There was a lot of discussion.
It started when we were packing. My preference is to leave the tent home whenever possible. I love sleeping under the stars or in an alcove, conditions permitting.
Mama Bear tends to play it more on the safe side. While she isn’t against sleeping outside, there is always the nagging thought about bugs, rain, marauding teenagers, etc and for that reason, we usually put the tent in. She wasn’t opposed to not carrying the tent but it was at least going to Death Valley with us.
We arrived at the parking lot that passes for a campground at Stovepipe Wells. Kenny was hanging out by a fire sipping on a beer. The air was cool but had the feeling of a spring evening. And while the campground was crowded, had obnoxious lighting in multiple locations, it was dark. KB pretty much immediately got excited about the stars.
I set up the Tepui and made sure to remove the rain fly and open up the skylights. Stars were on the menu.
When was the last time you thought about night? Probably not since you were a kid scared of the dark and asking your mum if she turned on your nightlight. And in the same vane, when was the last time you considered darkness?
Night is an ever-present friend or foe when one is camping in the desert in the winter. It can feel like being held hostage. The sun starts to drop around 5 and the warm temperatures you had been enjoying all day disappear with its light. You quickly huddle around a campfire or retreat to the warmth of your down and nylon cocoon that is to be your bed for the night.
We used to hold that camp rules were 9 pm. Meaning you couldn’t retreat until 9 in an attempt to keep a semblance of a normal night, or at least a night similar to what we are accustomed to in modern society. The past couple of years, those rules have melted away to people dropping out as they feel fit. This does result in the occasional, “Holy shit! It’s 11:24 pm and I am wide awake, how am I going to get through this night?” But more often than not, it ends up being an amazing night of sleep with intermittent moments of gazing at the stars and feeling connected.
9:47 PM I’ve got to pee, again. Instead, I just lay in bed looking up. The stars are brilliant with little or no light pollution, the Milky Way is visible. The only thing making a star seem less visible is the one in front of it. The depth of the sky, its clarity and brilliance give a feeling of infinite vastness.
I pull myself out of bed. Take a whiz and quickly retreat from the cold night back to my sleeping bag excited to continue watching the stars. The worry of not being able to fall back to sleep is replaced by the desire to gaze at the divine.
10:13 Asleep.
What is 2ish feels painfully like 6ish. I check my watch and confirm that the night is young and I am not going anywhere for a while. The temperatures have dropped significantly and the little bit of skin exposed to the night air stings. I reposition my bag and its hood so just my eyes and mouth are outside. With nothing above me, the stars once again have my full attention. The darkness that we usually associate with night isn’t even a thought.
And try as I might to keep my eyes open, they flap shut almost as fast as if I was stuck in church.
4:14 I know it was important to rehydrate but the thought of going pee with the temperatures what they are feels like a non-option.
4:32 Unable to shake the feeling, I prep myself for the impending cold mentally and then physically. I pull my puffy jacket from the depths of my sack, unzip and quickly put it on. In an almost bandaid like situation, I rip myself from my bed closing the bag as I jump out. The stars illuminate the ground more than I expected and the headlamp placed over my beanie remains unlit.
I take a leak as quickly as possible, never a fun task to do in a hurry, and then run back to my bed. The cold’s claws have sunk into me and what was a warm bed when I left it feels icy cold. I remove the puffy and slump into the down insulation zipping things up as tight as possible while my shivering continues.
The bag rewarms in a few minutes. The shivering subsides. My breathing slows. The stars are almost old news but hold my attention for a few minutes as I fall back to sleep.
6:23 The quiet of the night is interrupted by someone moving waking me from my light sleep. I see that the sky is now a deep hue of blue. I’m awake and while I feel quite rested, I have zero desire to leave my bed. I lay there watching the colors of the morning fade into the glow of a sunrise. I reach out and check my watch for a temperature. It’s 24 degrees.
Several years ago, I had the realization that I slept much better on the ground, in the middle of nowhere than I ever did at home. The longer I went in the backcountry, the easier it was for me to fall asleep and get a good night’s rest.
I always chalked it up to being tired. Having actually spent a day moving under my own power should make me fall asleep quicker. I didn’t think too much about the fact that a serious effort at home and I would toss and turn for hours before maybe falling asleep. Or that the intermittent pattern of my sleep was interrupted when I would get up at 3 to pee at home, but in the wilderness, I would simply fall back to sleep.
And then I began to consider darkness.
It has only been the last couple hundred years that man has been able to light up the night. Before that, we were constrained by the cycles of day and night. A campfire or maybe a candle, eventually a lantern, but when dark came, the day was over.
In our times, the darkness begins to fall and lights lining our streets automatically flip on to ensure that the sidewalks are well lit. We immediately begin turning on the lights of the house and without much thought, or effort, we have extended the day time. Often to the point of it being brighter than it was before the sunset.
I never correlated being unable to sleep with the amount of light at the time of going to bed. It just wasn’t anything I ever thought about. Paul Bogard put it in perspective for me, turning on the light if you will. And it all makes perfect sense. When I am not surrounded by endless light when I am trying to get ready for bed, I pass out and sleep. When it’s readily available and on, I toss and turn. I wake up in the middle of the night nervous, anxious and can’t go back to sleep.
After that first night in the parking light, there was no question. We were leaving the tent in the car. Yea, it got cold. Yes, there were wild horses running around. Packrats? Maybe, but then again it was cold. Even without the false sense of security that a tent provides, it was an amazing night of stargazing, sleeping, more stars, contemplating life and the infinite, more stars, sleeping and not wanting to get out of bed even after 14 hours.
Consider darkness. Turn off the lights. Enjoy the stars and sleep.
P. L. and R.
