on renting dirt
The hum of the campground is never the same.
Despite the occasional few who would stay longer than 1-2 days, the sites to our left changed over like a laundromat of tourists. Some were quiet, mousey, read books or slept in their hammocks. There were people with elaborate cookouts and others who lived off of snacks or restaurant food. Some groups held roaring fires with shared drinks and menageries of conversation till the wee hours of the morning. Some had babies or young children, sometimes one and sometimes a small school, others had grumpy teens upset over lack of internet and signal (and some had adventurer spirits).
Each day would bring new voices, new smells, new ways of living, ways of relaxing, ways of being in Copper Harbor. Even the bathrooms would ebb and flow with general hygiene (made evident by guests only, for the bathrooms were regularly cleaned pristine), types of perfumes, and even just general behavior.
As a full season resident, the public shower house was also my personal bathroom. I took a minimum of a hundred showers there, brushed my teeth twice a day there, etc. Naturally, considering the meaning of campground life, I did come to expect strangers with each visit into the bathrooms. Often there would be no one… sometimes for an entire shower. On those days, even I could feel the deeper relaxation of a truly private experience… even if I did still wear sandals to shower every time.
What made campground life especially spectacular had nothing to do with the people at all. The thing I miss even now, as I sit in a place with four real walls, is the experience of living in the wildness.
Some campers are particularly glorious. While ours (loaned by our boss, thank the lord) was certainly nice, I wouldn’t call it glorious. It was everything we needed, but still quirky and irregular. I imagine even the big wheeled machines I’d watch roll into camp still felt the burden of rainstorms.
Living this way means narrowing down all the fluff of daily life and enjoying some shortened version of what you had before. It means watching your things with a close eye… because each day outside in the dampness of a northern summer means a day more of flirting with mold. It’s about hauling water for drinking, washing, anything - and heating it should you want warm dish water in your buckets.
It felt a bit like “off the grid” living but not because it was anything close to that. Its because I’m someone who has lived in true homes all her life, in a city of some kind (2,000+ residents), and whether I had enough of anything was more a question of budgeting or choice. But in this town, living on the edge of the deep-woods, daily life required more daily prep work than any home before this. And prep work was limited by resources and space, because there was no true storage for anything. It meant grocery trips couldn’t be a time of “stocking up” because no matter what I bring home I still only have one rubber-sealed tote box and a camper fridge (smaller than a standard mini).
Should the windows of the camper fog up, we had to fix ventilation in order to protect the camper itself (mold).
Should the camper be off balance, everything would earthquake and fall off the two mini-counters and we’d have to fix it in order to protect the camper (mold).
If it rained too many days in a row and we couldn’t open the windows we’d have to run a dehumidifier and check on the tent’s belongings (mold).
Sunny days were days for laying blankets out to bake in the sun (anti-mold).
For the most part, things were managed with ease. But it did require a bit of thinking, observing, and being aware of things because boiling water (as mentioned for doing dishes) would always fog the windows and on rainy days it was a burden to do the dishes - and yes - we did more or less only have two of everything. It involved looking at the forecast (which meant walking to the shower building in order to have a bar of wifi) and planning ahead.
The beauty of it all is that my living room was the picnic table outside. So was the kitchen, the mess sinks, the craft table… and this meant always listening and being against the deep woods. I knew of all the little creatures sneaking by who may or may not have known I was there, and watched all the birds bounce from tree to tree. I noticed the songs change by the season and time of day, I noticed the far-off visitors of wolves, coyotes, grey foxes… I heard them if they were there.
This was the most beautiful thing of living this way.
I watched all the trees, bushes, wild grasses and flowers grow up or get sick. I knew exactly when to pick a berry because they were always on display. And since I too was dependent on the variability of the weather, I too would change or adjust with the season.
I was surrounded by the wildness of pines, cedars, spruces. Woodpeckers, blue jays, crows. Chipmunks, fox, wolves.
And I’d do it again. Again and again.