For the better part of the early 90’s, eight weeks of my summer vacations were spent nestled away in the green mountains of Vermont at a quaint, charming, and unequivocally awesome place called Camp Farwell. Founded in 1906 as a horseback riding camp, Farwell’s mission was to shape girls from all over the world into confident, capable, ruddy-cheeked, horseback-riding young women. It is time I would not trade for the world and will always look back on fondly. There were more good times than I could count, there were some challenging times, and then there was my first ever camping trip.
The trip came about as one of the counselors there, a tall, rugged Australian, was an accomplished outdoorsman and had been brought to Farwell to impart upon us his knowledge and to turn us into intrepid outdoor adventurers. Despite what I would have overall considered to be a comfortable and very well-tended to camp, as we prepared for the trip, it became evident that the camping equipment was roughly about the same age as the camp itself. The tents looked like wolverine skins lashed together with pine tree saplings; the backpacks ancient, spider-riddled canvas with rickety, rusting metal poles. If someone had told me the gear was comprised of hand-me-downs from the Donner Party, I wouldn't have been surprised.
One of the pre-requisites to attending Farwell was to ensure you had compiled and brought with you everything on the camp-issued “How to Prepare for Camp” checklist. The cabins we slept in did not have bedding, so, intuitively, one of the items we were expected to bring was a sleeping bag. My family didn’t necessarily camp, nor were they necessarily interested in purchasing state-of-the-art sleeping bags for their filthy and sometimes irresponsible young daughters to use in the filthy and sometimes irresponsible wilderness. But the checklist could not be ignored, so we were issued hand-me-down sleeping bags that were once utilized by our uncles when they were in the Navy. In the 1970s.
Though functional and warm, my sleeping bag had taken on the musty smell of a few hundred unwashed sailors. So, as an opportunistic pre-teen, I jumped at the offer of a diminutive friend of mine who was not going on the trip and offered up her more modern, yet applicably much smaller sleeping bag. Not wanting to leave anything to chance on my first ever camping trip, I tested the sleeping bag and determined very scientifically that if I crunched myself in half and didn’t care if my shoulders, chest, or head were warm, the sleeping bag would be perfect.
And so the preparation went. There was instruction, lectures on the local Vermont flora and fauna, and some quickly forgotten safety information: what to do if one becomes lost, what to do if one becomes stung by a bee, what to do if one encounters a wolverine, as the smell of ones tent may attract them.
On the morning of the trip, we piled into the camp van, unhampered by the vomit and chewing gum smell that always seemed to pervade it. We rumbled and bumped over back roads singing a number of uplifting Camp songs: we joyfully strutted out verses about the sinking of the Titanic, and harmoniously relived the tale of an Austrian who went yodeling, yodeled his way into the heart of a young maiden-fair, only to have his short life gruesomely come to an end at the end of her father’s shotgun barrel. Spirits were high.
The campsite itself sat atop a mountain, and, theoretically, was meant to be quite scenic. We arrived and began our ascent, full gear in tow, without much ado. Our excited chatter began to wane as the hike became longer and subsequently more strenuous. The once glamorous concept of outdoorsmanship now, in reality, almost seemed perverse. Was all of this gear even necessary? Water, we reasoned, was a ridiculous thing to carry to the top of a mountain. As it turns out, there are a lot of things teenage girls will do for a tall, rugged Australian guy. So, whiningly, we pressed on.
A typical Vermont thunderstorm hides among the rolling green mountains and conceals itself until the last minute, skulking closer and then pouncing on innocent bystanders with the same urgency of a starving lion. Almost immediately upon summiting the mountain, lightning and thunder came without notice, nearly knocking us off our feet and echoing violently off the surrounding hillsides. The Australian and the other unlucky adults scrambled to assemble and erect our highly-conductive, metal-poled tents, no longer concerned with their objective of teaching us to become independent outdoorswomen. Fat, saturating rain drops fell and everything became soaked and muddy as we scrambled frantically into the tents. With every clap of deafening thunder, we clung harder to each other, like a scene from the Sound of Music, but without music.
The storm showed no signs of stopping and it became evident to the adults that at some point, food was going to eventually have to be cooked and consumed. Soaked, scared, and ravenous, we peered through the sopping tent flaps at the counselors who cooked hot dogs over a barely maintained fire. They handed them to us one at a time, the white bread buns saturated and disintegrating into our pruned fingers. I wistfully realized that my previously held notion of going to bed, satiated and sticky-fingered after singing songs around the campfire and gorging myself on s’mores was disintegrating faster than my hot dog bun. Our focus could only be on our survival.
Night dropped in all around us like a backdrop on a stage, and the rain stubbornly persisted. There were approximately 17 of us in a 5 person tent, and I was somehow convinced to sleep on the outer edge because I was the tallest. Height, as I’d learn throughout the course of my life, means one is immediately assumed to be an excellent physical barrier from things such as wind, snakes, and really anything else that could be considered inconvenient or scary. I didn’t just sleep on the edge of our tent, but the outside edge of the tent that faced the woods, which meant that the only barrier between me and nature was a scant layer of fraying nylon that reeked of wolverine.
I tried in vain to go to sleep, but the perfect balance of fear and hunger meant that sleep would evade me. Eventually, it came in small bursts, only to be consistently interrupted by thunder claps, and frigid rainwater seeping in through the bottom and sides of the tent. I dreamt of the Titanic.
Somewhere in the night, the rain stopped and I awoke with a start. I stared into the black soggy darkness, trying to convince myself that the low, rumbling growl I had just heard could not have been real. Holding my breath and silently cursing my tiny sleeping bag that served as protection from neither the elements nor beast, I waited, hoping that with time I’d see that the growl was only a figment of my overactive imagination, or at the very least a hallucination induced by my progressing hypothermia. I was to be disappointed.
The growl came again, more of a grunt I realized, but was unmistakably closer. And then closer still. Then, as if lured by the scent of my terror, the grunt/growl was right outside the tent. My side of the tent. The animal’s presence was large and palpable. All I could hear was my heartbeat. All I could see was black. All I knew was that an overcrowded tent and Lilliputian-sized sleeping bag gave me no place to run and no place to hide. One of my favorite Camp songs sprung into my head, the lyrics of which bore more poignancy than they ever had before: I’m Farwell born and Farwell bred, and when I die I’ll be Farwell dead! I knew it to be true, but it was too soon.
Stubbornly, I ignored every shrieking impulse in my body to either run or smack the animal in the face with my Teva. I didn’t move a muscle, for some reason applying the rules of Jurassic Park – if I don’t move, it can't see me. I don’t even remember blinking. In a significant plot twist, the grunting animal was apparently more of a lover than a fighter. So much so that it began rubbing itself on the outer edges of the tent, against which my spindly adolescent legs were pinned due to the tent’s overloaded capacity.
An unrelenting eternity of minutes passed. The animal, apparently realizing that its love would be unrequited from my legs, finally rumbled off. The pale light of morning came, bathing everything around me in a soft, pastel light, the beauty of which can only be appreciated by those who have escaped certain death. Others began to stir, and I had never been so relieved in my life. I was definitely not Farwell dead.
Naturally, no one believed a word of my story about how a dinosaur-sized grizzly bear had kept me up all night trying to extricate me from the tent and gnaw on me like a chicken wing. Adding insult to injury, after spending the night in a half-sleeping bag in a puddle of cold water, by the time we got back to Farwell, I had a sore throat and a fever. And, after a couple of days in the infirmary, I also had a promise to myself to never ever ever ever go camping again.
Almost 15 years later, I begrudgingly accepted an invitation to attend a camping trip at Joshua Tree in the California desert. As we pulled into the campsite, rain came down in sheets and I felt with every fiber of my being that I would never again attempt to spend the night in anything more exotic than a Motel 8. Luckily, the desert rain passed, and I eventually went to my tent that night satiated and sticky-fingered after gorging myself on s’mores around the campfire.
As I dozed off in my normally sized sleeping bag, I realized that my long night on the edge of that tent 15 years ago, like so many other experiences I'd had at Farwell, taught me that I was capable of much more than I thought I was. And I knew that being Farwell bred meant knowing that even in the coldest, darkest, most bear-infested places, there is always a light. We just have to let it shine.
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