Big August

The US norm of only two weeks’ paid vacation — IF you’re lucky — is a scam and a scandal. It plays into the lie that there’s not nearly enough money to go around and only our nonstop toil can keep the feebly flickering economic flame from going out. There are plenty of other developed nations where regular people have access to functional and humane healthcare systems, paid family leave, and weeks or even a month of paid vacation, minimum, and those countries’ economies are doing fine. We’re the ones who have it backwards. We should take vacations. And as someone who is self-employed and works remotely, I have some flexibility to live according to how I think things should be, to normalize long vacations by taking one of my own. But it still felt very weird when I emailed my regular clients earlier this summer and told them I’d be unavailable most of August.

This plan started in the spring when my friend Melissa planned a big family trip to Glacier National Park in Montana — her husband and kids, parents on both sides, some in-laws and cousins, and me. When that big vacation was established, two smaller ones clicked into place on either side, like a set of magnets. Seattle was only a day or so out of the way — I could visit my friend Julie for a long weekend and do some paddleboarding. And then the Santa Fe opera season’s last week was the week after the Glacier trip, and my friend Ron had always wanted to see Eugene Onegin.

So I was planning to make a big loop around the west: Colorado to Seattle to Glacier to Santa Fe. The vaccines were out and available to everyone, covid rates were dropping, and it seemed like this trip would be a tripartite celebration with three groups of friends: a victory romp, a big shout of joy, now that we were finally on our way to beating the pandemic.

We could’ve beat the pandemic this year. But of course we know how that went. My friends and I kept our vacation plans, though with precautions, like N95s on planes and carryout in lieu of actually going out. But it was still a great trip(s), fully worthwhile and lovely.

If you (like many people, sometimes including me) get bored listening to people exhaustively describe their vacations, please feel free to skip this post. I’m planning to write about some more topical stuff this fall, like whether living in a van is actually cheaper than living in a regular house, whether it’s more sustainable, and which of my van design choices have worked out well and which are flopping. But if you want the vacation narration and/or photos, read on!

PART I: SEATTLE

Starting in southwestern Colorado, I drove through Boise and parked the van by some lava rocks near the highway. There were fires all over the west, so I kept checking fire and smoke maps on my phone, trying to figure out where I could stop to avoid the worst of it. The drive was hazy basically all the way to Washington, and the sunsets and sunrises were all pink and orange.

On my second day of driving, I made it all the way to western Washington. I’d given myself three days to get there and it was only Wednesday, so I was basically early for my weekend plans with Julie. I had work to finish up anyway, so I plopped myself down among some big, gorgeous trees in the Cascades west of Yakima and figured I’d stay there until Friday or Saturday.

The next morning I was working away in the van and realized the light was weird. It was very orangey, and something about it was just slightly off. Also, my eyes itched and my head hurt a little.

I checked the fire maps, and sure enough, at about the time I arrived the day before, a new fire had started directly north of me. The smoke was billowing overhead just to the east. On my phone screen, it was a plume of bright red pixels, expanding and darkening to purple as the 24-hour forecast map ticked into the future.

I really liked this campsite, so I tried to stick it out for a while, but I finally drove off to the west, where the smoke wouldn’t be as thick.

I ended up driving quite a distance. The smoke cleared. At one point, I rounded a bend and wondered, “Why do the clouds up ahead look weird?”

Then I realized that what I was looking not at clouds but at the side of a mountain with patches of snow, a mountain so big that at first I did not notice that it was a mountain.

When I realized it was a mountain, I yelled, “Holy shit!”

I think yelling is an appropriate response to seeing Mt. Rainier. The “other” Cascade peaks are pretty majestic in their own right, but Rainier dwarfs everything around it. It looks surreal, like a mountain out of a dream or a fantasy tale. Its shape is conical and iconic.

Hello, it says. I am a massive fucking volcano.

This photo was taken minutes after my initial view of Rainier, which was much higher up and where I could see much more of the mountain, so it doesn’t come anywhere close to doing it justice.

I found a decent campsite that night, and the night after that I moved closer to Seattle.

I got to Seattle on a Saturday and spent a few days with Julie and her husband Daniel. We did some walking and driving around, picked about half a gallon of blackberries, and went paddleboarding three times: once in Lake Union, near downtown; once in an inlet connected to Puget Sound; and once in Lake Washington, which is a huge lake with hillside neighborhoods, marshes with lily pads and turtles, and views of both the Cascades and the Olympics. In short, it was pretty great.

A really good Seattle tree.

Lake Washington is like a frickin’ Monet.

The water was cold and briny with crazy tidal swings. This was also the first time I’ve ever seen a seal in the wild — or maybe several seals. Every so often, one popped its head out of the water and followed us at a distance, just curious.

Dreamy volcano with ducks.

PART II: THE FIERY APOCALYPSE

When I left Seattle, I had a week before I was supposed to be in Glacier. My objectives were: 1. Do my work (since this week was not a vacation week); 2. Avoid the places that were on fire or covered in smoke; and 3. Avoid the intense heat wave that was coming, with temperatures predicted to be in the 90s or even hit 100 in eastern Washington. (The van starts to get uncomfortable when temperatures get into the low- to mid-80s.)

Objective 1 was not a problem, but Objectives 2 and 3 turned out to be harder than I expected. This was around the time when the big fires in Northern California were raging, and those fires generated a tremendous amount of smoke. The fire that had started just north of me near Yakima was still going strong. There were fires in eastern Washington, a thick dotting of them across the Idaho Panhandle and in western Montana, and even one burning near the western side of Glacier National Park itself.

I kept checking the smoke and fire maps, and then the heat maps, back and forth and back and forth trying to figure out where I could go. It was like a puzzle or an obstacle course: I’d find an area where there was plausible camping and where the temperature was below 90 degrees, but then it was on fire. Or here was an area that was both not too hot and not too smoky, but it was in some remote spot at some high elevation, so it would take me hours to get to and where it was very unlikely that there was enough cell reception for me to work.

Noplace was great: everywhere would be hot. Everywhere would be at least somewhat smoky. The western side of the Rockies just north of Glacier looked like the best bet.

So I drove through Idaho, which was on fire and covered in smoke.

This was intense. The light was weird and I could barely see Lake Pend Oreille.

My eyes itched. My head hurt. And I could smell the smoke now. I wasn’t wheezing or having actual trouble breathing, but I felt generally gross in the lungs and sinuses. Some animal part of my brain was saying, Get out of here.

For a few hours, I drove while wearing an N95. When I pulled off by the side of a forest road north of Libby, Montana, the air quality rating was red, according to the smoke map, “unhealthy” according to the weather app, which advised people to stay indoors.

Is a campervan indoors? It’s enclosed, sure. But the whole engine compartment is open to the air on the underside and only separated from the van’s interior by an aluminum shield. If I don’t close the side door firmly enough, I can see daylight through the cracks. Dust sneaks in through the back doors. The van is basically a metal tent that is insulated and (thank goodness, so far) waterproof. But I doubt it’s as well sealed as a house. It’s not the indoors that the weather app, public health advisories, scientists, doctors or anyone else means when they say “stay indoors.”

I slept with the N95 on, then woke up at first light and kept pushing east. The smoke got a little better, but I could still smell fire when I got to my intended spot. I kept going up, taking a forest service road that climbed a mountainside, over a thousand feet from the valley floor.

For a few days, this seemed to do the trick. I was high enough that I was above some of the smoke and it didn’t get uncomfortably hot in the van. But the smoke caught up with me, and again there was the weird light, and the itchy eyes, and the strong feeling that I Should Not Be There.

The thing was, there was noplace else I could go where it might be better. I felt what I imagined a non-human animal might feel when its habitat is being taken away: a new road over there, so you didn’t want to go there; houses over here, so you could no longer go here. So eventually you ended up clinging to one narrow band of trees high on a mountainside, where you hunkered down hoping it wouldn’t get worse, that you wouldn’t lose any more ground, because where could you go?

It’s a shitty feeling. This summer and last have been so remarkably hot, so remarkably fiery, that I think in the future we’ll remember these years as the first summers of a new and grimmer climate era. I’m writing this in early September, a week or so after the remnants of Hurricane Ida deluged the east coast. On Twitter, I saw a screenshot of a text message from the poster’s friend in New York City, saying that he’d gotten multiple emergency alerts: one told him to get underground because of tornadoes, and one told him to seek higher ground because of flash flooding. On the mountain in early August, I felt trapped by violent extremes of weather, but in September, dozens of people actually were trapped, and actually died.

On the mountain in early August, the wind shifted and blew the smoke away a couple days before I was supposed to be in Glacier.

I was working pretty intently, trying to meet some deadlines. But changes in weather also sometimes affect my cell phone reception. I lost the one or two flickering bars I’d had up until that point, so I headed for the national forest campground about a thousand feet down, where the signal was stronger.

This is where I had what a friend later said was an auditory hallucination. The site was lovely, right next to a clear river that flowed over multicolored rocks. So there was the river noise, the tree noise, and the noise of the two fans I had both running on high because it was still pretty hot. There was not another person in that campground the whole time I was there, but at one point, I was convinced that at least one adult and at least one child had set up camp one or two sites over and were talking excitedly.

I’ll go talk to them, I thought. I was going to offer to move sites — I was in the best one, and since I was just working, and very intently at that, trying to meet a couple of guidelines, I wasn’t taking advantage of the site’s awesomeness.

I went outside, mask on and everything, There was no one there. It was a bit creepy, but also weirdly fascinating: left on its own someplace very quiet with white noise, the brain will make voices out of things that are not voices. Maybe because the brain is always trying to make sense out of things, and for the brain, language is order?

And this is where I have another story about a dumb thing I did.

I worked into the evening. I worked into the night.

The brain, I thought, really was bizarre. For instance, right now I hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep and I’d spent all day in front of my laptop, so it looked like the lights in my van were flickering.

I focused on the lights. Maybe they really were flickering.

I opened the app that monitors the van’s house battery. But something was wrong with the app: it wasn’t giving me a reading for the battery charge, it just said zero. I closed the app and reopened it, then I restarted my whole phone. Still zero.

Then I noticed the voltage reading, which was usually over 13 but was now at 11-something.

As it turned out, this wasn’t a glitch with the app. For days, I’d been keeping the big fan running, mostly on high, all day and all night, plus a second fan when it got really hot, plus doing a lot of work on my laptop. I’d also been moving the van back and forth during the day so it stayed in the shade as much as possible, and the smoke had blocked the sun. So: I’d drained the battery, and the lights were flickering as the last of the charge trickled out and the voltage started dropping.

I turned all the lights off, started the van, and flipped the switch for alternator charging. The charge reading ticked from zero to one percent. This meant that I had to go for a little drive on the backroads of Montana at night, which cost me some work time and sleep time but was actually kind of fun. However, I’m going to try to keep a better eye on my battery charge from now on.

PART III: GLACIER

I’d been to Glacier two times before, both with Ron. The first was in 2002, when we’d come too early in the year to drive the famous Going to the Sun Road. But we did take a great hike to Avalanche Lake, which was about four miles round-trip with snow at the top, and which Ron did in flip-flops. The second time, we’d been able to drive Going to the Sun Road, and it was beautiful, but we’d made the mistake of hoping to just show up and find a campsite in the park at the last minute like we had in 2002. This was no longer possible, and our race to beat the oncoming night and find a place to stay resulted in Ron’s car becoming momentarily airborne on a rough gravel road.

Glacier is one of the biggest of the big-deal national parks, one of the most visited, and for good reason: it’s one of the most stunning places I’ve ever seen, and it’s incredibly biodiverse, more even than Rocky Mountain national Park or Banff and Jasper National park in Canada. A couple of the park’s employees put out a podcast about a year ago, which is great because it doesn’t skirt around some tough issues: the violent displacement of native people and coerced sale of ancestral lands, and the mistakes that park management has made in balancing conservation and public access. For instance: at one point they installed a new sewer system for public toilets at Logan Pass, the highest point on the parks’ main road and one of its most pristine landscapes. The new system was supposed to filter and treat the sewage and spritz more-or-less-harmless water onto the adjacent meadow, but instead it sprayed out gobs of raw shit and left toilet paper streamers on the alpine foliage. One fix proposed for this problem was saving up all the sewage til after dark, then having it gush out in fountains illuminated with multicolored lights, because in the dark the tourists wouldn’t notice that these fountains were sewage, and the park could make it a show, entertainment, a little bit of Vegas in the high Rockies.

Thank God, this idea did not go forward, and the sewage system was redone. Today it takes a 3,500-gallon sewage tanker seven (if I remember correctly) trips every day to haul all of the human waste down from the alpine tundra. The tundra is, hopefully, recovering. And park management seems way more conservation-minded now.

But it’s still strange to feel the push-pull of that balancing act, to be in such a pristine and incredible place where there are also so many people. Reservable campsites fill up months in advance, and even activities like horseback rides and bus tours, which feel like they should be spur of the moment, are booked weeks ahead. This is what had caused Ron and I so much stress a few years ago — but Melissa planned this trip like she was orchestrating the invasion of Normandy. I think she made a spreadsheet at one point. On this big family trip there were six groups of people: two in hotels, one in a big RV that stayed in RV parks outside the national park boundaries, and three in campervans. Everyone was arriving and departing at different times. A few days would be spent on the west side of the park and a few on the east, so everyone would move from their first campsites/hotels/RV parks to the second halfway through the trip. Some people were renting cars, and Melissa and her family were renting a pop-top, four-person, four-wheel-drive Sprinter van. There was a day-by-day itinerary with planned hikes and check-ins and who needed to go where and meet whom. It was incredible planning.

And the trip was a lot of fun. The weather was cool and a bit rainy, which limited the planned hikes a bit but also cleared out the lingering smoke. And we got to take some beautiful walks.

I also went paddleboarding twice in Lake MacDonald. The first paddle was remarkable for how glass-calm it was when I started out and how suddenly it turned windy and choppy, with waves breaking over the bow of my board. I was soaked by the time I got back, and it was completely worth it.

I did not take any photos after it got windy because I could not stop paddling or I’d be blown backwards, but here’s how calm it was, and how beautiful. I can’t get over the color of the water — we were told that these teals and turquoises and greens come from “glacier flour,” ultrafine dust scoured off the rocks by the glaciers that carved the landscape.

Like the landscapes, the wildlife in Glacier is extra. We saw a black bear strolling along the opposite shore of Avalanche Lake. We saw a deer, which came so close to Melissa’s kids that they could almost touch it — the kids moved away first, not the deer. And we were almost charged by a moose.

Moose are huge. They are not afraid of humans, cars, or dogs. They are magnificent and weird-looking and rather scary. And there was one that was said to frequent a pond about half a mile from our second campsite on the east side of the park.

We went to the pond and we saw the moose. The moose in the water up to his chest, fully submerging his head to graze on underwater plants. The moose did not seem to care about all the people on the shore watching him, some of whom had even set up camp chairs for a front row seat to watch him.

As we got back to the campground, we ran into Melissa’s brother-in-law and his girlfriend, who had just arrived. They wanted to see the moose too, so the whole larger group of us all walked back to the pond.

The moose was gone. There was a guy standing on the shore and taking a video or a photo of the pond, and after he left, we stood in the trees just above the shore, looking for the moose.

Moose, prior to Incident.

I was convinced that he had walked out of the pond onto the shore to our right, since there was a trail of stirred-up sediment in the water and it seemed to lead that way. But as everyone was looking over to the right based on my (wrong) idea, the bushes over to the left were moving, and then antlers appeared, and then the moose crashed out of the bushes at a rapid trot, headed straight for us.

The moose dodged. The people dodged. But the moose did not stop or turn around, and it’s very fortunate that everyone was able to get out of its way in time. I don’t think he wanted to run any of us over — but also, he really wanted to be in that pond and wasn’t about to let us stop him. After the moose plunged into the water, he stood looking sideways at us, huffing and snorting. We left quickly and quietly.

The trip went too quickly, and it was great to hang out with Melissa and her family. They really enjoyed their rental van, which could fit five people for dinner on chilly evenings.

It was definitely a weird time to visit Glacier, though. The park wasn’t doing a very good job with pandemic safety: on paper, visitors are required to wear masks in park buildings, on park transportation and tours, and in “crowded outdoor spaces” (i.e. popular trails), but I saw very few people actually doing that, and it seemed that there was no enforcement of anything. I’d assumed that park staff would be wearing masks, but that wasn’t the case at all, and the park doesn’t require staff to be vaccinated. I’m worried about the potential for long covid as a result of breakthrough infections, plus I don’t have paid sick time or disability insurance, so I stayed mostly out of buildings and opted out of the bus and boat tours (which I really wanted to take). I would’ve tried to do some more early-morning walks, too, but Glacier has a lot of grizzlies and everything I read warned against hiking alone.

For this trip, I was content with puttering around, taking in the view, and socializing at the campsite. No matter what you do or how weird the times, it’s an incredible place.

PART IV: SANTA FE

Next was the part of the big long August trip that in my mind, I had been thinking of as “the dash”: I left Glacier on the morning of the 23rd and planned to pick up Ron from the airport in Santa Fe on the afternoon of the 25th.

When I planned it, this didn’t seem like a lot of time to drive about 1,336 miles. I think I wanted to give myself a buffer in case of bad weather or van problems or detouring around fires. But as it turned out, I could’ve stayed in Glacier longer. I drove well into the night on the 23rd, took a nap, passed through metro Denver at around 4 a.m. so I wouldn’t hit morning rush hour, and pulled off behind a truck stop south of Colorado Springs after sunrise. I was basically already within striking distance of Santa Fe with a full day to spare.

This did mean, though, that I was able to catch up on sleep at a nice reservoir in northern New Mexico near I-25 and then take the van to the car wash the next day.

It really needed it.

After the sightseeing and hiking and moving around in Glacier, Santa Fe was a very different type of vacation. Ron and I had booked an Airbnb that had plenty of reading space, comfy-looking furniture, and good light. There was a backyard with lounge chairs, a cottonwood tree, and hummingbirds.

Most of the time, we just sat around and talked and read. We stocked up on peanut butter, jelly, and bread, but since Santa Fe has such good food, we ended up getting takeout most nights, and it was so good.

We went to two operas, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. They were both amazing. I’m not very knowledgeable about opera, and it’s a pretty slow-moving art form. Normally, I gravitate towards narrative and consume it voraciously — reading all of The Never-ending Story in one weekend as a kid, or bingeing all of The Sopranos in a week during grad school. It takes me a moment to sink into opera, to open up to a story that’s told through music as much as or more than through words, but once I do, I love it. Almost as much, I enjoy seeing what modern directors and designers have done with these very old scores and librettos. Why, for instance, were the (mostly male) backup dancers in Onegin wearing tutus and hoop skirts and animal-skull masks? (It was very weird and I was totally here for it.) Or what did it do for Figaro to have all the characters except for the Countess look like they stepped out of an early-1900s British manor and why was the garden full of gigantic clock numbers and springs?

Plus it’s always wonderful to be at the Santa Fe opera house, which is an incredible space, especially when thunderstorms roll through.

The operas were on Thursday and Friday, and on the weekend we got to meet up with our friend Kim from college and her husband and son and dogs. (Kim even cooked for us, which was extra lovely.) We hadn’t seen them in a couple of years and it was very, very good to catch up.

Aside from seeing Kim and going to the opera, we didn’t go out at all. This last and most restful vacation also went very quickly — we could’ve stayed in that airbnb another week, easy.

PART V

Even after Ron was flying back to Florida and I’d checked out of the Airbnb, I could have lingered in New Mexico for much, much longer. I did stay for a few days, which I just spent working. Fortunately none of my capitalism-based fears came to pass: my clients didn’t deem me a lazy slacker and dump me in favor of a harder-working, more talented, younger, lower-paid competitor. In fact, I came back to a beginning-of-the-school-year academic editing rush. Over Labor Day weekend, I hunkered down and worked in the forest north of Taos.

I wanted to stay, climb Wheeler Peak and do some other long hikes, maybe explore some spots in the desert that I’ve only driven through but haven’t really spent time in. But I also wanted to see a doctor about a weird mole on my face, so I had to go to Colorado. The mole turned out to be just weird and not dangerous, and now I’m in north central Colorado, in the Flat Tops range.

I didn’t keep exact records, but I drove at least 3,200 miles on this big August trip. I’m very happy with how the van did. It stalled out only once, when I braked hard and turned onto a side road from a fast highway (I don’t know why, so hopefully it’s not a sign of a bigger issue?). It started right up again, though, and overall, it still sounds and feels great.

And now I’m back to just living in the van, not traveling or touristing or road-tripping or vacationing. I’ve gotten through my initial rush of post-vacation work, and I’ve eaten most of the leftover peanut butter and jelly and bread. For the next couple of months, I’ll be moving a lot less. I may go south, perhaps to the San Juans, then follow the fall weather into New Mexico. And I’ll hopefully be writing more — both on this blog and in general.