Fifty

“I can’t! I can’t! I can’t do it!”

The younger sobbed uncontrollably, his hands a bright shade of red, as his little bike came to a stop along a paved path through the woods. It was 7:30 in the morning, and the temperature was 35 Fahrenheit. I knew because I’d been checking it on my phone since four-thirty a.m., and it had ticked up exactly one degree since then. The sky was clear, the sun not yet over the treetops. My heart sank for the kid. He’d reached his limit and was in a completely dissolute state over it, his chest heaving in long, deep cries, tears streaming. My younger son, seven years old. I’d brought him there, and now I needed to get him out.

“Alright, buddy. It’s okay,” I said, sandwiching his burning-cold hands between mine. I lifted the ice chest filled with a day-and-a-half’s food and drinks that we would no longer need out of the wagon that was attached to my bike by a length of woven orange nylon rope. I set the ice chest off the paved path. Then I set his little red bike by the ice chest.

“Here, you get in here and I’ll bike you out,” I said as I pushed a few bags to the front to make space for him in the wagon. “Put your hands in your pockets.” I tried to pull his arms from between his legs and stick his hands in his hoodie pockets.

“It’s okay, dad,” he said, as the sobs slowed. “My hands are okay.”

He had some toughness in him and wasn’t going to stay at the bottom for long. We were .25 miles along a 1.25-mile path back to the car. Every quarter mile was marked. With a big pump down on the pedal, we started off and soon came to the older, who was just ahead on the path.

“I can’t do it,” the older said, starting to cry. “I can’t make it.”

“Did you try pulling your sleeves down over your hands?”

“Yes!” he yelled. “That makes it worse!”

“Okay. Stop and wait right here,” I said as we rolled by. The loaded-down wagon on a rope was easier to keep going straight than to get going straight. That was one of the things I’d learned in the past sixteen hours. “I’ll bike him out and come right back and get you.”

Sixteen hours since we’d pulled into the parking lot, and that moment marked the low point, for them, at least.

A friend of mine had a theory about campsites. If you can get a mile in, away from the road, from the parking, from bunches of people, from civilization, just one mile, then the whole camping experience opens up. The skies, the elements, the outdoors that you’re looking for — all of it comes readily if you can just manage to get yourself that far into it.

A few years out from my fiftieth birthday, I started looking for spots like that. I wanted a trip for me and the boys that would put us off the grid, that would let me wake up on that day in a beautiful place with my sons, doing something we loved to do, in a new special place. I had an idea at that point that they’d be old enough for a heavier adventure, seven and nine, old enough to carry a pack, to help out, to actually contribute to our survival, instead of strictly the earlier version of their camping selves, okay to sleep outside, as long as the car was right there, and daddy did all the work. I wanted a test, to gauge where they were in that regard, and a camp with a hike-in would surely be one. I also knew that if I never asked, then they’d never have any reason to answer, and we’d never know.

Looking back at what unfolded from there, I got exactly what I wanted.

Winter camping on the Gulf Coast was great, so good at times that it felt like a little secret to be guarded from the masses. We’d camped at Fort Pickens in November, near Pensacola, every year since the boys were born, except 2020 when the campground was flooded by Hurricane Laura. I’d camped there before the boys. It was one of my favorite places, the thin strip of land between the bay and the gulf that runs right up to the entry to Pensacola Bay. In all those years I’d only had one really cold night there, low thirties, and even that day, by noon I was in short sleeves. We swam in the gulf every trip. The gulf was warm, stayed even warmer in recent years, the air temperature when you emerged being your only concern, and the boys never cared. They were hearty in that way, despite the younger turning blue while drying off at times, his thin, bony frame shivering until the sun’s warm rays stabilized him. E.B. White’s chill of death lurked nearby.

Fort Pickens was our regular spot, and it was car camping. I wanted something different for the fiftieth. I’d seen some good hike-in spots. John’s Rock in Pisgah National Forest looked like an amazing place to hike and camp, but that was in North Carolina. Winter camping in the mountains wasn’t what I had in mind. I searched the warmer climes, the areas we knew, and when I came across the Outpost camps at Gulf State Park at Orange Beach, Alabama, it seemed like I’d found the perfect spot: primitive camp, army-style canvas tents already in place, no RVs, hike-in/bike-in on a paved path, and near the beach, with the moderating, gulf-coast weather patterns we were familiar with. This spot had it all. I booked it almost a year out.

About a week out, the forecast turned bad. Thunderstorms followed by a cold front were coming through, on a course to hit that exact area at the exact time we would arrive. I got depressed. How could it happen? The coming front was a topic of conversation around New Year’s across the gulf coast, not because of its severity, but because of the mass of warm, humid air it was going to slam into. In New Orleans, the temperature was 83 on Saturday, the overnight low for Sunday was predicted to be 35 — a fifty-degree temperature drop in twenty-four hours. Tornados would surely follow.

We weren’t coming from New Orleans, though. We were coming from the east, where we’d spent New Year’s Eve with family on the Florida gulf coast. On January 2nd, radar indicated that the heaviest rain had shifted north. We could drive through the tail end and arrive after it’d mostly cleared, to what looked to be a pretty nice evening. The temperature would drop overnight, but we’d bundle in the tent, and then the next day was all sun, with highs in the mid-forties. We’d be fine!

I checked in at the entrance to Gulf State Park around 3 p.m. The boys waited in the car. The woman in the office was a little unsure. The Outpost camps weren’t marked on the trail map. She pointed to the trail she thought they were on, but there was another trail just north of there that might’ve been it. All of that was back a few miles east on the beach road, the way we’d come. You had to take a left, or maybe it was a U-turn then a right, then look for the trailhead parking, which she was pretty sure was marked. She pulled out a basket of keys and rifled through them briefly, saying she was pretty sure the gate would be open. When they knew someone was coming, she said, they would go out and open the gate. It was unclear if they knew we were coming, but it was clear that we’d be the only ones out there.

“Is there firewood?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, definitely”, she said, her most confident statement thus far.

“We’ll be fine, then.”

We found the first trailhead, but none of the signage indicated there was a camp down that path. I asked some hikers if they’d seen a camp. They hadn’t, but they hadn’t gone far. This camp was so far off the radar that its existence could not be confirmed!

I looked at the trail map again and the general area where the woman in the office had pointed and figured we were probably at the right trail. I unloaded the bikes, had to screw one handlebar back up after unscrewing it to fit it in the car, loaded up the wagon, and we set off. The path was smooth, and the weather was nice. Rain had passed and late-afternoon winter sunlight splashed the woods of Orange Beach. The heavy wagon was tricky to maneuver, and when one of the plastic wheels went off the raised lip of the path and dragged sideways threatening to break off, I stopped and shortened the length of the pull rope. The wagon was one of those nylon-sided, pop-up deals, with a metal frame, but with plastic wheels, with an inch-wide rubber-band of “tread” stretched around each one. If one of those plastic wheels broke off, everything would get much harder.

When we found the site, we were filled with joy! It was great to be there! The canvas tents were roomy and nice. They were set up off the ground on wooden decks, with little front porches, with plastic Adirondack chairs. The fire pits were down from the tents, through the sand, with benches built in. Our tent was called “The Duke.” It was the farthest back off the trail of the three, past the firewood, the outhouses and sink, and the other two tents. The ground was sand, and the wagon wheels wouldn’t turn on it, so after dragging the wagon with the ice chest in it all the way to The Duke, I was winded and sweating. But I didn’t care! We were at a camp away from everyone, and it was a gorgeous evening. We would have a fire, make some dinner, and be in the tent by the time the temperature started dropping, just as soon as I biked back to the car to get the rest of the stuff.

Back at the car I contemplated the second load. Would I need both the cast-iron pan and the Dutch oven? I could just do all the cooking in the pan, but that oven with the lid was nice to have. The boys liked their Pilsbury cinnamon rolls in the morning, and they did better in the oven. I put them both in the wagon. What about the guitar? I did bring it all that way, no point leaving it then. By the end of the third mile-and-a-quarter trip, I was glad to be done with biking and with dragging stuff over the sand to The Duke.

I made a fire, and the sun went down. The wood wasn’t wet, but it had been wet. It burned, and eventually burned hot, but it wouldn’t put off much flame, no roaring, crackling fire. I cooked a few hot dogs on long forks, and I used a little cast-iron “camp cooker” to make the older a pizza kind of thing, with Pilsbury pizza dough, sauce, and cheese. It was a tradition, but they didn’t always come out good. This one did.

I thought the traditions would help the boys remember the trips. I didn’t know why. We took some camping trips when I was growing up, but I don’t remember any specific traditions that went along with them. Nor do I remember returning to a particular spot time and again. Beyond memories of cold creeks, starry skies, and dirt mixed in with the food, along with general memories of just being together with my family, a feeling of functioning as a unit, moving about together. My most specific memories were of the van we used to get there — the weight of the sliding door, the texture of the curtains my mother had sewn and affixed to the inside on little, telescoping rods, the feeling of being in the back of the van while it rolled down the highway. The bench seat was a wall. The back was a room. I didn’t know what my boys would remember from our trips, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be the car, a generic midsize SUV, one of an interchangeable few that they’d already known in their short lives. There was no way to know what they’d remember. Maybe I made the pizza pockets every time so that I’d remember.

By the time I went to use some of the dough to make the younger his blueberry pie, with berries and preserves inside, another tradition, a cold mist had started falling. The temperature dropped quickly as I moved the dry bags to inside the tent. We opened our sleeping bags onto the cots, and I went out to check the pie, while the boys got in their bags. Cold, misty rain was coming steady, so I brought the camp cooker back into the tent to open it, but I was a little late — the pie was golden brown on one side, but black on the other.

The younger was disappointed, but I told him not to worry. I had enough dough left to do another one. The dough was there in the tent with us. It had only gotten a little wet. I could tell they were getting tired, though, so I made them get up and put some layers and extra socks on before they got back in their bags. I sat outside minding that pie. The fire was hot, but only right in the middle. I could put my hand right over it, up to just a few inches from the wood.

By the time I got back to the tent, the younger was asleep. It was around eight p.m. I opened the cooker and used a flashlight to inspect the pie, still a little doughy on one side, but the boy was asleep, so I just left the cooker closed on the wooden deck floor. I chatted with the older for a short time in the lantern light, and then he was drifting off to sleep. There wasn’t much to do when it was too wet to sit out by the fire, and the kids were asleep in the tent, so I turned out the light and eased onto my cot, using a folded-up sweatshirt for a pillow. I had forgotten pillows. Or maybe I had meant not to bring them.

The wind picked up and whipped against the canvas walls, knocking the guitar in its case to the floor. I saw the younger twisting and turning, head buried under the bag, feet scrunched up., whimpering softly. I dozed off for some time, and when I woke with the noise of the wind, the younger was sitting up.

“You okay, buddy?”

“It’s too cold. I can’t sleep.”

I had suspected as much. The cots were nice for allowing air to flow underneath, that is, when it was warm out, but it was hard to stay warm on them in the cold. The floor might have been a warmer option, if the floor itself hadn’t been designed to do the exact same thing. The raised decks that the tents sat on worked great to allow air to flow underneath the tents. The tents were like the shotgun houses of tents, designed to stay as cool as possible in the mostly warm coastal climate. As it was, they didn’t trap any heat at all. We’d have been better off in a regular tent, on the ground, together on one bed and sharing blankets. But we were in The Duke, on cots, spread out from each other. Whatever the temperature was outside, that’s what it was in The Duke, and it was dropping quickly.

“Why don’t you come get in here with me?” I said.

He got up and came over, and I zipped us up together in my bag, which was a warmer one than his. On a different kind of bed, I could’ve slept with us both in one bag, but on the cots, the canvas sagged while the metal rails held firm against my back. We both tried to keep our faces covered, as the air in the tent was now too cold to expose your face to.

Some time passed, maybe an hour. I thought the younger was asleep, but then when the older woke up and sat up in his cot, I was wide awake.

“What’s the matter?” I said, already knowing the answer.

“It’s too cold. I can’t sleep.”

“Okay,” I said, and slowly unzipped my bag and pried myself from the younger and up.

“My feet are frozen,” he said.

I fumbled around in a bag for the last pair of socks and put them on his feet. I felt the cold air coming up from the half-inch gaps between the floorboards. I took his bag and the younger’s and unzipped them both. Maybe if I could sandwich us between two bags, there might be a little more room for two of us to sleep on one cot. That was the best idea I could think of. That or try to bike to the car.

I laid out one unzipped bag and told the older to get in. Then I got in and put the other on top of us blanket-style. It was warmer, but my torso was still smashed against the metal rail, and there was no place to put my arm except out and over the bar. After some time like that — twenty minutes? forty-five? trying not to cramp, no room to rearrange even slightly — I got up. I had no sleeping bag. I sat in the dark, cold tent.

I had wanted to see how grown-up they were, which in a way was a gauge of how tough they were. But how tough was I? I was their father, and they trusted that I would never put them in danger, would never put them in a situation where they wouldn’t be okay. But could I trust myself not to do that?

I once met the writer Scott Russell Sanders at a conference. He was one of the most remarkable people I’d ever had a conversation with. In a crowded cocktail party after his address, I got his attention and spoke with him about something, I can’t even remember what. What I do remember is how fully present he was in that conversation, in that moment. There were people waiting to speak with him, conference planners and board members, way more important people. I could see them and feel them waiting for a moment to cut in. But he couldn’t. He didn’t. He was talking to me, and that’s what he was doing at the moment. He gave that conversation his full self, undistracted, until it was done. It wasn’t about me, or what we were talking about, or some way he was trying to be at the time. It was just who he was, a completely mindful person, tuned in to every spoken word, his own and those of every person he spoke with. His comfort in the world was like none I’d ever seen.

During his keynote address, he’d told a story of an adventure with his son. I didn’t recall the exact details, but it involved a strenuous and challenging trip, to mark an occasion, a birthday, perhaps, or graduation. He must’ve been in his fifties at the time, and the picture he painted was one of a series of challenging adventures with his son — long hikes with backpacks, remote destinations, different continents — impressive and inspiring stuff. I didn’t have kids at the time, but his speech surely put some ideas in my head. When he came to the end of the story, he and his son were on top of mountain somewhere, and he had a moment of realization there. In choosing to have a child, he had internalized the responsibility of making that child’s life a good life, and he’d accepted the joy and hope, as well as the fear and worry, that went along with that. But there was another truth that he hadn’t realized up until that moment on the mountain — that his son would also one day face his own death. That in a way, in creating that life, he’d also created a death. That in way, by bringing his son into the world, he’d also sentenced him to die.

I fumbled in the dark for my phone. It was 4:30 a.m. The wind had calmed down some. I went out of the tent. The sky was filled with dark, orange-tinted clouds. No stars. I walked to the front of the Outpost to get some wood and stuffed a few singles into the honor-system box that asked a dollar for two pieces. I arranged the wood into a log cabin in the pit and lit it with a plug of sticky fire-starting material. As I waited for the fire to heat up, I checked the phone: 34 degrees, sunrise at 6:47 a.m., high for the day of 44 degrees, the next night’s low of 33.

I sat in an Adirondack, but the fire wasn’t hot enough to sit that far back. I stood, paced, walked around it, changing spots to get out of the smoke, put my hands deep into my pockets and bounced up and down. I pulled my sweatshirt hood over my head and cinched up the drawstrings with the little tabs. I reached into the ice chest and fished around for a can of peach-flavored Red Bull. I opened the podcasts app on the phone and resumed an episode of The Plot Thickens about Lucille Ball.

Lucy had wanted a normal family life more than almost anything, second only to how badly she had wanted a successful career in showbusiness. Unfortunately, those two big wants smashed into each other. She had trouble getting pregnant. She and Desi had Desi Junior when she was forty. I had the older when I was forty. Time and again her career took precedent over her kids and family life. Desi was a great entertainer, almost single-handedly popularizing the Conga-line craze in the U.S., and he was no doubt a shrewd businessman, building an empire with Desilu. But he was a terrible father and husband, drinking heavily and sleeping around, picking up women at parties at the couple’s own house and taking them to their bedroom. At least go fuck them in the maid’s room, Lucy had told him, or something like that. But as doomed to misery as that Hollywood family was, they still had a moment, a few years in there when they decided to take time out to raise the kids, to take them on vacations, to teach them to fish. They did it, as brief as it was, before the whole thing fell apart.

The sun began to come up around the time the phone had predicted, and the temperature ticked up that one degree. I unzipped the tent to stick my head in and check on the boys, and it was colder in the tent than outside. They sat up, the younger’s teeth chattering, and when I told them I had a hot fire going, the older jumped up went straight out. I pulled a sleeping bag out and draped it over them as they sat by the fire.

“Who wants cinnamon rolls?”

They were in good spirits. They had slept some. They were eager to have our traditional camp breakfast, and I even managed to burn the bottoms of a few as usual.

I explained the situation. The next night was going to be the same. We didn’t have the right gear, and we weren’t in the right kind of tent. We could make a day of it, go check out the nature center, maybe the beach, and then drive home. The older was disappointed, but he understood. The younger understood, too, but he was already thinking about the bike ride out. He couldn’t do it, he said. It was too cold to ride the bike. I told him we’d pull our sleeves down over our hands and take our time, and just walk if we had to. He was willing to give it a try, so I moved quickly, not breaking down the camp, but just putting the ice chest and a few bags into the wagon and dragging it to the front.

We didn’t get far before I had to leave the ice chest and bike out the younger. The older managed to bike himself out, and once they were in the car watching videos on their devices, they were fine. They were not concerned in the least with what daddy had to do.

I started back to camp pulling the empty wagon. I’d break down the camp first and try to load all of that out in one trip, then go back for the ice chest and the younger’s bike. Some people were out walking the trail by that point, bundled up and breathing steamy breaths, watching me go back and forth like a crazy man. I approached a man who I’d already passed. Now he was carrying the little red bike toward the parking lot.

“Did you lose a bike?” he said. “You look like you’re having a bad day.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “I’m on my way back to the camp, though. You can just leave the bike and I’ll get it later.”

“I’ll set it there by the swing for you.”

“Good, thank you.” The swing was at the .75 marker. I had left it at the one-mile mark. He had carried it .25 for me.

At camp, I managed to get everything else into the wagon, with the sleeping bags unrolled, draped across the top and stuffed into the corners. I laughed as I retrieved the last item, the guitar, now symbolic of my dashed hopes for the trip. At the car I mounted the bike rack and loaded the older’s bike and the fourth bike. My girlfriend had planned to come but couldn’t at the last minute and not because of the weather. She would have had fun, but I would have felt bad putting her through that. I rolled up the bags, stuffed them into the hatch and closed it quickly. I opened the passenger door and stuck my head in.

“I’m almost done, boys. I’ve just got to go get the other bike and the ice chest.”

They couldn’t hear me because they had headphones on. Back on the path, I tried to get the bike and ice chest both into the wagon, but along the way the bike fell out and by the time I looked back I didn’t even see it, so I pedaled the ice chest out, then went back for the bike. In all I pedaled 7.75 miles that morning. The full load-out took me almost three hours. My hands stung for about a week after.

We visited the nature center, which was quite nice, and walked by a lake that was near the regular campground. There were no tents, though, only R.V.s.

“What do you think about these R.V.s, boys? All of these people had a warmer night than we did. Do you think you’d like it in one of those?”

“I think it’d be good,” the younger said.

“I liked our tent, too,” the older said.

“Maybe when I’m sixty,” I said. “I figure daddy’s got about ten more years of tent camping in him. Then we’ll get an R.V. and just park and sleep. How’s that sound?”

The sleep deprivation and exhaustion were kicking in. I had squiggles in my eyesight in the bright sunlight.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) wasn’t a very good movie, but it did have a few good scenes. Of course, the money scene at the end is the one the whole thing is building toward, when she’s old and he’s a baby, and they can’t communicate. All they can do is look at each other and remember the life they’d had together. But I also liked a scene in the middle, when they’re both around the same age, and they’re dancing to records in the living room. Truth be told, I liked just about any scene in any movie involving playing records, but there was something touching about that one, that brief moment, again, like with Lucy, how fleeting it all is, when you can dance and sing and play and fish, and be together.

The drive back to New Orleans was difficult. I had little moments of snapping myself awake. I thought about stopping at a rest area to nap, but then I got a second wind when we passed the rest area, and then a third wind at the next one, and so on. I stopped once for gas and bought a can of Starbucks Triple Shot. It tasted like vanilla and chemicals, but it worked. I finished the Lucy season of the podcast. Lucy’s last public appearance was at the Grammy awards. She’d been asked to present by Bob Hope, and she couldn’t say no to Bob Hope. She wore a black, sequined dress cut high up the side, and after the show she got a big round of cheers from fans outside when she flashed them her leg. She still had great legs. She died in 1989, the year I graduated high school. I cried as I listened. She was good person, and I hadn’t slept.

At home, after an hour or so snooze, I got up, and the boys were in the living room, just doing their thing. I was fifty. We ordered pizza from Papa John’s and watched Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) with Jim Carrey. “Grownups are always talking about actors,” the older said. They thought he was pretty funny as the bad guy.