When the Signal Drops Out
There is this place I like to go camping. It takes a few hours of driving on the highway to get to the forest service road that carries me up into the mountains. Somewhere after an hour or so on that road, I know the cell service is going to drop out. I actually look forward to this moment. I don't really know exactly where in the mountains it happens, but without checking my phone, there comes a moment when I feel a deep exhale. My chest expands, my mind loosens its grip on a predetermined path of thought, and I settle into the ride.
The details of the landscape around me begin to come into sharper focus. Regardless of the weather, the colors begin to feel more vibrant. The autumn sun hits the yellow leaves in a deep forest of green. It's brilliant, radiant. It is the real gold of life, and its value is unmeasurable because it is temporary. It cannot be mined, bottled, picked, or saved. It can only be savored in the moment, right now.
It is the time of year for the larch trees to start taking on their golden mantle of needles, and there are cars parked along the road at some of the famous trailheads. While I know it is beautiful, I am glad my destination is going to carry me to a place where there will be very few people, and likely no one.
It is opening day for hunting season, and while I pass a few hunters' camps on the final fifteen miles of dirt road, there is no one in the valley camp high on the pass. It is just me, Rally, and our chance to drink in the world without a connection to the outside.
With the autumn colors flushing across the landscape, it has also meant that all of the birds and other small animals have retreated lower into the valley. There is a distinct absence of sound. No wind, no birds, no trickling water. Just the sharp crack of the campfire, my steps in the gravel, and the sniff of Rally as he investigates a marmot hole.
I am keenly aware of how loud my actions are. Had I been at home, the sound of putting the pot on the stove, my breathing, the whoosh of my arm as it brushes across my leg, all gentle, quiet sounds. Here they feel amplified. They feel loud. Not in an offensive way. Without the clutter and noise of everyday life, and the overlapping circles of things demanding our attention, the solitude and the simplicity of cooking my dinner over the campfire becomes my focus.
We talk about flow states for creativity, but what about a flow state for enjoying the pleasure of a simple life?
I arrived before sunset with a few pieces of wood in my truck. The first bit of fire was lit and I set about collecting more. I cleaned up around the fire pit, broke my collected pieces into the appropriate sized chunks, and sorted them. I know darkness will come, and I don't want to struggle with fire maintenance. I think about these things. Keeping it all tidy and at that perfect distance from the active fire where I can reach it while sitting in my chair, but far enough away that it is unlikely to catch fire.
I collect more than I think I will need, and in the fading daylight I map out where other easy collection points are. First collecting from faraway places and leaving the nearby, easy stuff for later.
The last hour of daylight I make dinner and make sure everything in camp has clear paths. The fire is low and slow for the moment. I don't need it raging to cook. Cold is beginning to settle in, but I can stave it off by moving. When the dinner dishes are put away, my bourbon is poured, I stoke the fire and settle in with a book.
As the last bit of sunlight leaves the sky, there is a shift in the air. The mountain breathes, and for a little bit I find myself trying to find the right balance of sitting close to the fire and avoiding getting blasted in the face with smoke.
All of this work, all of this forethought, and yet I am still alone on a mountain, tending a fire and watching for the first signs of the stars.
At some point, doing all of the right steps and taking all of the right actions, I realize that I won't necessarily get the reward I wanted. Doing everything correctly does not guarantee the outcome I hoped for. The fire can only stave off the cold for a short while before I have to shift and find another angle.
It is maintenance, not the thing that will solve the isolation problem.
I think about how much this parallels other parts of my life, especially dating and trying to make connections with people. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I can do to make things work. Be prepared. Be thoughtful. Anticipate what might be needed. Create a comfortable place for someone to arrive. Keep enough wood nearby so the fire doesn't go out while I am sitting beside it.
But the fire doesn't work that way, and neither do people.
Preparation is valuable. It just isn't control.
It is a half moon tonight, and it sits slightly above the ridge to the west. The sun set around 6:20 p.m., and by 7:30 the sky is ink black except for the glow of the fire and the soft coldness of the moonbeams. Thousands of stars have been blinking their existence, and a wisp of cloud like spilled milk that someone tried to wipe up holds the glow of the moonbeams.
Temperatures are already dropping below freezing, and I can feel the deep cold setting in when I walk away from the fire. There is almost no movement in the air, and the smoke mostly goes straight up. I am able to sit close to the fire in a way that exposes my front side to soaking in its warmth. The cold at my back grows stronger, buffered by my sheepskin.
On the drive up here, I thought about how I found this place sometime around 2015 or 2016. It was pure chance. I was on one of my usual camping and exploring trips. I had a paper map and my trusty Subaru, and saw a sign that said,
"Road ends 25 miles past Slate Creek."
Okay, let's go to the road's end.
A half-mile-long, sketchy, single-lane hairpin cut into the rock face drops a thousand feet down into the valley on one side. Tumbling rocks from the cliff overhead tend to keep most people from coming up into the high valley at 7,000 feet. When I saw it for the first time, and saw the grove of trees that had burned out a few years before, leaving their trunks to bleach in the winter snow, I fell in love.
Those trees became hauntingly beautiful at night as the wind crested the ridge and worked its way through the valley. A haunting and intoxicating song as it whistled through the stands. A thousand individuals humming a few notes. You could almost feel like the voices of the ancestors were speaking to you.
There was nothing polished about the place. Nothing particularly convenient. It was difficult to reach, and there was nothing waiting for you when you arrived except wilderness, weather, firewood, and whatever you had thought to bring with you.
Maybe that was part of what made it feel so profound.
It did not offer much, but what it offered was enough.
At the time, I was in a long-term relationship, and when I got home I remember telling him about this place. Excitement was leaking from every pore. The beauty felt so profound, so real, so primal. I really wanted to share the place with him.
Over the next few years, I invited him to come see it. I tried to speak of its beauty, its impact on me, how when you were in the camp you looked out in every direction on wilderness. I asked every year, and every year he said no.
A part of me is sad that he never came to see this place. But as I sit here alone in the moonlight, I find myself grateful that he never did.
At the time, I thought sharing something beautiful with someone meant bringing them into it. I thought if they could just see what I saw, they would understand why it mattered to me. Now I think maybe some things don't need to be shared to be real.
This place has never asked me to explain itself. It doesn't need anyone to understand why it matters. It feels like a place of patience and legacy, not newness. I can invite someone to the fire. I can make them comfortable. I can tell them why the stars matter to me. But I cannot make them look up.
The cloud that looked like spilled milk has dissipated, and now only the fire, my meager headlamp, and the moon are giving light. I keep dropping my head back as I sit in my chair, mouth open, staring at the stars and drinking in the void. A small breath of wind comes through and fans the fire, sending a few sparks upward like reluctant fireflies.
Bourbon swirls in my cup, and I take a sip before returning to the stars. The moon slips behind the ridge, and now I can see the first signs of the Milky Way. It is faint. I almost have to squint to really see it, like seeing someone I think I know walking toward me on the trail from far away. I can't fully see it, but there is something familiar when I look at it. I wait, and in time it becomes more defined.
Eventually, I take off my glasses. I can't handle the brilliance and sharpness of all the stars and the now clearly defined Milky Way. I need it to not be so well defined. Just my failing eyesight blurring my vision and my bourbon-soaked brain trying to fill in the gaps. Somehow, the imperfect version is easier to take in. It leaves room for imagination.
By nine o'clock, there is no longer any moonlight, and as I drink in another round of the universe, the longing hits me. I desperately want someone to look up at the sky with me, someone to trace the undulations of the Milky Way and see what I see. There is a particular kind of loneliness in witnessing something beautiful and having no one beside you to turn to and say, "Look at that."
But I also fully love that I am here in silence and solitude with Rally. I don't feel like something is missing from this moment simply because no one else is here. The longing exists alongside the contentment. I can want someone beside me without needing someone beside me to make this moment whole.
A single shooting star streaks across the sky, and I wonder if anyone else is looking up and sees it too. Maybe somewhere far away, someone else is standing outside in the cold, looking at the same brief flash of light. I will never know. There is something strangely comforting about that.
I shut off my headlamp. The fire is dying down into a bed of coals, and I reach my hand up into the darkness. I can see the absence of starlight in the shadow of my hand. First I play with holding the Milky Way like a branch, then I run my hand along the skyline like stroking the hair of a loved one. For a moment, the distance between the physical world and the imagined one disappears, and I am simply sitting beneath something impossibly vast, letting myself feel small inside it.
Darkness defined me.
Bed calls me, and wrapped into my bedroll is Rally. He lets me hold him close all night.
Morning comes before the sun.
I wake while the sky is still dark, climb out of my bedroll, and start the fire again. Rally is still curled up, warm and unwilling to leave the comfort of the sleeping bag. I pour myself a cup of hot coffee from the Stanley thermos and sit beside the fire, watching the last stars disappear as the sky begins to soften.
There is something about that hour before sunrise that feels like a secret. The world is quiet enough that I can hear the small sounds of my own existence. The fire popping. My boots moving through the frost. Rally shifting beside me. There is no traffic, no voices, no notifications. Just us, the fire, and the slow arrival of another day.
The frost has settled over everything. As the first light reaches the valley, it catches the leaves and turns them brilliant again, reds and yellows scattered across the mountainside. The same landscape I watched disappear into darkness the night before is suddenly right there in front of me, changed only by the light.
Eventually, nature calls, and I find a suitable place to dig a cat hole. In the quiet of the morning, even that feels oddly ceremonial. I sit there looking out across the valley, realizing there is something humbling about having nowhere to hide from the simple facts of being alive.
Back at camp, I strip down and wipe myself off with warm water. For a moment, I am standing there naked except for my boots and a knit cap, steam rising from my skin while smoke curls around me from the fire. It is ridiculous and beautiful at the same time. There is no bathroom, no mirror, no separation between me and the landscape. Just a human body trying to get warm in the middle of the mountains.
For a few minutes, I feel completely at home in it.
The smoke, the cold, the trees, the fire, the frost beneath my boots. None of it is separate from me. I am simply another small thing occupying this place for a little while.
Then I put my clothes back on. They feel impossibly soft against my skin.
And eventually, it is time to leave.
I pack everything back into the truck, putting the campsite away piece by piece until there is little evidence that we were ever there. The fire is cold. The wood is stacked. The ashes are scattered. The valley is still quiet as I make my way back down the mountain.
The road feels different on the way out. Maybe it is the same road and I am the thing that has changed. The further I descend, the more familiar the world becomes. Trees give way to pavement, pavement gives way to roads I recognize, and eventually the little symbol on my phone changes.
One bar.
Then two.
The signal is back.
Almost immediately, the notifications begin arriving. Messages. Emails. Updates. All the small demands of a world that had continued spinning without me while I was sitting beside a fire, staring into the Milky Way.
I look at the phone for a moment, then turn it face down.
Then I turn off the radio and roll down the window.
Cold air rushes into the cab, carrying the smell of the forest with it. Rally shifts in the back, and for a few miles I drive without music, without conversation, without anything asking for my attention.
The signal has returned, but I don't have to.
For one more stretch of road, I let myself stay somewhere between the mountains and the life waiting for me at home. I think about the fire, and the stars, and the things I can prepare for but cannot control. I think about how easily I confuse being prepared with being able to determine the outcome. Maybe that is one of the hardest things to accept about life. You can gather the wood. You can build the fire. You can make the place warm and welcoming. You can sit beside it patiently and hope someone comes to share it with you.
But you cannot make them arrive.
You can only tend the fire.
And sometimes, that has to be enough.
BOOK: Emersons Essays - Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is something almost perfect about reading Emerson beside a campfire. His essays are long enough to pull you into an idea, but contained enough that you can finish one, close the book, and sit there for a while without feeling like you need to know what happens next. There is no plot waiting to be resolved. No cliffhanger asking you to turn the page. Instead, there is an idea. You read for a while. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe forty. Then you put the book down and stare into the fire. That is where the real reading begins.
Emerson was interested in questions that don't have particularly tidy answers: self-reliance, nature, friendship, love, solitude, purpose, the individual and the pressures of society. His First Series alone moves through essays on History, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, the Over-Soul, Circles, Intellect, and Art.
SONG: All My Days - Alexi Murdoch
This song seems to capture the moment... perfectly.
Thank you for reading my post. This post/essay, like many of the ones I write, is a blend of my personal experiences, travel, memories, stories, and shared conversations. These solely represent myself and my opinions and thoughts. When it involves personal friends I have given them nicknames unless they have given explicit permission to use their given name. There are times that I am able to pull from what I wrote down in my journals at the time an event happened, others I am trying to recall memories that have been altered by brain injuries and a lifetime of simply living. I may not always get it right, so please forgive me for some unintentional variations.
I always welcome feedback and thoughts on my posts. Please feel free to send me an email or comment below.
Love from the road,
Nic & Rally
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