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.

(C) Susie Bright. Don’t, don’t forget the binos.

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…