Kalaloch Campground in June
My family has been going camping since we became a family. The summer I moved into my dad’s girlfriend’s house was the summer of isolation. The forced proximity of quarantine was something like the perfect time to carve out a new home. If you’re lucky. Which, thank goodness, I was. Skeptical, of course. Very skeptical. I was the only one that year who had my own room. Parents in the basement, four other kids sharing two other rooms. All of us crammed together in a house with one shower. I was skeptical, but intrigued, like the first time you bring a stray cat home.
For a cabin-fever stricken family of seven, camping was the perfect escape back then. Really, the only kind of travel that was still possible. Socially isolated, outside. We went to Kalaloch campground, which, if you’re not from Washington, is on the coast of the peninsula. Down a few miles from Ruby Beach. Close to the Hoh rainforest. Close to Forks, where Twilight was filmed. On the right days, it feels like being in Twilight. Jagged evergreen cliffs. Hanging lichen. Undergrowth greener than emeralds. When it rains, everything is misty, dripping, and perfect. I remember my camping trips by the books I was reading at the time, and I was reading one of The Dark Crystal books. Our campsite was right next to the highway. The bushes and trees were so thick you couldn’t see it, but you could hear it very clearly. We still laugh about the sleeplessness to this day. It was so loud our tents shook.
Since then, it feels like I’ve gone on a hundred different camping trips, not just with my dad’s family, but my mom. The number is probably in the twenties, truly. Nonetheless, it feels like a hundred, because camping has become a new way of bonding for us. This month, my family returned to Kalaloch—to a campsite not anywhere near the highway. Things look different now. We have a dog. My oldest stepsister is living in an apartment close to her college. Her place in the tent was taken by my stepbrother’s girlfriend. The two of them, along with my youngest stepsister and my brother, drove back one day early to attend to various school-related commitments. We have three cars between all of us, and are no longer all cramming stuff in a single Ford Flex, backpacks between legs and on laps, freed from commitments and society and only existing in each other’s presence day-to-day. We all have our own separate lives now, as we will continue to as the years march steadily onward.
But many things have not changed. The bickering, for a start. The day I stop hearing my youngest two siblings argue will be the day pigs fly. Then, as soon as we parked and pitched our tents, everyone made their way down to the beach. Our dog jumped in the waves and was terrible at playing fetch. A field of driftwood, scooped up by the ocean and deposited, lay waiting and ready for our adventuring. My brother, as he had in the years before, constructed a fort out of the destitute gray logs. He is still thirteen, after all. Surprisingly, my two other siblings, now highschoolers and teenagers and finding out how to be cool, joined in. Even my dad built something of a fort. More of a place to nap. This time around, I had the second Game of Thrones book tucked under my arm.
Very soon there was a feeble economy going, currency being white rocks we labelled “quartz” years ago. My brother commissioned my stepsister to make him a sign for his scavenging shop that read NO REFUNDS! scrawled on a piece of flat driftwood in charcoal. My stepbrother and stepsister were developing a bakery featuring sand dollar cookies and rock ice cream. My stepmom wandered through it all, finding logs and sticks for them to build with.
There is something about the lighting in Kalaloch that always feels otherworldly, as if the sun is closer here than it is anywhere else. Walking back to camp, I marvelled at the shadows cast on the ground by late-evening light, the sun peeking through gaps in the bending Sitkas and the thick sword ferns. Dips in the ground were bursting with skunk cabbage and leafy ground cover. Spontaneous green stems were alight with molten gold rays, as if they were readying themselves to be free from their roots and ascend to the skies. Other plants were bathed in perfect shadow. Everything was perfectly contrasted, and imperfectly sun-dappled. The lacy canopy shadows on the path I followed were reminiscent of the spots on a newborn fawn. A breeze ran through it all, stirring things against each other and creating my favorite sound in the world, the rustling of leaves. Second to that only was the sound just over the wind, of frothy waves rolling and crashing. In the quiet moments, when people were napping or scattered across the campground and everything human was still, I would peek over my book to see the world growing loud. A stellar jay investigating our cooler, then spreading his sapphire wings and joining the hungry crows in the trees. A chipmunk, frozen under the hammock, both of us looking at each other with awe, trying to understand what the other was going to do next. The rustling in the ferns of some other mysterious creature.
We coasted ten minutes up the highway to Ruby beach. I braved myself to forge unsteady log bridges over rushing creeks (having donned brand-new converse instead of my sandals.) I watched the waves crash against the jutting islands and rocks, let the sun bring color to my face, payed my little brother in “quartz” to scavenge the most circular rock he could find. Beaches are made the way families are, rocky and uneven before time and weather forces them up against their rough edges and carves them into different shapes, until everything fits together. Grains that pack easily in your hand and yet are always slipping through your fingers. When we first were here, my family was like Ruby beach, our edges worn down but not quite fitting together, not yet. We are still figuring out how to be sand, but what family isn’t?
My stepmom remarked that food always tastes better when you’re camping, and I couldn’t agree more. Nowhere else would I be able to stand vegan hotdogs for dinner, and instant peaches and cream oatmeal every single morning. We made sandwiches and saw the Tree of Life, a Sitka Spruce tree dangling in the gap between cliffs, its root system spread out and clinging to the rockface. It looks like it could topple down at any minute, but its roots go deep. It has held itself up, all these years. And it’s still growing and green.
“Is anyone else’s sleeping bag filled with sand?” My stepsister asked as we bedded down the first night. One of the things I have grown to begrudgingly love most about camping is the dirt. Going three nights without a shower has always been a trial, but one I have slowly learned to bear. No matter how neat and clean and tidy my corner of the tent is, no matter how organized my belongings, no matter if I make my sleeping bag in the morning or not, there will be sand and dirt in it by—at least—the first morning. I love feeling clean. I love having my space be clean. I am human, and I was made to live on this earth, with all its dust and soil and mud. And more important than keeping my shoes clean is the fact that I don’t know when I will ever be able to search among the tidepools with my stepsister and stepmother again, now that I’m in my senior year of college. The second morning, the tide had rolled out like a blanket being lifted, unveiling a field of treasure buried in the sand. Living sand dollars. Spiralling fragments of shells. Pearlescent oyster carapaces. Among the barnacled rocks, we found sea anemones and strange wiggly worms, fish darting to-and-fro, secret quiet crevices normally hidden by the waves. My dog chased a bird and ate a dead crab. My sandals and feet were coated with mud. It was the best part of the trip.
After the kids had driven off and left the campsite quiet, I was permitted to have a bottle of wine on the beach with my dad and stepmom. We read in silence as the sun made its way across the sky. My dad, being my dad, brought his saxophone camping. We jumped over waves and waded out to where rocks and seaweed swirled underfoot. We found logs that looked like benches. We explored the shady green creek behind the driftwood. We tried to unsuccessfully get the dog to swim. We ambled down green forested trails. We brought rocks and sand-dollars and shells home. The best thing we found on the beach—credit to my stepsister—was the small skeleton of a seal, wedged between two logs, at peace among the busyways of the driftwood fort city, and in view of the blue, rolling sea, her home forever. On the final night, my dad and I walked down to the beach as the last of the daylight faded. He labelled the bright stars above us as Jupiter and Venus. The sky was a cobalt-periwinkle-rust-amber-rose-colored ombre. A layer of fog lay over the coast to our north, over which the outline of the forested hills hung. Far across the waves, the single light of a ship blinked out at us peacefully.
We left the driftwood city behind us, my brother’s NO REFUNDS! and Scavenging Shop signs waiting for another child to piece together their story. There have been three of these fort cities built and abandoned, each time we’ve camped here. Each has been built upon the remnants of another abandoned driftwood fort, its creators unknown. I wondered briefly if anything of those three we built remain. Perhaps the kids who came along after us rearranged some things, and the stick-tent I am clambering over to reach the edge of the forest bears the bones of my brother’s first ever scavenging-shop, six years old. Doubtless there have been a hundred driftwood-cities in this field before us, constructed by other families trying to find themselves upon the beach.
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