Backpacking Newlyweds

I was in my 20’s before I went camping for the very first time—if you don’t count the overnight slumber party in a big tent in Lizzie Warner’s backyard across the street when we were 13.

I’d married an outdoorsman passionate about hunting, fishing and hiking who was just getting into backpacking in the nearby Catskills and later in the Adirondacks. We were a sight–the city girl in fashionable jewelry and make-up trekking through the forest and her rugged, handsome “back-country” fella. I showed him the NYC subways; he showed me the deep woods.

We spent a fair amount of time and money getting good backpacking gear: packs with aluminum frames that were light but sturdy, and mummy-shaped down sleeping bags that stuffed into an unbelievably tiny sack once you pressed the air out of them, dark blue on the outside and light blue on the cozy inside. They wouldn’t allow for sleeping together under one cover but we could figure out the intimacy part along the way.

We carried flashlights, matches, a small packer’s cookstove and freeze-dried food—the specific details are vague after all this time, but we had it all covered. Oh, and a tent of course—a tiny, greenish pup tent that just about covered his six-foot-four frame. We didn’t use it on many trips because our accommodations turned out to be much more interesting.

Matt had been investigating trails with topo maps and had discovered the existence of large log-built lean-to’s scattered around the Catskills and Adirondacks of upstate New York. They were something out of a dream. When I first laid eyes on one, I thought it was the most ingenious camp shelter I could have imagined. We had walked about five miles into the woods, across a lush, young meadow with green-spotted orange salamanders and tiny beaded ruby eyes sunning themselves on wide stalks of grass and we ended up by a lake.

And there it stood. 

It was walled on three sides, with the fourth facing the lake; the walls were built of huge logs stacked one on top of the other just like the cabins you’d see in pioneer adventure books. They had shelves to place some essentials onto and you could store the rest of your gear toward the back. The floor was a bed of soft pine needles. 

There were other logs out front for sitting around a metal ring with a grate to build a fire and cook. We’d have to scavenge our own firewood but that turned out to be one of my favorite parts of camping.

I was better than you’d think a girl from Queens could be at finding dry, naturally seasoned wood and Matt was good at breaking it down and keeping a roaring fire going without getting too much smoke into our eyes. He was also a great campfire cook.

Maybe my love affair with wood fires stems from this time of my life, newly married on a wildly romantic adventure with the fragrance of burning pine or cedar enveloping me like a warm blanket.

I never went camping as a child or adolescent. My folks were city natives to whom staying in a pine-paneled motel room meant roughing it. I’d been a Girl Scout, and though my mother had been to an adult camp herself and was a troop leader and my family had spent a day trip at a Girl Scout camp, my father wouldn’t have his girls away for even a weekend, much less the entire week each of the campgrounds booked for. And that was that.

Staying in those big log lean-to’s—even the five-mile trek carrying a pack—was an idyllic weekend getaway and we returned again and again. Some were closer to us in the upper Catskills, others were nestled in the Adirondacks a little further afield.

One of the shelters we stayed in had a sketchbook with meticulous charcoal drawings of deer drinking at the lake and birds on branches which someone had left behind for future travelers which we also left for others to discover. Another lean-to had a logbook: we added the date, our names and city.

One sultry morning in July I awoke and looked out to the crystal blue of the lake in front of the lean-to. Then we each stripped and jumped in for a refreshing bath/swim and the water felt so gentle against my skin and the beginning of the day so sweet I wished I could wake up like that every single day for the rest of my life.

Cooking eggs, frying bread, making coffee with the primitive gear we’d packed made for a great start to the rest of the day, which we’d fill with hiking, or fishing or simply being. Nature is its sovereign activity, demanding nothing except to notice and just exist.

One night in the Adirondacks I heard the maniacal cry of loons and from that night on I understood how they got their name. Another evening we saw an owl and heard its low ominous hoots throughout the night, There were always deer and at night racoons, and we kept our food and other belongings securely packed and up high–out of reach of such trespassers. I never thought about bear and we didn’t see any, but I know that all these decades later they do populate the New York state forests—no real enemies–and I wonder if the lean-to’s are still there and if they’re still as safe from man or beast.

The numerous other details of our expeditions beyond that blur together but I imagine myself as happy then, yet not really noticing or registering the extent of my happiness, because like so many of my early adult years I was only half-present—my mind was always fixated on resolving some past pain, or embroiled in some future fantasy or imagining myself as me but in someone else’s life–someone who didn’t really exist except in images I conjured up.

Backpacking in the Adirondacks was equally soul-satisfying as in the Catskills, except for one disastrous Memorial Day at Blue Mountain and Blue Mountain Lake. I didn’t know that late-May-early June is peak season for swarms of black flies—I had never even heard of black flies—but they lost no time making their presence known to us.

I am fodder for biting insects anyway—especially mosquitoes–but even they were never as vicious as these intrusive, infinitesimal demons that invaded my nostrils, ears, onto my eyelids, my scalp and any part of my flesh not completely covered. We hiked up the trail and the morning grew warmer and the more I sweated, the more it attracted the relentless pests.

Reaching the summit of the mountain was a blessing as the wind at the top was finally strong enough to sweep the flies away—but then we had to descend back down to the lake. We met a woman on the trail covered head to foot in mosquito netting and I envied her the rest of the way down. I lost count of all the times I was bitten, little smears of blood—my blood!– all over my arms and feet and neck and eventually I removed my outer shirt and completely covered my head to keep them away from my nose and mouth and lost a silver earring in the process.

I was full of irritation, resentment and frustration by the time we got back to our car and made the short drive to the lake lodge, and only a couple of ice-cold beers and a magnificent pastrami on rye soothed my persecuted sensibilities enough for me to finally smile. I looked over at Matt in his misery and we both started laughing. We’d survived. We were away from the tiny beasts and only a little worse for the wear and we’d shared an adventure: travel + disaster.

Back home, I found out that by an odd coincidence, my twin sister, who was living in New York with her husband, had also been on Blue Mountain that weekend, at a nearby spot camping with some of his family. We shared our black-fly horrors, but she had it a lot worse than I did. She had fewer blackfly bites than I did but each one turned into a deep purple, painful bruise on her porcelain skin. I asked her if she’d been at the lodge and tried the draft beer and pastrami.

“Corned beef,” she said.

Matt and I backpacked to the state-maintained lean-to’s a few times more but adventures were mostly limited to reaching for our butter one breakfast and discovering sharp teeth-marks in it. But that changed one early September weekend when we’d tried a new location and new lean-to at a place called Queer Lake. The name came from the odd shape of the lake: like an hourglass with the two narrowest points close together but not quite touching and each side covered in thick forest.

We were resting during a hike on one side of the lake and the woods were so overgrown you couldn’t see across to the other shore from where we stood. All of a sudden we heard a loud blast and something whizzed past my head.

“Get down!” Matt yelled and as I lay shaking in the leaves, flat on the ground, we realized someone was shooting a rifle across the lake–without even being able to see what was on the other side. Us.

There was another shot, and a third and then Matt yelled in his deepest, meanest voice: “Hey! We’re over here you moron! Stop shooting!” There may have been another choice word or two I don’t recall.

We heard someone yell “Sorry” and the shooting abruptly ended. But we waited about ten minutes still pressed to the forest floor before we rose, Matt first, to make sure it was safe and then stretching out his hand to help me up. I shook all the way back to our campsite and a sick dread took up residence in my gut and refused to be quieted. I could hear the tension in Matt’s voice as well.

A dark deeper than the approaching night seeped into the air around us and we were silent as we watched the embers of the fire turn black and we both decided to call it an early night and try to sleep. It was Friday, and we’d planned to stay the weekend. But next morning, without conversation, we packed up our gear and headed for home.

I took a hot bath and we shared a meal and eventually my nerves relaxed and we returned to normal. But we didn’t return to camp at the lean-to’s anymore after that afternoon. It didn’t ruin camping and backpacking for us, but it had come close.

Our trips after that time were mostly in the nearer Catskills, on a tributary of the Delaware River in a place called Russell Brook near Roscoe, NY.

Despite the one harrowing incident, I almost always felt safe camping. And after a city childhood, I became constantly awed by the simple beauty and variety that was nature. Trekking to the lean-to’s each time became a familiar sequence of striking landmarks. My favorite was the walk across a wide, boggy meadow where trail maintenance had installed a series of wide wood planks end-to-end to walk on. Every time we reached them, I knew that camp was near and my steps became lighter, more energized.

 

The times of the season brought a changing panorama of sights and sounds. In May we heard choruses of peepers. In August it was uncountable crickets, cicadas and katydids. And just about everything in upstate New York boasted one of a million hues of green. One plant that seemed to grow wild and abundant looked exactly like a cabbage.

There were multi-hued sunsets at dusk, the edges of the galaxy in an inky sky and shooting stars at night, and, occasionally, the comforting patter of raindrops on the tent roof.

Each new discovery of things that grew wild, their proximity and all around-ness took me out of myself and forced me to notice, to pay attention in the moment. I still escaped at times into my own thoughts–but I was not alone. Matt would retreat into the silence of his inner shadows, too. And the summers flew by faster and faster.

Later, long after Matt and I went our separate ways, camping with a group or on my own, I would be reminded of something from those newlywed days. And after carrying only what would fit into a pack and feeling it weigh heavier with each mile, vehicle and even tent camping seemed like an indulgent luxury.

I’m glad I “roughed it” when I was just starting out and glad that I’d had someone to share it with, someone who took the time to introduce a native New Yorker to a world of nature waiting just beyond the concrete and ease her into it in the sweetest possible way.