narcs

As you know, I like a little morning ramble, and one thing I love about my neighborhood is that we’re just steps away from multiple paths into the woods.

The ramble, no matter which path we choose, takes us deep into the trees. Mostly this is all delight, but sometimes I end up, knees-quaking, on a trail that pushes my limits.

And sometimes, unexpectedly, I get to confront my inner narc.

We’ve been up the redwood trail hundreds of times in our nearly twenty years of living here, a couple of times a week at least, either just me and the dog, or the husband and the dog, or all three of us. Lately we’ve been going up that way more for one reason or another.

We seldom see other people, which is awesome, though sometimes there are signs, trash at the bottom that I pick up on our way home, sometimes little cairns or this heart that appeared on a heart-shaped shelf fungus recently.

Hmmm, I thought, when I saw it: cute, but kinda crosses the line.

A few weeks ago, we headed past the redwoods toward the steep trail to the ridge.

Just past a rise where I counted 5 or 6 newts aloud, we both suddenly smelled burnt sugar. Delicious, but completely human and out of place.

A few step later, I picked up a cheap plastic bracelet, alternating stripes of white and purple, that reeked of wood smoke. Was there a camp, we wondered. Was someone spending the night up there, something we’ve often talked about but never done, thinking it would be lovely to open our eyes to that place first thing in the morning?

But truth is, we'd never sleep up there because it's not allowed. No way would I sleep one wink for breaking the rules.

On Sunday, Mother's Day, we were up there again, and at a similar point smelled smoke. My husband, thanks to his super-nose powers, knew it was paper burning, the start of a camp fire. Strange. We continued on our way. And then just as we we turning back from an unsuccessful attempt to create a loop, unsuccessful on account of my own limited comfort level with breaking trail on steep hillsides covered with loose rock and countless opportunities at (imagined) ankle injury and death, we turned to make our way downslope a different way and there it was – a tent at the base of some trees.  And a voice calling out, “You like to hike like me.”

I'd just been thinking about the amount of noise we were making, scrambling and sliding along, talking, me voicing my nerves. I'd been thinking about how, well, if someone was trying to sleep up there that morning, good luck, 'cause we were crashing along regardless. 

Meet Camping Dude.

Naturally Joe bee-lined toward the camp when my inclination was to stay as far the hell away, his extrovert as usual leading my introvert. I picked my way after him across the slippery slope.

Camping Dude was sitting there, on the ground in front of his tent with a metal camping mug in his hand. When Joe said, “I knew we smelled fire,” Dude replied, “Might as well take advantage of it,” sipping from his cup. He made some statement about how he had just been there for the one night, would be moving on to China Camp that day. One sweeping look at his camp seemed to indicate that wasn’t really true, the one-night part:  it was super-tidy, the area around the trees clear of any debris down to the dirt, a well-used firepit surrounded by big rocks. It looked lived in. His Sierra Designs tent was pretty nice, too. And then there was that piece of of rusted corrugated metal wedged between two stumps, creating an effective wall to hide a camp behind, the reason we hadn't noticed his camp til now. Deliberate.

He looked like he’d been there a while, actually.

He had a bit of an accent, could have been anywhere from 25 to 40, in a dark green t-shirt, shoulder-length dirty blonde hair parted in the middle. Am I right to remember that he was wearing a headband, or is that some later embroidery, a detail my mind has added because it wouldn’t be entirely out of place?

I couldn’t wait to get away. The dog had his hackles up and barked. I knew just what he meant.

And then Camping Dude said, Oh, I’ve seen that dog before.

The whole way down I played the tape back to myself: Camping Dude living up there in the redwoods at the end of a trail that I use all the time, just me and the dog, heading up to the big trees early of a morning. Somehow it didn’t feel the same, knowing that Camping Dude was up there. Somehow it didn’t feel safe anymore.

There’s  a promise, with shared spaces like that one. That we all just visit. We don’t live there.  The deer live up there, and the squirrels and the coyotes and countless birds. But nobody human lives up there. So when someone stakes a claim, lays out their little homestead and takes a more permanent space, well, then the space is a little less ours, a little less Open. It breaks the promise.

And what did he mean, he’d seen our dog before. Had he seen him up here, in the woods, or had he seen him in our yard. Did he know where we lived? He seemed OK, not raving crazy, but what do we know?

I told a friend. She said, Call the police. I remained conflicted. I mean, there’s a part of me that wants to be all Live And Let Live, right? There’s something cool, isn't there, about just camping your way around, a kind of Kerouac On-The-Road-ness about a hobo lifestyle, hopping trains, being off-the-grid, just livin’, man. 

And yet, there’s the other part of me, the part that was creeped out and bothered by Camping Dude’s presence.

Cutting through the noise, my husband did it: he called the ranger. Of course the ranger had only one thing to say about it, which was No. And can you show me where the camp is.

So at some point it'll happen that he'll show him where the camp is. And that dreaded moment will come, when Camping Dude sees that Joe's the one that led The Man to his door and drawls, as you know he totally will, “I thought you were cool, man.”

No, we're not cool. Not a bit. We're narcs.

It turns out Camping Dude has moved on, but we know he was definitely there for more than a night. The site has a definite extended-stay vibe to it, so he or someone like him will likely be back.

I'm left still ill at ease, uncomfies about heading up there alone on our beloved redwood trail though I will do it anyway, since I refuse to be kept out of shared space. And also uneasy about being a narc, about being party to the call to The Man, as much as I know it was the right thing to do. I'll be nervous about this for a while.

Let the deer and the squirrels and the coyotes live there. We just get to visit. All of us. Even Camping Dude.