I flipped it over in my hand, obligated to read the chorus of testimonials before committing to the first page. The pages smelled of ink and bread. By page five, I was engrossed. On page 9, I hovered over a passage with the vigorous persistence of a fly determined to land on a ham sandwich. I wanted to dive in to the words as if they were a summer lake, offering up their coolness and placidness to me. I peered into the water and saw a beautiful reflection.

“On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay?…Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

In a few breaths’ time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them the same way we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this story-teller is alive. The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.”
---Little Bee (Chris Cleave)

I shut my eyes and replayed the words over in adoration. It was of course, our “human story” - where no one is immune to pain or loss or derailment. But, reading that passage smothered me with pride as if I alone were being honored in the front row of a graduation ceremony. As if I alone were being reminded that grace is both earned and dispensed in this life - One just has to hope that whatever omniscient being up there, dosing it all out, will balance out the scales in the end.

I thought back to a vignette I had started writing in the fall of 2008 when my own wounds were not yet scars. I never finished it. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure how it was all supposed to end.


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October 2008

She left pieces of her life behind her everywhere she went. ‘It’s easier to feel the sunlight without them’, she said.
-Brian Andreas, Artist

I own a print with that phrase etched on canvas. It balances on top of my vanity so I both blink awake to the words and subliminally bid them goodnight. I am not a collector of art or gimmicky quotations. Although I admit to posting the Footprints magnet on my college fridge for two months before overhearing the Lacrosse Boys ridicule it in the hallway. “Never date a Footprints chick. They don’t put out.”

P-I-E-C-E-S. That particular word endears itself to me because that’s what it felt like for a long time. It implies that a WHOLE can disintegrate into PARTS - that loss is tangible. That it has body and blood and flesh. It admits that there is throbbing, bruising, tearing, and scabbing. It is physical. It amputates. And pieces shed, sever, and scatter like shards of glass.

Slowly, I’m morphing. I suppose that is the essence of all healing – the sloughing of the dead and regeneration of the new. But, it’s not pleasant – it’s pink and raw and tender like the blisters on the pads of your palm after playing hours of tennis. It’s wet. It’s messy and soggy in wads of Puff’s tissues and shapeless sleeves of college sweatshirts.

I don’t know why the word “healing” typically elicits such a positive connotation. I don’t think it deserves it. It’s not at all soothing. But, the print’s message is pacifying - coating me like balm and invigorating like eucalyptus.

I bought it down in New Mexico while visiting my friend, Nik, in August. I had just packed up my Tucson condo into generic brown boxes and watched them roll down the black asphalt on a 42 ft. Mayflower moving truck. I handed over the keys to my Chrysler to a chain-smoking trucker with a trailer who vowed to make it to the Midwest in 28 hours flat. I glanced around at the empty 1286 square foot unit - #3212 - and realized I was no longer home. I locked the front door, mailed the key to the rental office and boarded a Southwest 737 with a melting granola bar in my pocket.

When I arrived in Albuquerque, I was damaged and broken and sat contemplating a cheese omelet around Nik’s breakfast table. Her dad, a psychologist with a kind face and wise eyes, was seeding grape tomatoes over the sink and listened to me bemoan my choices in a life mate.

“It all goes back to the mother,” I admitted. “She never could demonstrate love.” I spiraled a piece of mozzarella around my fork and stared at the antique clock on the far wall. I groped for something deliciously insightful – some tidbit that might convince him that I was capable of intense introspection. “I think I over-compensated. I think I wanted to make him whole.”

“It was doomed, Emily.” His voice was quiet and calming – an impressive subtlety when articulating a word such as ‘doomed’. He paused before turning on the faucet. “But, I think it might be too soon to self-analyze.”

I nodded and took my first bite.


It hit 102 that afternoon, but Nik and I decided to hop in the Jeep to peruse the neighboring pueblos and tiny towns surrounding Sante Fe. We scalded our fingertips on the metal seatbelts and blasted the air conditioner to a volume that drowned out Garth Brooks on the radio. She drove. I plopped my feet on the radiator.

The highway sliced through the mountains, curving over boulders and blooming agave. The sun was high and every few miles we passed a patch of spiny cholla cacti that conjured up an image of Bob Marley’s lopsided dreadlocks. Eventually the highway deferred to small country road and isolated artist’s colony about ten minutes outside of Santa Fe. We parked diagonally on a patch of gravel outside of the Wheelbarrow Inn as the smoke from grilled hickory burgers leaked inside the car vents. I hopped out, securing my sunglasses over my ears, and wandered into one of the first galleries.

Instantly, I recognized the sweet scent of hyacinth and the store clerk pointed to a circular table brimming with homemade bath soaps. I inhaled the fragrance. They had been the centerpieces at my wedding. It was then I spotted the prints, polka-dotting the back wall in splashes of red, yellow, purple, and aqua like painted blooms in a tulip garden. "Story People" - the artist dubbed them, a collection of geometric design blended with poetry. I had seen them once before in a boutique in San Diego and adored his elegance with words, but the primary colors didn’t match my motif. My home had been a shrine to coffee-bean brown and African khaki. That day in New Mexico, I spontaneously announced that it was time to embrace some color. Maybe color would bring some healing.

With my new purchase laid out carefully in the backseat, we continued our meanderings through the neighboring reservation. Not a mile up a desolate road, we noticed a caravan of cars bleeding into a vast open terrain, stirring up a haze of dust. We turned into the parade of traffic and filed into a make-shift spot in between two rusted pick-ups.

“What on earth?” I gasped, scanning the bustling crowd of Native Americans with scores of jewelry, pottery, and leather merchandise perched under table tents. A old radio was emitting static mariachi as three mangy strays shuffled by with their tongues hanging out like lizards waiting to vacuum up grasshoppers. A flea market on steroids.

As I stepped out of the Jeep, the clay vibrated beneath my flip-flops and my ears perked to a deep-throated rumble in the East, ricocheting off the San Juan Mountains. Drums. We instinctively followed the noise down a barren stretch until the road ended and a colossal wood fence guarded a crowded entry arch. The winds intensified, plastering the dust across our cheeks into streaks of war print. Clouds churned into thick gray clumps, skirting briskly across the sky like they needed to be somewhere by sundown. The vibration was deafening as we pecked our way to the front.

Suddenly, the narrow passage funneled open to a spectacle that could have been plucked from a scene in Indian Jones. A giant coliseum of aboriginal dancers. There had to be over a 1000 of them, men and women adorned with crowns of feathers in their hair and cloaks around their waists, striking their heels and pelting drum hides. I approached a young bystander with two different colored brown eyes and murmured, "What is all of this? A festival of some sort?”

As if to compensate for his small shoulders, he lifted his chin and looked at me curiously, “An ancestral healing ceremony. It’s been preformed for hundreds of years.”

Nik and I exchanged glances. I knew instantly that we had been led here. The world swelled at that moment, watching this colony of Native Americans perform their ancient healing ritual. I felt the planet spin for me as the dancers moved in hypnotic, choreographed rhythm until their stomping failed to kick up even a smattering of red dust. They had pounded all of the loose soil into the core of the earth.

It was then that we heard the thunder. Claps layered over the drums as if we were being sandwiched between the earth and sky. The rain came down in pellets. The drenching kind that seeps in your underwear and stings your scalp. There was nothing to do but laugh and blink away the water from our eyelashes as we sloshed back to our car with water-logged sandals and soaked pony-tails. It felt like a baptism. It felt like healing.

*********** ************** **************


I glanced down at the book across my knees and focused on the landscape around me. The sun was white and I could feel the tingle of sea-spray from the ocean’s spank against the rocks. From behind the rock wall, a sprout of bamboo shoots swayed in union with the tides like a darting school of herring. Brad and I sat in the shadow of a 150 foot volcanic cliff at the foot of the Pacific with the clouds moving overhead. Two inconsequential humans in the sand. And as the birds darted in and out of the beards of moss billowing down from the cliff in a tangle of Rapunzel’s hair, he proposed to me. This beautiful man. Four tiny words in a lifetime’s crater of sentences – “Will you marry me?”

I had to look up at the sky and smile. We spent the afternoon nestled on our beach, digging our toes into the sand and tracing constellations in each other’s freckles. By mid-day as I nonchalantly nipped the sand with a dried bamboo stalk, I noticed a flickering gleam on the dune to my right. A dainty prism of colored light, hop-scotching about as if Aquatic Tinkerbelle was flicking her crystal wand in careless frivolity. I watched the light in amusement, ever so subtly dart this way and that, until I reached up to sweep a strand of hair from my lips. And in that movement, I understood. My engagement ring. My white sapphire was bathing in the sunshine, casting rainbows on the sand.

She scars. She heals. She sun-bakes. Because indeed, this ending was something fine. I would venture to say, it was something marvelous.