A Thousand Times No

Portland has a reputation as a cyclist’s paradise.  Most people think it’s because cycling has achieved true critical mass here: there are extensive bike paths, several custom bicycle manufacturers in the area, and an extremely high number of everyday bicycle riders.  When I got off the plane, I was greeted in the airport by an enormous glass showcase that displayed one gorgeous Oregon-made bike after another.

But after spending time watching people riding around the Rose City, I’m here to tell you why Portland really rocks:  There’s a dearth of fixies.  The one notable exception I saw was when I spotted a guy doing a track stand for what seemed like an eternity on a downtown sidewalk.

Which means this town is Beyond Hip.  They’re totally tuned in to the fact that the most important thing about bicycling, as Freddy Mercury used to sing, is simply this: “Get on your bikes and ride!”

While we were in Rainier, we saw many wild creatures.  The hoary marmots (marmota caligata), were out in force, feasting on the late-blooming alpine wildflowers that covered the meadows in great abundance.  I immediately recognized the waddling rodents as cousins of Punxsutawney Phil and the Pennsylvania groundhogs (marmota monax) that I often pedal past on the Schuylkill River Trail.  We also spotted several black-tailed deer, who were a bit shy, and numerous chipmunks, who were extremely brazen in their pursuit of food.  We had been warned before reaching the second Burroughs peak that a chipmunk had made off with an entire apple from a hiker’s lunch just minutes before.

The most surprising animal sighting, however, came at the end of our longest day of hiking.  As we were less than a mile from the Sunrise Lodge, we caught sight of a juvenile black bear.  He stopped to look down on us from about a hundred feet up a hillside, as if posing for a photograph.  (”Silly tourists,” I could imagine him saying as we fumbled to snap a picture. “Can’t you learn to operate a point-and-shoot camera?  Point.  Shoot.  Done.”)  After several seconds, he slowly ambled away.

Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you — and sometimes, you just look each other in the eye and head back to your respective dens, content to have met and shared a small piece of the day.

The eminently quotable blogger BikeSnobNYC once defined the term “cyclist” as someone who rides a bike when they don’t have to, and who owns a floor pump.  If there’s an equivalent taxonomy when it comes to camping, I guess it would have to do with bedding down under the stars and owning a tent or an outdoor sleeping bag.

By that, or any other definition, I have never been a camper.  By “never,” I mean I had not slept in a tent so much as once, even lying out on someone’s suburban lawn.  Among some of my friends, this information would be greeted with a shrug:  Why would anyone lie on the ground when they could be sleeping in a bed somewhere nearby?  Isn’t that why credit cards were invented?

But among other friends of mine, this news verges on apostasy.  How could I manage to have spent my entire life without taking the chance to get closer to nature?  What kind of person carries around a titanium spork and a penlight and doesn’t know how to pitch a tent?  To which I can only respond by hanging my head and offering up some extra gorp in the hope that they will permit themselves to be seen in public with me.

Cycling and camping both pose similar barriers to entry, in that they both require technical equipment.  In the case of cycling, there’s the bike itself, along with a helmet (if your grey matter actually matters to you).  With camping, the list runs too long to even mention.  Even if you want to mooch off your friends who already have the full complement of gear, there still needs to be a sleeping bag and sleeping pad for you.  In short, it’s difficult to tag along with experienced cyclists and campers if you’re a total newbie, simply for want of stuff.

My sister and her friends all generously chipped in to get me to the other side of the Great Camping Divide.  One person loaned an extra sleeping bag and mat, another pair of people let us share their camp stove and food, and someone even let us borrow a spare tent, just in case the one we already had proved to be too small.

“We’ll be car-camping,” my sister assured me, “so it’s a lot more relaxed.”  Unlike full-blown backpacking, car-camping involves storing all your equipment in your vehicle and setting up your tent nearby.  You don’t need to spend the whole day turtle-ing your shelter from place to place on your back.  Much to my relief, the campgrounds are also equipped with toilets and sinks.  (For the record, campers have much better aim than the rest of the population.  I’m just sayin’.)

Our plan was to spend three days and two nights amid the breathtaking mountains and well-maintained trails in Mount Rainier National Park.  The Cascade mountain range where Rainier is situated is a testament to the awesome power of nature, shaped by blistering volcanoes (like Mount St. Helens) and massive glaciers.  It turned out that nature’s plan and ours diverged in the woods.

After claiming a campsite, we had started hiking in the afternoon, planning to pitch our tents when we returned.  In the evening, just as we had pulled the tents from their bags and were starting to put stakes in the ground, it began to rain.  Not the light, almost misty drizzle that is characteristic of the American Northwest — no, this was rain, cold and steady, dropping through the trees and drenching the ground underneath.

We struggled to finish setting up the tents in the downpour.  Or, more accurately, my sister and her friend struggled.  I was pretty useless, except as large imitation sponge.  At one point, I bent over to position a stake, only to pop right back up with a yelp as my back was hit with chilly rainwater in the gap between my jacket and pants.

When the tents were completely set up, we dashed back to our cars and hopped inside to wait out the rain.  I peeled off my rain jacket and tossed it into the back of the car.  We waited.  My sister began making a mental inventory of everything we could eat without setting up a stove.  We waited.  I started to catch up on some knitting.  We waited. We dug into some pre-barbecued chicken and trail food.  We waited.  The sun set.  We waited.

My sister went out in the rain to check her tent, and saw that the inside appeared relatively dry.  Still, she was wise enough to counsel me that I was probably better off staying in the car.  We tilted back the car seats, dug out the pillows, unzipped the sleeping bags to form large blankets, and hunkered down for the night.

“Think of it as sleeping airline-style,” my sister joked.

“But with better legroom and nicer blankets,” I replied.

The only genuine difficulty in the whole situation was that as we were trying to sleep, one or both of us kept sporadically breaking out into gales of laughter over the whole situation.  I couldn’t stop giggling at the words “car camping” for a good long while.

When we woke up in the morning, the rain had stopped.  My sister made sure that all our sleeping equipment was moved inside the tent, and we spent the day hiking.  You get one guess what the skies decided to do once I got inside the tent after dinner.

The tent held up admirably, since its integrated tarpaulin was sewn in, effectively creating one giant waterproof bag.  Me — not so much.  Since I had climbed in before the rain had begun, my rain jacket was still in the car.  If I stepped outside, I would end up soaking myself and then dripping all over the tent’s interior when I crawled back in.

Imagine someone who needs to find a bathroom trying to lie still and fall asleep while listening to the sounds of rainfall mixed with the constant splashing of a nearby riverbed.  The rain continued until the following morning.  As soon as it stopped, I bolted (or more like hobbled, knock-kneed) out of the tent.

My sister’s friend who was camping with us commented over breakfast that he had spent about 250 nights camping in his life already.  Of those nights, only 4 were rainy — including the two nights we had just passed.  Hearing that, I felt like slightly less of a n00b.

So now I can finally say that I have gone camping…and I know why the place is called Rainier.

One of the great things about our recent jaunt out to Mount Rainier National Park is that I saw a number of people who provided inspiration for what to do later in life:

• The three sixty-ish women who were hiking up and down Burroughs Mountain together (and making better time than I was)
• The married farm couple from Iowa who had just sent their fourth and youngest child off to college earlier in the week, and who were celebrating by riding around the country on a Harley-Davidson
• The two very fit retirement-age couples who were strolling into the lobby of the Paradise Inn, both husbands decked out in shorts while the temperature outside hovered around 50°F (10°C)

Definitely better than Botox.

This post is necessarily brief since (a) I have been camping, and (b) I’m racing against the clock to finish making a scarf with the blue yarn I rediscovered last spring.

Because, you know, eighteen or nineteen years is not nearly enough time get these things done.

Another chapter in the brief history of time:

Sister: See? I told you that my hair is going gray.

Me: No, it’s not.

Sister: Look up here. [Pulls back hair, points at temple.]

Me: What are you talking about?

Sister: There’s a whole area up there that’s whitening.

Me: No, I see only one gray hair. That’s it.

Sister: Wow, your eyesight really IS starting to go bad.

In my rapid packing for the trip, I failed to toss in a proper pair of long pants suitable for camping in the cool temperatures at higher elevation. To spare me the challenge of pants-free hiking, my sister suggested we swing past “The Bins,” a huge Goodwill center near the edge of town where used clothing is sold by the pound.

After we arrived, we managed to pick out some sweatpants and an extra fleece jacket for me to wear on the trail, along with some tonier finds like a Marks & Spencer sheath dress for her and some Ralph Lauren khakis and a cashmere sweater for me. Just as we were about to leave, my sister suggested that we swing by the shoe bins to check for some dress shoes that she might wear when going out dancing.

Picking through the vast assortment of men’s, women’s, and children’s shoes, I suddenly did a double-take. I saw a lone sandal sitting in the middle of the bin that looked extremely familiar. I picked it up, and stared at it for a moment.

“How odd,” I thought. “It looks just like one of my shoes.” For a moment, I wondered whether I had accidentally placed my own shoes in the bin while trying on a different pair. But when I looked down at my feet, I saw a pair of sandals that matched the orphan sandal in my hand.

By “match,” I mean exact match — same brand, same style, same color, same size. Considering that I was wearing a specialty sandal that was discontinued six years ago, it was an incredible stroke of luck. The only problem was that I held a near-new left sandal in my hand, but its mate was nowhere in sight.

My sister and I diligently rummaged through every single shoe bin in the place, without success. I looked a second time, and then a third. Finally, I spotted Mr. Right, hidden amid the random pumps and sneakers.  Jackpot!

And with that, my vacation took another giant step in the right direction.

While my sister and I made our way through Portland yesterday around nightfall, I noticed that several houses had rather elaborate lighting schemes for the walkway steps in their front yards.  The first time I saw some fancy illumination shining out from an outdoor stair riser, I was impressed.  Then I saw another, and another, as they seemed to be sprouting up like Oregon’s beloved mushrooms.

I wondered why this was such a popular treatment here, and as it grew darker, it became self-evident: the amount of street lighting in residential neighborhoods here is minimal.  So minimal that I found it a little unsettling.

Even though I knew I was perfectly safe, I mentioned to my sister that the lack of lighting felt a bit disturbing.  “Sidewalk plus dark equals trouble,” my urban instincts were insisting.  She said that when she first moved to Portland (after a decade of living in major world cities), she had felt the same way, but quickly grew accustomed to the peaceful veil of night here.

“You know, when we go camping, it’s going to be really dark,” she reminded me.  “Is that going to freak you out?”

I told her I didn’t know.  Dark, minus sidewalk, equals “too dim to see whether a bear shits in the woods or not.”

Remember the conversation-starter that asks which superpower you’d rather have, the ability to fly or the ability to make yourself invisible?  My hidden talent lies in a variant of the two: I have become adept at flying in a way that is invisible to my pocketbook.  Yes, I’m an expert at getting bumped from airline flights.

Just yesterday the New York Times ran a piece on how the level of voluntary passenger bumping has been escalating now that an increasing numbers of airline flights are overbooked.  Since most of my air travel is for personal trips and I don’t face hard deadlines with my arrivals, I’ve permitted myself to be bumped more than a half-dozen times over the years.  In exchange, I’ve received vouchers or coupons towards future flights that have turned my tickets into twofers (or, in one legendary instance, stretching a ticket purchased with frequent flyer miles into three additional round-trip tickets).

Today I arrived more than an hour early for my flight, dropped off by one of my friends who was returning a rental car to the airport.  When I arrived at the gate with boarding pass in hand, I asked (as I always do) whether the flight was completely full.

“Completely,” said the people working at the counter while they intently keyed through their screens.  They were friendly and conversational, but clearly focused on working with their passenger data.  My antennae started tingling.

I asked if they needed any volunteers to give up seats, and they immediately took me up on my offer.  After spending a few minutes looking for ways they could reroute me to Portland, they found a way to rearrange my itinerary to free up the seat I would have been taking to Washington-Dulles.

So rather than the much-dreaded, non-stop, coast-to-coast connecting flight from Dulles that I was expecting when I arrived at the airport, here’s what I got instead:

• A connecting flight that took me through one of my all-time favorite terminals, Helmut Jahn’s light-filled B and C wings of Chicago O’Hare
• Exit-row window seats on each plane, both with literally over six feet of legroom due to seat configurations that removed the window seat from the row in front of me
• An arrival in Portland over two hours earlier than my original itinerary
• A voucher for a free round-trip flight anywhere in the continental US

I don’t think anyone’s had such a good time getting bumped off since the filming of “The Sopranos” wrapped.  The only thing missing was a soundtrack from — say it with me now — Journey.  W00t-w00t-w00t!

I’m in the midst of packing for a week-plus trip that kicks off with the better part of a day in transit.  This means charging up my iPods (er, yeah…plural), completely draining out and then recharging my laptop battery, juicing up my cell phone, topping off a half-dozen AA batteries, and rounding up a full complement of in-flight munchies for The Hungriest of Them All — me.

As long as this keeps me from fretting too much over the fact that I’m sitting in a tin can way, way, way up off the ground, it’s worth it.