“I feel sure, someway, that I shall always be a braver and stronger woman than I was before...”
-Alice Mabel Gray, "Diana of the Dunes"
I was two hours into my first solo camping trip when I got a call from Mommaw. She never calls me-- everyone knows I hate phone calls-- so I knew someone must have snitched about my plans. Sure enough, she was calling to dissuade me from camping alone. I sat there in a Marathon gas station in Kentucky (just past her house, though I didn't tell her that) while she talked at me for twenty minutes. She said she was mailing a check to my mom who could deposit it for me so I could pay for a hotel. "Choose a good, safe hotel and only stop at well-lit nice places. Like McDonald's or Burger King." Then she hung up, assuming, I suppose, that I would do as I was told like always. I continued driving to my campsite.
I never cashed that check. It wasn't a money issue. I was camping because I wanted to, not because I had to. The fact that tent campsites cost much less than hotel rooms is just a nice bonus.
It was day one of my four-day road trip to Fargo, North Dakota, where I would live from June to August. The U$DA folks who collected the bees for my thesis had agreed to let me come there to get more field experience, since I hadn't been the one to gather the bees myself. They were even paying me and giving me free housing in the ND$U dorms. It was a good gig-- I was excited-- and since I had done a long road trip alone the previous summer, I wanted to try something new. Taking a page out of Ranger Zoe's book once again, I decided to try camping alone.
My family was less than enthused. They all tried to talk me out of it, but I was twenty-four with a reliable car and a head for planning, so nothing was going to stop me. My sister said they yapped at length about what a stupid thing I'd done at the next family gathering. Poppaw offered me several small guns, but I declined. I didn't want to deal with differing gun laws across state lines, and I wouldn't be going anywhere dangerous. If this is how I die, this is how I die-- and at least I'll be having a good time when it happens.
Night one was Indiana Dunes National Park. I did make mistakes here.
Indiana Dunes sits on the cusp of Eastern and Central time zones. I knew what time sunset was, and I set an alarm to give me plenty of time to head to camp after chilling on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was my first time seeing the Great Lakes, and I sat in a folding chair with an audiobook and ate M&Ms as the light danced across the water. What I didn't know was that my phone had slipped into Central Time Zone. When my alarm went off, it was an hour later than it should have been, and I dashed to the campground. The sun was setting quickly as I started to unpack. It took several tries to put together the tent. It had been a long time since I had pitched one, and I kept getting the steps in the wrong order or turning something inside out.
The campground host rolled up in a gator as I was figuring out the tent fly. "Where's your park pass?" Shit. I had made the campground reservation, but I hadn't picked up a park pass on the way in. "The website said they were available on site. Can I pay you for one?" No, they were not actually available on site. I had to drive back out to the closest gas station and buy one there. I didn't want to leave my things unattended, so I put the tent back in the car and drove to the gas station.
It was completely dark by the time I got back. There was no time to make dinner, so I had more M&Ms. My teeth felt gritty. I also had to put the tent together with a headlamp on, and that headlamp attracted bugs. When I woke up in the morning, my feet and ankles were covered in mosquito bites. They looked positively diseased. And because it was a national park, the place was packed. The line for the camp bathrooms was long. It took forever to get a shower, and when I finally got into my sleeping bag, people talked nearby late into the night. I barely slept.
I told my family of none of these inconveniences, of course.
In the morning, I went to the Visitor Center and hiked some of the dunes, including the Diana of the Dunes Dare. That one tells the story of Alice Mabel Gray, an Edwardian who lived alone in a shanty on the dunes for a decade.
I wondered what her family said when she set out alone.
I stopped in Chicago for pizza at a place one of my friends recommended. I had lunch with the pigeons in a tiny nearby park downtown.
Night two was at Mirror Lake State Park in Wisconsin. There was no time zone change this time, and I arrived with enough time to have a real dinner. This was the first time I used my camp stove. I've had an irrational fear of anything that resembles a Bunsen burner since my chem lab TA days in undergrad. I once watched another TA help a student whose Bunsen burner would not turn on. The student had released the valve all the way, and when the TA turned the gas on, the flame shot up and singed a ceiling tile. If he had been leaning over it, he would have burnt his face off. Luckily there were no such fire-related incidents with my Chef Boyardee.
Someone's dad offered to help me pitch my tent at this site. I politely declined, but it was nice to feel welcomed. There were lots of families there. It felt very neighborly and safe.
In the morning I hiked around and got some new birds on Merlin. It was aggressively hot and humid by lunchtime. I wished I had packed my bathing suit accessibly so I could take a dip in the lake.
Frontenac State Park in Minnesota was next. This one had some indigenous history, and I hiked to see In Yan Teopa Rock before bed. It was named by the Dakota people. Also the bluffs of Lake Peppin were beautiful. Somehow Lake Peppin is a lake on the Mississippi River-- I'm not sure how to comprehend that, but okay.
This was night two with the Bunsen burner, and I tried a backpacking recipe that had good reviews, some kind of pasta with canned crab. It wasn't great. The crab and noodles tasted ok separately, though, so I choked some of that down.
In the morning, I had chai and packed up quickly to get to a cat cafe in Twin Cities. This was my first time visiting one. The other people visiting there didn't seem to know anything about interacting with cats and couldn't read their body language. I ended up mostly sitting in a corner and giving the cats space because I felt bad for them. But I got to see pretty kitties.
I saw prairies for the first time on my way into Fargo. It was amazing how
flat everything was. I also discovered that Minnesota police have some maroon-colored cop cars (no I did not get pulled over but it's nice to be able to see them coming from a distance and I've always thought red was a safe color in your rearview-- apparently not here.)
Anyway I guess here are the things I learned from my solo travel:
1) Have a digital watch if you are traveling near/across time zones
2) Double check all the paperwork before you go-- reservations, park passes, receipts, directions
3) Practice pitching your tent and using equipment before you get there
4) Keep a bathing suit handy just in case
5) Have as little exposed skin as possible at night in the summertime
6) Bring an air mattress or inflatable sleeping pad. They're not that expensive
7) Try out recipes before you camp
8) I need more time to explore new places than I think I do
9) Document better-- I didn't journal at all and I didn't take many pictures of my first solo trip.
10) I should have done this sooner
