Project Camping

I was pissed. I turned away from Han and exhaled audibly. Great… four days into the life of our dreams and we were already arguing. While I stared out of the dusty window, watching the green forest leisurely passing by, I did not notice the whites of Han´s knuckles. Clutching the steering wheel, she tried to suppress a sob.

***

The silence was unnerving. Tiff usually never stopped chattering. Never. In this ringing silence I was hyperaware of every clunking noise the cups in the back of the van made. We should secure them better, I thought to myself absent-mindedly. The van hit a bump that, for a nanosecond, sent us flying. The bells of the colorful hippie tapestry started chiming. I, always tense while driving, flinched. “We might have gone a bit over board in terms of decoration.” Tiff burst into laughter. I chuckled, shakily at first, then freely. We looked at each other and the tension melted away. Then with a loud noise, the car came to a halt.

***

I could still feel the tickling sensation of laughter when shock slowly erased it from my cheeks. “What was that?” – “Burst tire” Han said matter-of-factly. “Good that the street is empty”, she murmured, getting out of the car. The setting sun painted the broken tire in a glorious gold while Han got her phone out and tried reaching AAA. “It´ll take them a couple of hours to get here”, Han said. I planted my heels into the ground and pushed my back into the midnight blue heck of the van while Han got behind the steering wheel. One inch, two inches… “You need help?” I jerked around. Two guys in shorts and a girl in a long tribal patterned skirt had appeared out of nowhere. “Where did y’all come from?” I asked, baffled. One guy gestured over his shoulder. “Camping site. You want us to help push you off the street?”

***

After locking the van, now parked at the road side, we followed our unexpected helpers down a hidden trail. Nothing could have prepared us for what lay behind the trees. We thought that we had stumbled onto a film set, or a fair, or a concert venue or maybe all at once. It was a colorful jubilating vibrant hippy stronghold built from vans and tents and carpets. People were playing, painting, singing in a circle. It smelled like summer, flowers, fire, marihuana, food and the pungent smell of homemade dye. I felt Tiff’s hand involuntarily grope for mine. She was smiling shyly, but there was a nervous undertone to it I could not quite place. I noticed a Baywatch-style tower in the center of the site on top of which four people were posted, two observing the scene with binoculars, two typing on laptops. They did not belong here; amidst these festivities they looked unnaturally sleek. One of the binoculars focused on us. What was this place? I grasped Tiff´s hand.

My tension was apparent in the stiffness of my shoulder when I unwillingly turned my back on the Baywatch tower. “What is this place?” I asked the blond guy who had introduced himself as Matt. He smiled disarmingly warm. “These guys?” He gestured towards the tower. “A couple of years ago this started out as a camping site, or rather a parking lot with some facilities. Over time it first developed into a secret tip for road trips and then slowly into a community. Now it is still a camping site and visitors are very welcome, but mostly it is a commune of vagrants who finally found a home. We are a group of artists defying society, living here and creating, experiencing art and community. Those guys are scientists from the UCLA. They are interested in mass creativity and the effects of communal life on intellectual output.” Tiff looked over her shoulder and shuddered. “But why do they have to look so…” she struggled to find the right words. “Psycho?” Matt laughed huskily. He really was the perfect incarnation of a surfer boy. I would have imagined the member of a commune to be attractive in a different way, I thought. “They have hundreds of individuals to observe. They asked whether they could put this structure up.” He waved his hands dismissively. “But believe me, this is really not the most interesting part of Caramel Creek,” the girl in the patterned skirt interrupted him smilingly. “Caramel Creek?” She laughed and exposed teeth like pearls and pointed to a painted sign showing a river of caramel. “We discovered our own secret recipe.” She winked and took my hand.

“This place is insane” Tiff said under her breath. She was completely and utterly speechless. I smiled. We had tried the specialty caramel and it tasted wonderful, although I was not sure if I should be driving after consuming it. In the past two hours we had met more people than we had throughout all our high school years, and it had been a by far more agreeable experience. Overstimulated and drunk on colors and experiences we were now resting in the shade of a pink tent. Tiff was lying on the colorful cushions (they were more over the top with their decoration than we were). I looked around. It was the first time Matt and Malis, our two self-declared guides, had abandoned us. The entire camp looked like a busy beehive in psychedelic colors. I had tried to reach AAA again, but it looked like we would have to stay overnight. Tiff was excited as a kid the night before Christmas. And I could not help but slowly abandoning my skepticism for the sake of curiosity.

***

I had the time of my life. Nobody could have ever dreamed up a place light this. Colors, lights. Just the sensory experience of this refuge of dreams in the woods was mind blowing. We were listening to the improvised concert a couple of guitarists were just giving and slowly dancing around the fires. There had to be over hundred people here. I danced with Matt, Malis, with Han, with Matt again, and then with Malis; Han took my hands, we smiled at each other and turned around and around. The music was so good. Breathlessly we sat down on the all-present cushions and carpets and laughed the bubbly laughter of excitement. I only half listened to Matt´s story about his travels and projects. I was in a daze, it was only six hours since we had arrived and we had already had orange coffee, had participated in a movie, helped to build a tree house, painted fabric in order to decorate the assembly hall, eaten with the entire camp (they made a devilishly good vegan stew) and lived through this perfect concert night. This was the distilled essence of road trips, this was how it should feel on your skin - like warm tickling sunshine; taste - like salted caramel with smoky flavors; sound - soft guitar music and the crackling of fire; look - innumerable comfortable colorful tents with innumerable colorful people; and smell - earthlike and compostable. I leaned against Han who was laughing about a comment Malis made who at the same time was weaving wooden pearls into my hair in a complicated pattern. I suddenly felt heavy and drunk. “Tired?” Matt asked, instantly observing the change in my mood. I hid a yawn behind my hand and nodded. He took my hand and let me to a red tent. There were multiple camping beds in it, all empty. “This is our guest tent. Just choose whatever bed you like best. There is a barrel with rain water outside.” I smiled at him, he warmly pressed my hand for a minute and was gone. I lay down unto one of the beds, vaguely wondering when Han would come. I could still hear the guitars playing folky melodies, I heard laughter, conversations that softly faded away when the conversants moved deeper into the forest and then into their tents. I would not mind if the repair of our van would take a while, I thought, before I fell asleep.

***

It was late at night when I took my leave from Malis and Matt and all the others. I smiled. What a day, what a night. When was the last time I had been up so late, just talking, gazing at the night sky, being warmed by a fire? I wondered if they were distilling magic on purpose. For people to get and take a sip from whenever life was a suffocating greyness. I saw Tiff sleeping on one of the narrow beds, her arm dangling onto the red carpet on the floor. In the moonlight that entered through the half closed tent plane she looked like a fairy with all these pearls and flowers in her hair. How would life be after this night? Could you ever live again after tasting this? I yawned – How melodramatic, Han, I scolded myself and heavily sat down onto the bed next to Tiff´s. I slipped out of my shoes and must have been asleep before my head touched the pillow.

***

I woke up because I was cold. Softly murmuring against my pillow I wrapped myself tighter into the blanket. A breeze lifted the sheets up and I struggled to hold on to my blanket. I sat up abruptly. Brilliant sunlight prevented me from seeing anything for the moment it took for my eyes to get used to the brightness. We were in the forest, on a clearing, sleeping on two camping beds on a red carpet that was like a lost diva in an empty theatre amidst all this greenness. I turned around so quickly that I fell from the low bed. “Han! Han!” I frantically pulled at her sleeve. She opened one eye, but the other followed quickly when she saw that my panic was real. “What´s up?” She scrambled onto her feet and I didn´t have to explain a thing. Everything was … gone. The tents, the carpets, the campers, the caravans, the vans, the pillows, even the stone rings around the fires, everything. “That is impossible…”Han said, her voice faltering. I stood up and took some huge steps across the clearing. “There are marks in the grass” I shouted to Han, somewhat relieved. At least it had not been a dream. Han tilted her head and looked at the sun. “We must have slept through half of the day,” she said while scrambling to her feet. She came over and I thought I recognized the same relief in her eyes when she saw, that even though everything was gone, there were still traces of the camp. “At least it was not a hallucination,” she said and I laughed nervously. “But what is it then?” We walked around the deserted camp and unconsciously came to a halt in front of the four pits which were left of the watchtower foundation. “I have no idea.”

***

Half an hour later Tiff and I were back in our van which was still safely parked at the roadside. Han was making coffee while I was talking to AAA. Luckily, we hadn´t missed them and they would be here in half an hour. “Check this out, Han.” Tiff called after I had hung up. I went over. She was sitting in front of her laptop clasping a mug of steaming coffee. She shoved another one towards me. I looked at the website she had pulled up. “There are a couple of articles, blog entries, posts about the camp, but they are super unspecific about its location.” She took a sip of her coffee and squinched up her face when she burned her tongue. “But there is a whole deeper level of kind of … experience reports of people… who have been there.” She breathed in deeply. “They all sound kind of disturbing. But…” She scrolled down. “Most importantly. I think they change their location pretty frequently. These posts” She pointed to her screen. “Are only four weeks apart but they describe the landscape really differently.” I followed her index finger and skimmed the entries. I could not repress a shudder when it sank in that this weirdly perfect night had been in fact a pretty creepy experience.

***

“Well, I hope your night was not too bad. You got stranded in a pretty lonely area here. Classic spot to lose a tire”, said the AAA guy brightly while Han assisted him in the reparation process. She muttered something vaguely affirmative. After the mechanic had taken his leave, it did not take us long to be back on the road. Han was starting the car. We exchanged glances over the sound of the engine coming back to life. “Different than yesterday, right?” I mumbled. She nodded curtly, a furrow appearing between her eyebrows. She straightened up, shaking her shoulders slightly, as if to get rid of the invisible weights that had settled down there. “I think we should drive a lot today, maybe we can make it to the waterfall and canyon area by the afternoon and find a really breathtaking place to stay.” I smiled. “That sounds like a great plan!”