A Bad Idea Is a Great Idea
Sometimes you commit to an idea that you know is terrible— objectively so— because you feel in your gut that, if not a good idea, it is the right idea. This was how the plan to camp in my Toyota Camry came into being. No sooner did it occur to me that I could fold down the backseats and spread a sleeping bag over the flat space that extended from the trunk to just behind the front console, than I knew I must do it.
My camping exploit would be the centerpiece of a drive along the Pacific coast from San Francisco to San Diego. Day 1 would take me through Santa Cruz, Monterey, and Carmel, and into the heart of Big Sur. In the final episode of Mad Men, the enigmatic anti-hero Don Draper has an epiphany at a yoga commune in Big Sur. He wanders in with a few belongings in a paper bag and slowly succumbs to the beauty of the place. Why are all my aesthetic imperatives 1960s-era men? There is a debonair carelessness in their attitude when faced with challenging circumstances: the cigarette dangling from the driver’s lips in the Italian Job as he handles switchbacks at high speeds; Don Draper’s disdain for luggage. There is obviously a whole scaffolding of privileges that allows these men to drift along, so confident in the benevolence of the universe. There is a certain depravity in thinking, the world’s going to end, let’s have a cocktail. Such confidence is called something else when adopted by others, and is punished brutally. But there’s another side, one that takes in the inevitable ugliness of the world, the myriad ways it falls short of what it could or should be, and says, let my life be a piece of art hewn out of the stone of reality.
No, I don’t have any camping gear. In San Francisco my brother, sharing the vision, loaned me a sleeping bag and— presciently, expertly— a ski hat. A hardware store in a shopping plaza in Carmel, California yielded a camping chair. It was clearly meant to be: I asked the clerk if they had any folding chairs and he started to describe some patio furniture. “I’m looking for more of a camping chair,” I clarified. He disappeared briefly and then reemerged. “You know,” he said, “I have this one chair that I was holding in the back for a customer who called in, but that was several weeks ago. I was just about to put it back out on the floor.” Kermit green, in a bag with a little strap, it was kismet. The man at the campground, the kind of hardened hippie worn smooth by Bug Sur sunsets and weed, seemed bemused at my endeavor: One person, one night. “Are you going to sleep in your rig?” he asked as he typed my license plate into the computer. Later, when I reemerged from the forest asking to use the microwave, he peered into my takeout container and asked, “where did you score this?” It was cumin lamb and I made it in San Francisco, then packed it up in the cooler bag from the Goodwill in Oregon that has been a linchpin of this road trip. He commented politely that it smelled good. I took my lukewarm noodles and a pack of firewood back into the warren of campsites.
Wilderness is a relative term— an unknown, unmapped place, standing in opposition to settled places, to familiarity. For me, the West Coast is already a land of wilderness. It feels bigger, and the forests larger, nearer, pressing in around. Mountains, gorges, tall trees all press around the settled places, which do not seem to have won as definitively as they have on the East Coast. Even the mountains of New England roll gently and are dotted with fragile steeples. On Highway 1 at Mendocino, I saw a rugged cross standing up out of the hillside— I used to see similar crosses in Haute Savoie, in Eastern France, where they are a symbol of the maquis, scrublands that took on symbolic meaning during World War II as a place of refuge for the French Resistance. The crosses were used as landmarks by Resistance fighters, who fled to the maquis and then organized themselves there. The maquis is a good metaphor for my wilderness— a place to hide out from occupying forces, but also the place to mount a new offensive. A place outside the scope of government. Government here is another metaphor— I’m no prepper, outside of a couple of gallons of water in my trunk leftover from the threat of wildfires. Government is the forces of domestication and embourgeoisement. The government of expectations and inertia. The virus has created its own kind of maquis or wilderness, effacing our landmarks of daily life and throwing us into unfamiliar terrain. Suspending the normal flow of life and its authorities: the office, holidays, sociability. It’s a cloud bank blotting out our lodestars. Astrolabe lies useless on the map table. It’s a time of feeling in the dark. I’ve been consulting my gut to figure out where to go and what to do next. What does my gut know? It whispers, drive on. Leave behind the oasis, familiarity.
And so I sat in the dark in my camping chair, beside a blazing fire. Some kind of highway construction project was underway on Route 1, so the supreme stillness of the woods was cut by the whining rumble of large machinery doing something laborious. I sipped red wine. The brightness of the fire rendered the darkness all around me more complete. I felt like I had slipped into the space in between time. The group at the adjacent campsite was speaking Japanese, and the patter of unfamiliar words and occasional laughter tucked in around me. The sound of the machinery faded slowly as it rumbled on down the road. I turned the logs and fanned them as the fire died down.
My brother had suggested that I test out my sleeping arrangements before leaving San Francisco, an idea that I dismissed out of hand. My plan was flawless, testing it was pointless. When I folded down the backseat in the dark, though, I immediately discovered that it did not lie flat. Scrambling in and plunging my bottom half into the trunk, I found that the angle of the seat rendered the opening to the trunk too narrow— it clamped uncomfortably around my hips. I would be sleeping in the backseat. This was, of course, why I didn’t test my plan out earlier: Learning this in San Francisco might have deterred me from realizing my vision. I unfolded the mattress pad I absurdly brought from the East Coast, that didn’t fit the mattress I ended up finding on Craigslist in Oregon. My yoga mat unfurled on top of it, and then the sleeping bag. All night long, when I opened my eyes, I saw the trunks of Redwood trees silhouetted in the dark through the surround of window glass and the pane of the sun roof.
In the morning I packed up quickly, pumped some free campsite coffee into a hot mug, and drove to a turnout overlooking the sea. I set up my camping chair in the gravel near the edge of the cliff and sprinkled Cheerios into the empty container from my cumin lamb. There was a plastic knife in the car somewhere but I used my spoon to slice chunks of banana over the cereal. Setting the container on the trunk, I poured out milk as the occasional sports car or camper van whooshed past. The waves crashed rhythmically below and a band of mist smudged out the line between sea and sky. The brown hillsides glowed gold in the morning sunlight. The whole world stretched out around me.
