Soooooo I wrote this earlier and completely forgot to schedule it to send but THOUGHT I had scheduled it to send and here we are now, on Sunday. Whooops.

 

We took a long weekend over the new moon and went camping, and of course this means I brought my travel tea set and we had tea out in the middle of nowhere. The tea we had was Calabash: it came in the form of a mini tea ball that I'd had sitting in my mini tea collection for a year and a half.

 

It was a very good white tea that probably needed a little more gentle temperature control than I was able to manage on a camp stove. It came out a little rough and slightly bitter, but you know what? That's fine.

Origin name.

 

It has been a long time since we went camping, and I'm not sure why. I am a fan of camping. My husband is a fan of camping. It's one of the things we had in common that bonded us. He's a big outdoor guy who did NOLS courses and lived in Alaska in a tent for several summers in college; my family went camping on vacation as kids because it's cheap and fun, especially if you get most of your camping gear by cashing in grocery blue chip stamps, which is what my parents did.

 

One of the first things we did after getting together in law school was take the long Fall Break that they gave us and go on a backpacking trip along the Potawatomi Trail which was absolutely amazing. We went backpacking in the summer on law school breaks and then we graduated, and…

 

And I did two clerkships and he did his medical residency and I became a law professor plus secret romance writer and we were both stupidly busy. After law school I mostly didn't go camping again, except that one notable exception that I will talk about later.  So somehow we fell out of the habit.

 

We tried to get back into the habit a few years ago, but unfortunately we went through the gear problem that goes like this: go on camping trip, use old camping gear, discover that the inexpensive camping mattresses that we used in our 20s are really not going to work for our bodies in their 40s.

 

So this year we went on a camping trip again for the first time in a long time. I did a ton of research and found actual decent camping mattresses.  We could sleep and we both absolutely loved it.

 

Camping is incredibly cheap and also absolutely beautiful. People talk about touching grass, but can we add “see stars” to the list of rejuvenating things to do? It's wonderful to remember that there's a whole Milky Way up there, and if it's dark enough, you'll see it, too.

 

We're going to need to do that again, and soon.

When I say that I mostly didn't go camping after law school, there is one notable exception.

 

Occasionally, I believe things that cannot be proven. Here is one thing I believe: I believe that I am the only person who lived in a tent while clerking for the Supreme Court. The reason I believe this is because…uh, I doubt anyone else would do that? The reason I can't prove it is a lot of people have clerked for the Supreme Court and I haven't asked all of them, and “why do I believe this” is perhaps the less interesting question than “why did I do this.”

 

So here's the deal. Near the end of my time clerking for Sandra Day O'Connor, the apartment building I was staying in in Virginia announced that they were going to undergo renovations, starting some time in May or something like that.

 

They gave me a choice: I could stay through the end of my lease (but no longer), with ongoing noise and dust and distraction. Or they would cut me a check for violating my lease and I could leave in May. I thought about subletting somewhere but I looked at sublets and none of them really fit the exact time I needed and I would have had to have roommates I didn't know, which I didn't want. And then I thought about camping.

 

It turns out, there was a campsite about a quarter mile from the metro station in Maryland. The campsite had showers.

 

I said: cool. Let's do that.

 

Let me be clear: I did not tell anyone at the Court I was doing this, because if I did, they would have told SOC and SOC (who was spending this time in Arizona) would have given me the keys to her apartment and told me to stay there, and I did not want this because, first, I wanted to camp, and second, I was working on romance novels in my spare time and I did not want her to discover this when she came back to DC. So I told a friend from law school in the area and some people I knew not in DC and that was it.

 

I loved it. It was quiet. It was peaceful. I would walk from the Court to the metro at the end of day and walk back to camp and make pasta on the stove and sit at the campsite and look up. I would get all my work clothes dry cleaned and hung up in the back of my vehicle and go to a laundromat on Sunday to handle everything else. I'd charge my laptop at work, and--here is the thing that sold me on “campground”--I had bought the first ever Kindle, so I could have an infinite supply of romance novels without a bookshelf. And that first generation Kindle actually subsidized early 3G access and had a rudimentary web browser, so I was actually able to check my email (this was back in the day when Blackberries were the smartest phone you could get) while there over the world's slowest internet connection.

 

It was a necessary thing for me: to detach from the world, to strip away all the stuff, to think about what really made me happy and what I needed. It's the reason I decided not to work for a large law firm--because I gave myself space to strip everything down to the minimum, and I realized I didn't want a gigantic salary with no time. I wanted a sufficient salary with lots of time.

 

A lot of my time from September 2006 to April of 2008 is a gigantic blur because what happened with Kozinski was such an immense pressure on my brain. But that month spent camping is the point I can look at and think: ah, yes, that's when I started coming back into myself.

 

I recognize that there are people living in cars and tents right now because the housing crisis sucks, and I don't want to imply that this is a good thing for people who have no choice. I did it in a month where the weather was relatively good, but I did it by choice, and that made all the difference.

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