Camping

It has been years since I last experienced sleeping in a tent outdoors, but I recently returned from a camping trip in Watsonville, near the ocean, with a group of high school (or former high school) students and other adults connected to a local church. In the process, I met kind people and named my car; but what was perhaps most novel about the trip was the intersection of nature, civilization, and culture. Indeed, one of the first things we learned on arriving was that our campground was stationed next to an agribusiness-sized strawberry patch, pickers hard at work and a taco truck there to serve them, all within walking distance of the ocean and a short drive to a shopping center. To see these shades of American culture juxtaposed like this was at once unique, quaint, and telling. It was like reading The Grapes of Wrath and watching an episode of "Are You Afraid of the Dark," all on a smart phone.

After arriving, setting up our tents, and enjoying the beach for a time, we settled in the evening around a campfire, where the students roasted s'mores, an experience so ubiquitous in summertime campgrounds across the U.S. Soon after retiring for the night, we saw and heard several raccoons around our picnic tables, searching for food. They walked up to some of the adults in our group before those adults shooed them away. After falling asleep, I woke to near-complete silence, a silence so full that I could hear only what I thought was the movement of an insect on top of my tent. On the second night, a raccoon scratched at my tent less than two feet from where I lay inside.

We drove to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk on the first full day, played miniature golf, enjoyed the beach, and experienced nostalgia as we walked through an arcade with games from the 1980s. The drive home the third day, like the drive there, allowed us to listen to over half of my CD collection and (on the way home) play "Would You Rather."