On the night before solo, we gathered around the campfire to talk about our expectations of solo. Many expressed their hope to learn more about themselves from such a tough experience. Our hope of not having a close encounter with a bear was also common. As LandSea as my first real camping experience, I knew nothing of dealing with a black bear. My only guide to bears was a newspaper from the local town of Sudbury in one of the vans. The newspaper said something like this:
“If a person doesn’t want a black bear to come closer, act aggressively.”
Huh? What was that? You want me to act aggressively toward a 400 pound black bear by myself? The prospects of this happening scared the shit out of me. I decided that the chances of this happening were pretty slim, so I turned the page and tried to forget about it. I found comfort in the next page of the newspaper, an advertisement for the Sudbury RibFest. I would soon regret seeing this.
We got out of the vans, walked for 30 minutes to the aptly named Grey Lake, and waited to be taken to our individual sites by canoe. I decided to let others go ahead of me, hoping that a miracle would appear so that I wouldn’t have to go on solo. No such miracle materialized, so I was taken to my campsite. Darkness soon approached as I set out my things, so I crawled into my sleeping bag underneath the stars, content and confident that solo wasn’t going to be as bad as I had thought the night before. No bears, just myself and my journal to reflect. If Gandhi could fast for weeks, going a little less than two days without food would be a
Boy, was I wrong.
I awoke about an hour later to find that the beautiful sky of stars had changed into a dark mass that became the subject of my scorn for the rest of the night. The rain began to pour down, so I wrapped myself up in my ground tarp (a method called burritoing) and tried to find a dry place under a tree. In hindsight, sitting underneath a tree was a bad idea, but I didn’t really care. Constant rain, rumbles of thunder that seemed to last for minutes on end and my longing for a hot bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese lead to very little sleep that night.
The rain continued on into the late morning and tapered off as the sun was able to finally break through. After the hellish night I had been through, feeling the warm rays of the familiar sun was comforting. I laid my drenched sleeping bag near the shore to dry off as I got my journal out to reflect. As I tried to accurately describe the events of solo experience to that point, I realized one thing: damn was I hungry. My stomach felt like an empty pit, aching relentlessly, crying to be filled. I made a list all of the foods I missed: hamburgers, pizza, ice cream, pasta, anything barbecue, turkey sandwiches, chicken salad, and the list went on. The thought of endless ribs from the Sudbury RibFest tortured me. When the list was not enough, I began to go into detail about every food. Hamburgers turned into two toasted buns with sizzling bacon, sharp cheddar cheese and a half-pound, medium rare burger hot off the grill. I even picked out what kinds of ice cream I wanted on a triple scoop waffle cone at the Bob-In Again custard shop near my summer cottage in Petoskey, Michigan. I felt a lot like Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. In order to take my mind away from food, I thought that drawing might do the trick. Instead, I found myself drawing pages upon pages of food, becoming mesmerized like some sort of food zombie.
The day wore on as my stomach ached for food in a way that I had never felt before. But I ached for another thing: company. The wonderful cooking of my Dad and Grandma, thoughts of my Petoskey friends at summer hot dog roasts, my LandSea patrol that gathered around the fire to cook up hot meals after a grueling day of hiking and canoeing; my desire for food was accompanied by all the people I spent eating it with. I didn’t just long for a cheeseburger, I longed to sit around the back porch table of my cottage with all my family. I had been alone for so long that when I closed my eyes, I could picture it perfectly. But when I opened them, all I saw was trees and lake. I just a dot in the vast sea of Canadian wilderness, and I knew it perfectly well.
After another night of thunderstorms, the rain continued as we shivered in the canoes that picked us up from our campsites. After two days of loneliness, seeing and talking to other people was an alien, yet wonderful experience. During our walk back, we were given a red apple. I took a bite. It was small, mealy and somewhat juicy; the antithesis of the huge, juicy, golden delicious apples I had been accustomed to picking every fall at apple orchards 15 minutes away from my home in Kalamazoo. But it didn’t matter, it was one of the most satisfying things to touch my taste buds. We walked back to the vans, which took us to a parking lot with a small convenience store owned by the park. Jim, a Kalamazoo College trustee who was on the trip, met us there and bought each person a can of pop and a candy bar. I picked out a Pepsi and some sort of chocolate bar with peanut butter. I never imagined that my spirits could be lifted from two simple items, but these small luxuries did just that. The only thing better than the sweet taste of the pop and candy bar was that I was eating it with my friends, friends who had just been through the same lonesome experience. Sweets and smiles. I couldn’t have been more content.
While I know that thinking about food for most of my solo experience made me hungrier, it also helped me get through the entire experience. Those hours I spent listing, describing and drawing food helped me to remember the people so close to me and helped me to escape from the boredom. At a time I was so far away from food, I realized that I had never been closer to it.
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