Let’s Go Camping Now, Everybody’s Learning How
On the trail, if not too far away
The Glorious Pumpkin Tent
Our family went camping this week. It’s been too long!
We camped close to town. I grabbed a burrito de camerones along the way, local shrimp, and that was dinner, along with s’mores.
Like most Americans, I come from agrarian immigrants who fled starvation and persecution from their country of origin. They hunted, fished, watched the weather— no “camping” required.
My mom grew up an urbanite, glad to wash her hands of the ancestral homestead terrors.
But my dad, Bill, a butcher’s son, discovered the backcountry, exploring California head to tail. He was in the Sierra Club back when the organization were considered godless communists (Could use a little more of that now!).
More importantly, he studied Indian languages up and down California, and made his own maps.
He knew what California was like “pre-contact,” and was the kind of person you could walk alongside and he’d blab away each plant’s name, in English, its regional nickname, or the Latin, and an Indian tribal name or two. —Maybe the German or Hindi name if he realized it was kismet!
I always thought I’d have his name lists forever, but after Bill died, my first walks without him were a deafening silence. I couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t ask.