Category: Camping

Wheel estate

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Irish Space Travellers docking at The Duck! City Vortex? Nah, just our weather station.

Some vortexes suck more than others, I guess.

The Guardian has picked up on a story I saw earlier in The Washington Post, basically the same ol’, same ol’, about how some of The Beautiful People in Sedona would rather that the Help did not share their ZIP code.

It seems Sedona, like Santa Fe, Taos, Aspen, et al., is a few rooftops short of affordable housing for the worker bees who keep their fauxdobe hives filled with organic, free-range, GMO-free honey. Thus, some of the folks who fluff Swiss chard at Whole Foods or pillows at resorts keep getting rousted from local parking lots, state parks, or the national forest, where they live in their cars between shifts in the barrel(s).

One short-term solution being considered is a “safe place to park” program that would accommodate 40 vehicles (belonging to Sedona’s unhoused workforce, not itinerant bands of Travellers, meth cooks, and hookers). The idea is to provide bathrooms, showers, and a fixed location for workers who are already living in their autos wherever they can find a place to park them. A social-services organization would vet the “tenants” to make sure no Irish were sneaking in.

Jodi Jackson, who lives in an RV and works at a local coin laundry, told The Guardian: “We may not be housed and living in town, but we’re the ones who are doing your laundry, working at your gas stations, working at your restaurants — all of the lower-wage jobs – delivering your pizza, for God’s sake. We’re not bad people. We just need a little bit of help.”

Don’t we all, at some time or another? When I was a pup I occasionally brushed up against the rough edges of capitalism, newspaper style. It’s why I declined an offer of “casual labor” on the copy desk of the San Jose Mercury News — “casual labor” meaning “We don’t know exactly when we’ll need you, but it won’t be 40 hours a week with the usual bennies.” It’s why I decided to settle in Española instead of Santa Fe when I got the gig at The New Mexican.

As regulars here know, I don’t mind kipping in my auto now and then. But all the time? It was grating enough to watch the People of Money (© Ed Quillen) strutting around the Plaza when I had a roof over my head that didn’t come with wheels under me arse.

As I noted above, Sedona’s a familiar story: tourist town, short on affordable housing, long on Airbnbs, rising rents, and exploding home-sale prices, possibly overstocked with POM© and the sort of self-satisfied simp who muses over his venti green tea frappucino with a strawberry smoothie base, two pumps of caramel, three espresso shots, whipped cream and a caramel drizzle about how nobody wants to work anymore.

They want to work, all right; they just want homes to go to when the shift’s over, like everyone else.

• Editor’s note: The headline is lifted from “Blue Highways” by William Least Heat-Moon, who during a stretch of personal and professional difficulty kipped in a 1975 Ford Econoline while motoring around the country to see how other people were getting along.

Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Homeless? Not hardly. I had the tent, the Toyota, and the house where both were usually parked.

“They had all the news from all around the world just crammed into four pages. Didn’t even have any funnies in there, you know? Every time you turned a page something just jumped right out at you. …” — John Prine, “Dear Abby”

Read enough news and something will definitely jump right out at you.

Sadly, we no longer have John Prine to write songs about it.

Nevertheless, there I was, sipping my morning coffee, slouching aimlessly from pillar to post on the Interwebs, just waiting to get jumped by something.

And suddenly, boogity boogity boogity, there it was.

The Colorado Sun had a piece about the Moosejaw Business Accelerator, which in conjunction with Western Colorado University in Gunnison helps entrepreneurs with the theory and practice of launching outdoorsy businesses.

The story featured a fellow with an 18-pound, thousand-buck ruck that comes with most everything a larval backpacker needs; a duo working on a clothing line for “plus-sized” adventurers; and a bikepacker whose outfit makes “plant-based, gluten-free dehydrated meals for backpacking.”

They were all enthusiastic and effusive and by golly, good for them. I hope they’re all thundering successes.

And then I stumbled onto a New York Times story about how the end of pandemic-era federal funding for emergency housing is forcing Vermont to evict homeless people from subsidized motel rooms and into (wait for it) tents.

With waiting lists for shelter beds and transitional housing, the only option available to most of those forced from hotels this month was a free tent. Across the state, social service workers handed out camping equipment, a gesture that pained providers like [Jess Graff, director of Franklin Grand Isle Community Action, a nonprofit agency in St. Albans], who saw 28 households displaced from hotels in her area of northern Vermont on June 1.

“Even purchasing the tents is awful, because you’re in the store with a cart full of camping equipment, and people are saying, ‘Looks like a fun weekend!’” she said.

“A fun weekend.” Like, say, camping in a Brattleboro cemetery. Might see the odd plus-sized person out there trying to stay dry among the tombstones. But I bet s/he’s not sporting a thousand-buck ruck.

Some days I wonder whether we have the right foot on the wrong accelerator.

Taconook

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Well, now I know what I want for Christmas.

Start passing the sombrero*, y’all. I think you’re gonna need a big one.

* A tip of the hat to Adventure Journal, which agrees with me that “if Toyota was fun and not merely practical, they’d put this sucker into a production run.”

Autumn, leaves

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 33 Comments

The third and best season is upon us.

The autumnal equinox seemed an auspicious occasion for the flushing out of headgear.

I hadn’t left the confines of Bernalillo County since October 2019, and the walls of El Rancho Pendejo had passed the time by slowly creeping inward. Most people wouldn’t notice. But I am a Professional Journalist and know a hoodoo when I see one (our mantra is hoodoo, what, when, where, and why).

So I got out of Dodge. Threw too much camping gear into Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster, left the MacBook Pro where it sat, and sputtered off to see if all my long-neglected outdoorsy stuff still worked. Just in case something didn’t, I planned to be gone for not too long, to nowhere too remote, and not too far away. I favor multiple redundancy systems, but still, just because you’re paranoid, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.

Hoodat?

The great thing about car camping is you can overpack without flattening your tires, feet, and/or spinal column. So I took two sleeping pads (Therm-a-Rest BaseCamp and ProLite Plus), and I layered them sumbitches between me, the tent floor, and the ground, just because I could.

You wouldn’t want to backpack that BaseCamp, which goes about 3.6 elbees in the large model, but it is the shit for car camping.

I didn’t double up on tents, going with one Big Agnes Fly Creek UL2. Big Agnes says you can fit two people in there, but not if one of them is me. The voices in my head take up a lot of square footage when they come out at night. But what a great one-person tent. Sets up fast, comes down even faster. Just the thing for that third season, which is my favorite.

The bag was a Marmot Elite 30, which is plenty toasty for a hot sleeper like Your Humble Narrator, but a tad on the snug side. It’s kind of like wearing a puffy coat with a hood, but in a duster length.

For a backpack, I chose the Gregory Stout 45. If I need to carry any more gear than fits in a Stout 45, I ain’t going. I may be a jackass, but I ain’t no burro. This is one comfortable pack for traveling fast and light (or for fetching your gear from the car to the campsite to minimize the back-and-forth).

However, since I was car camping, not backpacking, I brought along two items that didn’t fit in the Gregory: a camp chair from L.L. Bean and my elderly Coleman two-burner propane stove.

Now, I have had more than a few camp stoves over the years, from an MSR RapidFire isobutane burner that for years was my main road-trip rest-area stove, to itty-bitty bikepacking boogers like the Soto Micro Regulator, which fits with its canister in a Snow Peak Trek 700 titanium pot. But man, that old Coleman does the business. It was our backup cooker for when the utilities went south up Weirdcliffe way.

Like everything and everyone else, the Coleman two-burner has been through some changes over the years — my old model has a piezo igniter — but it’s still getting rave reviews, and it’s still as cheap as the dirt you’ll sleep on.

And the Subie? Glad you asked. Seventeen years old and she’s still kickin’. If I don’t drive like the Road Warrior, she won’t set me afoot in the desert. That’s the deal we struck, and so far so good. But sometimes I take a bicycle along just in case (see paranoid, above).

An ominous rattle developed on the return trip, but it turned out to be coming from the plastic garage-door opener clipped to the driver’s side visor.

They say you can’t go home again, but it opened the door for me just like always, so in I went.

Hello, sunshine.

Could be worse. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

August slipped in wearing its gray flannel suit.

Sixty-four degrees at 8 a.m., with a monochromatic sky and a forecast that would have Noah muttering, “Not again,” as he reached wearily for the red phone next to his spyglass and Mae West.

“Hello, San Diego Zoo? Two of everything, please, chop-chop. No, no delivery necessary. I’ll pick ’em up. Just truck ’em up to Hot Springs Mountain and keep a sharp lookout for a real big boat.”

Welcome to August.

It’s not what I expected, frankly. With The Visitation on hiatus and my calendar remarkably free of to-do items I had been pondering a brief escape from the sodden Duke City to air-dry the old brain-case.

Fewer deer, more roses.

But the weather is proving uncooperative, and it seems silly to drive somewhere else to watch it rain when I can do that right here at home.

Especially since travel involves either a cheerless motel room that was no bargain before the daily rent shot into the mid-two-hundies (plus you can’t find one anyway), or pitching a tent in a flaming puddle full of vampire bugs, shape-shifting cooties, and hobos who wish all these slumming hipster dickheads would just dig into their Hilton points and piss off so they could enjoy their mulligan stew and squeeze in peace.

Masque of the Dread Breath

Well, at least we’re back to the face panties again, hey? Some of us, anyway. The checker was not up for casual banter as I hit the Sprouts to replenish the larder, possibly because The Great Remasking seemed to be a few faces short of a full team effort at 9:30 on a gloomy Sunday morning.

I had noted some diamonds on my windshield during the drive to the grocery and was hoping the actual tears from heaven would hold off long enough for me to sneak in a quick ride without fenders or jacket.

Sure, we need the moisture. And no desert dweller should bitch about rain, unless he parks his shopping cart in an arroyo. But I’m just enough of a hipster dickhead to need the ride, too.

With the deer rustling their own grub up in the hills we were getting a rerun of roses in the yard, so, yay. But the murky mornings and low ceilings recalled Corvallis, Oregon, the only place I’ve ever lived without a bicycle.

The clouds sagged all the way down to the ground in that burg. The moist walls of my tiny apartment closed in around me like hungry freegans swarming a Whole Paycheck Dumpster and the firewood steamed before it burned in the cheap tin wood stove.

A neighbor’s ducks loved that climate, quacking contentedly outside my bedroom window. I drank a lot.

Horses for courses

Back home, with the groceries put away, I took another glance at the sky and decided to go for it. I used to race cyclocross, I thought. I’ve covered school-board meetings. I can do anything for an hour.

I felt another drizzle tuning up as I approached the base of the short climb to the tram. So I swung around and headed back south, weaving Tramway and a network of foothills avenues into a rolling 20-miler. It was just the ticket. Smoove like butter and dry as a good martini.

Today — eh, not so much. The rain started before I even left the house.

I thought about taking the day off, but I ride with a small group of graybeards on Mondays and Wednesdays, and had already committed to the meetup. I had a feeling they’d be out in it, and it was unfortunate that I had mentioned my fondness for cyclocross in their presence.

So I left the New Albion Privateer parked and pulled a Steelman Eurocross down from its hook. A cyclocross bike for cyclocross weather. A man must carry on.

Sharp-dressed man

I stuffed a jacket into a jersey pocket to make sure the rain stopped, but it didn’t work. Didn’t matter, either. The rain continued, but never turned into a frog-strangler; it was barely even chilly, though I kept my arm warmers on. The jacket stayed in its pocket.

And yes, the geezers were all there. And yes, the Steelman drew many admiring glances. So yes, I’ve fooled ’em again.

At one point as we took shelter under a tree there was a short discussion about cutting a climb and subsequent descent from the usual route. It ended when one of us (not me) observed, “Well, we’re already wet, so. …”

So on we rode, taking the downs along with the ups.

It made me wonder what I’d been missing by not riding a bicycle in Oregon. I mean, I was gonna get wet anyway.