The Great Indoors

Sometimes I get these overwhelming urges to go camping. It has been several weeks since our trip to Huangshan, which helped curb my craving, but it has been months since my last camping trip. I need to get out of the city. It feels urgent. I spent a large chunk of time yesterday looking for places I could get away to. I looked up all the natural parks in China, and I must say none of them seemed like they would satisfy. There are some incredible places in China. There are whole forests of rhodedendrons and colorful pheasants and somewhere, supposedly, wild pandas. There are bamboo forests and misty mountains with buddhas carved into their sides. But I guess I'm homesick, because none of those seems right. I need some ponderosas or blue spruce or red cedars. I need a river that is freezing cold and cuts banks the way I'm used to. I need golden hills, enormous vistas, and a canyon. I need a moose, a coyote, or even a white-tail deer.

Perhaps it will help to tell you that Peter is Idaho right now and I am in Shanghai and it's raining. But that's not all of it. I felt this way in Seattle, too, so much so that once I drove to Mt. Rainier in the middle of the week and called in sick so I could just stay on the top of a mountain by myself for a few days and chill out. It was one of the best trips of my life. But there is no Mt. Rainier here. It is days and days to the closest place that could be considered wilderness. There is no way to escape except a mindshift into appreciating the urban jungle of a large Asian city.

There is a new store close to our house called Outdoor Store. They sell imported camping gear and the inside looks like a small-town Chinese version of REI. Shaved log banisters, some pine sprigs here and there, etc. They have all the name brands: Marmot, Arcteryx, North Face, SmartWool, Nalgene, etc. A windproof fleece there costs more than our rent, which is probably true in the U.S. too, but here nothing costs as much as a month's rent, nothing comes even close. A pair of SmartWool socks costs twice as much as an entire evening for both of us to go to dinner and the spa with a massage. Peter and I can't help but go in there and look around whenever we walk by. We touch everything. It feels like it should: warm, lightweight, waterproof, breathable, technical. Downstairs there are tents and sleeping bags and campstoves and carabineers. We wonder what they would charge us to spend a night in the display camp, use the warm down sleeping bags and cook breakfast over the not-backpacker-friendly charcoal stove and eat with the lightweight aluminum chopticks. Sometimes we think we might be able to sleep in that dark tent and pretend we're home.

I'm always planning my next vacation. I've got several lined right now, more than we can possibly accomplish if we want to come home in July and spend time in the Bitteroots or the Owyhees. Right now I'm hooked on Hokkaido, the northernmost (undisputed) part of Japan, where in winter, you can stay on a wooded peninsula jutting out into the sea enjoying thermal pools while looking out at the southernmost extent of the sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere. Stellar's Sea Eagles come down for the winter and small brown bears--distant cousins of our grizzlies--are hiding somewhere in dens.

Yesterday, I lay in bed watching a Planet Earth marathon while it poured what I'm pretty sure was acid rain outside. It was a kind of medicine, a therapy. Me and David Attenborough contemplating the world and its untouched places and that fine line between knowledge of the world and destruction of the world. It helped a little, but I still got out of bed and went to the computer to see how much it would cost to get to Hokkaido if I left tomorrow. Turns out I'd have to have Sir David's salary to get there, so I got on my bike and rode to the closest person selling roasted sweet potatoes and enjoyed the smallest, cheapest thing I could find that would make me happy in Shanghai.