Uncomfortable Places I've Slept In

Not the actual van. Duh.

A Nonworking Van in Someone's Driveway, Rural Minnesota

I used to get around everywhere by bike. I loved my late 80s white Specialized Stumpjumper, bought for about $200 brand new and lovingly obsessed over for a decade by me. I especially enjoyed the feel of speeding down hills on roads, sitting straight up evoking the sensation of time whipping past me.

I took several bike trips after I'd moved to Minnesota. This one was the cycling tour I took to visit my soon-wife while she was doing a radio internship in the small Wisconsin town she'd grown up in. I rode several days from Mankato where we were students on the Sakatah Trail and then began riding back roads east across Minnesota to the Mississippi. 

It may have been the third or fourth evening of the trip. I was on a road bordered by long lines of trees with occasional houses. Back then I used a slim backpack US atlas where I traced my travels with markers, including stars at places I'd spent the night. But I've long since lost that, so my best guess is it was along one of the rural roads between Northfield and Prescott. A storm was brewing that I expected, having heard about it on a radio playing at the McDonald's where I'd had breakfast that morning. But by midafternoon I didn't need a weatherman to tell that. The sky had been a milky grey before covering what was left of the sun by 4 or 5.The wind, which had been pleasant through most of my trip, picked up so I was pressing the pedals as hard as if I'd been riding through a river flowing in the opposite direction. 

I didn't have a watch--I haven't worn one since the mid-80s--so my estimate of the time of day is really a guesstimate. But I was certain it was darker earlier than it should be. I'd started looking for someplace to set in for the night, hoping my tent would weather it but worrying it wouldn't. So I was searching for a place under trees where, even if I was at risk of a limb falling on me, would afford better protection than being in the open. 

I'd decided to start looking for an abandoned barn but while they were plentiful in that part of the state the only ones I could see were all in use by cows and horses. I was beginning to wonder if I could ask some family if I could cower on their porch when I passed a house with several vehicles in the driveway. My eye was caught by a van up on blocks. It looked like it was unlikely to suddenly be dragooned back in use. I stopped just past the house, listening to the sounds of people inside it, determined they were unlikely to hear or see me--it was the kind of place built into a hill where the ground floor on one side was actually the basement with no windows and the living was done on the next floor--and without giving it another thought opened the back of the van, popped my bike and gear inside, and closed it behind me.

The sharp smell of disuse and gasoline intoxicated me. The floor was a collection of tools, laid out where they could be grabbed easily from the door, and beyond them it was comparatively clear. I laid out my mat and mummy bag and read by what thin light was still available; when I decided it was safe,  I used my tiny reading light for a while until I gave in to exhaustion.

The wind had been pretty steady while I'd read and for the initial part of my sleep until the sound of a train barreling down the tracks at me shook me awake in a panic. The wind had  become a behemoth during my nap, a massive dragon snuggling up to my shelter and buffeting it enough that the sides shook. 

But I felt safe. The van had stood on those blocks for a long while and through many storms. Nothing was going to pierce those walls, not the harridan wind or the rain that hit the roof and windows sounding like stilettos. It probably went on for hours but I had little trouble, once I determined there was nothing coming into the few holes I noted in the van's floor, sleeping the sleep of the just plain tired. 

Despite my referring to it now as uncomfortable, it actually was pretty warm and secure and, most of all, dry. I slept close enough to one of the holes the smell of gas didn't bother me. When I woke the sun was just cresting the horizon. I usually spent the first minutes of my day brushing my teeth and splashing water on my face, but I didn't want to be caught by my unknowing saviors, so after a quick gulp from my water bottle, I opened the door as quietly as I could, and stepped out into a brilliant aqua-tinted world. Everything looked washed clean by the storm. Even the air seemed like it had been spiffed up. I took my bike out, closed the door just as quietly, walked it to the road and hopped on it without looking back. Tree limb after tree limb had been flung to the road and huge puddles were easy to navigate away from. Reaching the next town I heard it'd been a severe thunderstorm with sub-Category One winds, only(!) reaching speeds in the 60s. I was dry and safe and celebrated with a full breakfast at the diner. 

Uncomfortable Places I've Slept

 

Wildcat Mountain, Frost Valley, New York

 I’d found Wildcat Mountain years before when working at a group home that took the kids to a camp during winter. It’s a comfortable mountain full of trails and a cable bridge across a creek, bluffs, and many places to hide out, along with a huge open field. I camped there for a month in the late 80s.

My first night, I found a spot off one of the side trails, certain I wouldn’t be seen or heard. I had a secondhand tent that smelled of mold no matter what I did to it, but I’d gotten used to, if not happy with the smell. After setup I sat on a bluff over the field and watched the shadows from the trees behind me lengthen and then take over.

I was awake for a while after dark, reading Gary Snyder’s The Old Ways by battery lamp. I fell into a dreamy sleep involving Neil Young (I’d sung “After the Gold Rush” to myself while on the bluff). I was wakened by a noise. I couldn’t place it but I sat up, listening for another.

Not long to wait. Another, nearer sound came from just outside the tent. The scant moonlight allowed me to see one edge of the tent buckle, like a finger or a fist was pushing it in slowly, then suddenly withdraw. Then another sound I still couldn’t identify, and another part of the tent buckled, then just as quickly returned to place.

I didn’t dare turn on the light. I didn’t know who might have found my camp or what reason they might have to bother me, but in my imagination, it was any number of dangerous killers high on coke who happened across me and wanted, if just for fun, to frighten me.

Beside me on the floor was a survival knife I’d been given, one of those long-bladed monstrosities with which you could fillet a fish, tell the direction you were facing, unscrew the handle to access the small sawblade and fishing line, crack open a beer, and presumably fight off nefarious attackers. I slid it silently as I could from its sheath and crept slowly to the front of the tent. Other spots on the tent continued those sounds and their pushing in and letting out.

Experiences like this led me later to conclude that if you have a weapon, you’ll find a reason to use it. I unzipped the tent door, screamed as loudly as I could, and, brandishing my knife, flailed into the open,. In my mind, I was Conan facing a squadron of cannibalistic enemies. Realistically, I was a naked, shivering man with wild hair watching the fast-retreating white tails of several deer in the dim light. The noise had been their sniffing at the moldy smell and their snorting challenges at my invasion of their trail to the creek.