Crickets

I left the house to get away. AWAY. I came out here to leave my other life behind. Out here, this is who I really am. That other life is not me.

I don’t want a refrigerator. I don’t want a stove. I don’t want a bathroom. I don’t want a TV. I want to keep my food in a cooler. I want to cook over a fire, or at the very most over the little gas grill tucked in the storage space in the front of the trailer. I want to relieve myself the way nature intended me to do it, in the bushes, behind a tree. But I’ll admit that the porta potty that fits on the bucket is a compromise that I’m willing to stretch. I want to camp. I don’t want all the comforts of what I left behind. That’s kind of the point.

I do want to sleep in comfort. The ground is hard. It was softer in the good old days. I don’t mind tents, I was always a tent camper. But now I want a base camp that makes more sense. A good sturdy shelter the bears won’t get into and a comfortable bed where I can get a good night’s rest to go out and do it all over again tomorrow. And if I was going to sleep in a tent, why should I have to tow such a thing? To carry all the modern conveniences of home that I’m trying to get away from anyway, only to end up sleeping in a tent? That makes me dizzy.

This is my quick base camp. I left straight from work and never looked back. The last time I looked back was at the clock at work. A co-worker told me during the day “I see you watching the clock.” I told him that maybe I wasn’t watching the clock. Maybe it’s watching me, and I’m looking over my shoulder. The clock is watching me. Life’s too short. I took off straight from work, set up my base camp for the weekend, and never looked back.

The appliances will all be there to get me through the week when I get home. Here I don’t need them. Here, I don’t want the hum of a refrigerator, I want the crackle of a fire. And crickets.