One of the best things about living in a city, is leaving. the family and I tend to get out to somewhere pretty often especially during the summer. I remember on my first few years in the city getting kind of a cement claustrophobia every now and again. The walls here are so hard, and the cement and brick can start to seem more and more solid after a while. A little altitude like going on a roof tends to help over come the feeling a bit, the ocean feels even better, but nothing beats a mountaintop for rejuvenation. Theres something about being able to stand somewhere and look off into space and alow your soul to expand out in front of you to a distant horizon. Its like moving from the sofa into a real bed where you can really stretch out your feet.
For New Yorker's who are always hurring from here to there to there and doing 3 things actively and 2 things passively every minute of every day, a little time sitting in a field or watching a river is often immeasurably cathartic. And as such we tend to join up in little communities, carpool, and get the hell out of dodge together.
In my experience the suburbs are hard to appreciate. Growing up in the Connecticut countryside I certainly had my fair share of experiences roaming through the forest that began next to our house but for all the trees and the big yard, I don't think I ever really appreciated it. For me it was just a tedious set of chores that always needed to be done. twice a week I had to give up three hours in the afternoon and push a lawnmover back and forth across the yard and down the hill 142 times. When there wasn't grass to cut, there were leaves to rake and when no leaves fell, there was snow to shovel. For few few years we even had a big round pool in the middle of the back porch, which served to collect all of the leaves, pollen, and insect life from the neighborhod trees. I'm pretty sure I can count on one hand the number of times we used the poll for swimming cooling off or relaxation, but it was memorable for the fact that it required someone (yours truly) to to put on a bathing suit, slip into the slimy cold green water with a completely nonfunctional "pool vacuum" and make sweeping motion around the floor until the green stuff would magically come off the floor and stick to their skin. After a couple years of this awesome practice, I left for college and the pool was closed temporarily, then permanently, then removed. But I digress...
These days when we leave the concrete jungle and go someplace less concrete, we really appreciate it. Milan looks forward all the time for the next time we can go camping, ideally with his big sister Molly and his girlfriend Lois. Whats amazing is that camping is always great, even in a crappy trailerpark, where there having some social disco for all of the campers who go camping to meet others, its somehow always great and aleways effective at reprogramming our thinking patterns in just a number of hours.
Anyway, this weekend we went to the third annual get together of a loosely affiliated set of new york art/techno/hippy burner people. E is not really so into techno, so the first time we went to this event she was really put off by the music and a couple drunken people she talked to so she didn't hand around to explore much at all. After seeing that the children and I had had a really nice time without her last year, she was gung ho to give it another try provided we could camp someplace far away from the music. When I agreed to this I was thinking far away like 300 meters or so at the edge of the forest. But it was actually more like 700 meters up hill through the forest into a clearing of nothingness. There the music was still audible, but the birds were louder so thats where we set up camp.
A few noteworthy observations
- Spending a day on the banks on the rocks by a clean cool river really chills everyone out.
- Kids can throw rocks into a river for seven hours and still find it fantastic every time
- 8-bit music can be rather happy
- Lightning and fire smell really nice together
- I love that our spacious taj ma-tent
doesn't flood any more like the Kmart ones we used to use back in the 90s.
- When Kahlo woke up and demanded to go say hi to the people playing music at 2:30 in the morning during a lightning storm, we were pretty sure that we could just say no and convince her to go back to sleep. We were wrong. She wanted unbedingt (I believe that is the proper word here, basically translates from German as without negotiation or unconditionally) to go outside and say hello. So against any good judgement I put my broken sandals back on walked about 5 minutes through the forest during an a fierce lightning show that became pretty much a torrential downpour around the middle of the journey. I was thinking how I we were to get hit by lightning here, I would be clearly maligned in the press as a bad parent, despite the fact that the little girl in my arms was the one who was being so unbedingt. But the entire walk through the downpour which soaked us both through our German raincoats and all, Kahlo did not make another sound. And when we finally made it to the sanctuary of the geodesic dome playing drum'n'bass at 2:40 she sat with her high fidelity earplugs for small ears
and watched the dj and the fairy dancers with intense admiration. When the storm subsided and during a short power outtage I told her it was time to go back up the hill and sleep. She said ok.