I had to run some errands Friday. They take longer when you have to walk everywhere. Ever since the Santa Cruz County bus drivers went on strike last week (which I’ll rant about another time) I’ve had to get around by foot, which isn’t so bad when you have the patience to walk everywhere. But at some point I’m gonna need to get out of town, so they’d better get their strike resolved soon.
Okay, so Friday evening after dinner, I packed up my tent, sleeping bag, folding chair, extra bedding, junk food and several books, and trekked down to the Redwood Bowl, our campus’s miniature outdoor amphitheater. From there, I went down the creek bed a short ways, and pitched the tent. Then I thought better of it. I don’t really how how far the school’s property extends into the woods, and I don’t want to trespass into the neighbors’ property. Plus, you never know how trigger-happy those neighbors might be. In California, we have an odd combination of tree-huggers and militia freaks in the woods, and I don’t necessarily want to wind up like Ned Beatty’s character in Deliverance, so I decided it would be safer to move my tent back onto known campus property.
I sorta wimped out in that I parked my tent on the Redwood Bowl’s concrete stage. It wasn’t really roughing it, but then again, how much are we really roughing it when we go to state and national parks? They have the campsite pre-cleared for the tourists; the boundary lines are neatly marked; the flat areas are landscaped for pitching one’s tent; for crying out loud, I’m sleeping in a tent, not in a bedroll by the fire. Frankly, I’m pretty spoiled by the conveniences of modern camping technology.
It was still humid from Friday, and not cold enough to sleep… and, of all stupid things, I had forgotten a flashlight. So I left the tent there and hiked back to my dorm. While I waited for the temperature to drop, I watched a
At 4 a.m. the deer woke me up. I know; a lot of city people tend to think of deer as cute little animals. This is what happens when your only experience of deer comes from movies like The Yearling and Bambi. But if you’ve ever lived where deer live, as I did for two years, you learn really quickly that deer are destructive, nasty, foul pests. And the ones that live near humans no longer have any fear of them. But these did; I poked my head out of the tent and they scampered off. Stupid deer. At least they make up for their annoyance by being tasty.
The squirrels finally awoke me around 10 a.m. Man, are they loud if they don’t think humans are around.
So I changed clothes, ate some breakfast and coffee (I had brought a thermal bottle), unfolded my chair, and read a critique of high school history textbooks called Lies My Teacher Told Me. It’s about stuff that's never mentioned in the texts—fr’instance, acts of genocide against the Indians and blacks—the downplaying of racism (and, oddly, anti-racism), the tendency of textbook publishers to push patriotism and pro-American myths rather than actual history and sociology (which is why they’re seldom critical of the government, push voting and government involvement rather than nonviolent social action as agents of change), etc. If you know American history, you know all this stuff already. It’s still aggravating, though. The whitewashing of history, combined with nostalgia for a sheltered, artificial, TV-saturated childhood, is a major reason why people believe that “things were better back then” when they were actually much worse; that civilization is disintegrating into chaos when it’s actually improving; and why so many people are suckers for Left Behind style End Times scenarios. But that’s another rant.
Reading content aside, ’twas a nice and peaceful day. I did this until about 2 or so… when the tour group came by.
The faculty went on a retreat this weekend. Therefore I wasn’t expecting any tour groups to show up; I figured that tour groups would be scheduled for when faculty was around, so that someone from the administration could “talk up” the school a little. Apparently I figured wrong, for they were a little surprised to find me there. Our campus security officer came by soon afterward and pointed out that the next time I want to pull a little stunt like this, I need to clear it with the Student Life office.
I suppose that’s reasonable. My motives were to camp out for a night and get my camping bug out of my system. Others would have a less-than-wholesome motivation to go camping… say, a couple who couldn’t afford a room for the night off campus, or a friend who wasn’t allowed an overnight stay in the dorms. Or some people who have no sense of decency; you don’t want a tour group to discover pantsless Bethany students hanging out, as it were, in semi-public areas.
Anyway… I did have peace and quiet up until that point. So it was mostly good. No, I didn’t see any mountain lions. But next time I get the camping bug, I will likely do it off campus.