Camping Prepared: A Deeply Peaceful And Spontaneous Experience
This past weekend, that was how we experienced friendship and relationship. This past weekend, that was how I experienced God.
This past weekend, five of my friends and I went camping at a campground outside of Helen, Georgia, building upon an annual tradition of camping that another group of friends and I have gone on in the past. While the title of the previous article was "Camping Unprepared: A Deeply Spiritual Experience" (because there's nothing more spiritual than the aftermath of almost freezing to death in the Smoky Mountains), this time, my group was much better prepared to handle nature's predicted hurdles than last year.
There was a quote I shared in that article last year, from Maureen Dowd's 2012 NYTimes article, "Why, God?" Quoting a meditation from Father Kevin O'Neil, the article addressed a common question asked in circles of people who question God and ask why God would allow tragedy, suffering, and pain to happen, and the reason for that. The answer is this:
"For whatever reason, certainly foreign to most of us, God has chosen to enter the world today through others, through us. We have stories of miraculous interventions, lightning-bolt moments, but far more often the God of unconditional love comes to us in human form, just as God did over 2,000 years ago."
This year, however, was a much different experience than the year before. Yes, the God of unconditional love comes to me in the form of my friends, mentors, family, and people who have loved me from hell and back. But this experience wasn't as much of an existential crisis for a plethora of reasons. No, there wasn't the same level of absolute vulnerability, uncertainty, and foolish compromise to our survival that accompanied the previous trip.
But God's gift of unconditional love has come to me in a form that has been more difficult, tested, and farther to reach. I have lost friends. I have gone through intense isolation and depression. I have questioned everything. And like Father Kevin, I believe differently than I have this past year. There are people who I have suffered with but those people are fewer, and I have to grow closer and rely more intensely on a group of friends rather than a huge group of people.
"We are human and mortal. We will suffer and die," Father Kevin wrote. "But how we are with one another in that suffering and dying makes all the difference as to whether God's presence is felt or not and whether we are comforted or not."
Those are words I needed to read and hear again. And so they are words that I carried with me and thought about throughout this camping trip with the friends that have supported and stood by me through thick and thin. I have experienced God through these friends. I have experienced faith through these friends. They showed me that there is always humor in life, even in times of darkness and in life's darkest moments.
We drove up from Atlanta to Helen in a quite egalitarian fashion: every person took turns driving so everyone else could attend to their business and take naps if necessary. Beforehand, the trip was a very spontaneous idea, an idea I floated around to each of the friends living in our house. Everyone admitted that they didn't believe the trip would happen. But the night before, we stopped at Walmart and bought a cheap tent that could fit six people. We bought enough hot dogs to feed ourselves for the day and grill at a campfire.
Unfortunately, a persistent conflict arose. One of our friends, Egan, was a vegetarian. On the way there, we had to stop by a grocery store to get him veggie burgers. What we failed to foresee is how fragile veggie burgers are when you try to cook them in a fire: the top two ingredients in our veggie burgers were water and vegetable oil. I am not sure if this is a chemically and scientifically sound conclusion, but when your top two ingredients are water and vegetable oil, the veggie burger disintegrates extremely quickly.
But we drove to our campsite, and all partook in setting up the tent. While the procedure last year took a long time and took the herculean efforts of a couple of us (myself not included), each of us helped and contributed in some way to setting up the tent and cooking our own food. After we were done, we traveled to Brasstown Bald, the highest peak in Georgia, and enjoyed the views and scenery.
For all of us, it was a year of tumult and chaos, and so it was a great time to be able to relax and decompress on this trip.
But, again, chaos entered our lives. We went to Unicoi Lake to go on a run, like cross country and long-distance runners, and somewhere on the trail, I rolled and sprained my ankle so badly I couldn't run anymore, let alone walk correctly. I would walk the entire three-mile trail back to the car, only to realize, in my ignorance and utter stupidity, that there was a road I could have walked on that led back to our parking lot that was only a half mile long that I could have walked.
"Ryan, we thought you would figure it out," our friend, Burke said. But, I didn't figure it out and left the entire group waiting for 45 minutes.
We returned to the campsite, and chaos again took control of our lives when Burke, recommended we hike a two-mile trail named "Andrews Cove Trail." The way forward on the trail was entirely uphill, through creeks, and left all of us sweating and exhausted. At each minute of the hike, we proceeded with the mindset that "we've put in too much work to stop," but a break from that monotony came when we looked to the right and saw black bear cubs climbing and falling down trees and running away from us. Although our anxiety levels rose slightly, we just went about our hike through the trail as if nothing happened.
This is the second of my two camping trips where I have seen bears and just proceeded about my trip as if nothing happened, and I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing, because now I have no idea what the correct procedure is when you see bears on a trail.
The hike, however, would prove excruciating on the way to Andrews Cove. It was entirely uphill, full of rocks that I painfully rolled my sprained ankle on again, and seemingly endless. Egan ran ahead and tried to find the cove, and we didn't hear from Egan for several minutes, meaning that he was still running. Eventually, we got to a hearing, and never in our lives had we been as disappointed as we were. The "cove" was just a dirt road with no attractions and no scenery. We hiked two hours up the trail as the sun was setting for absolutely nothing.
What redeemed that hike, however, was running into a man (whose name we never asked for or caught, so I'm just going to call him Jim) who informed us that there was nothing there, that humorously expressed his sympathy for us in our disappointment. Jim would inform us that Andrews Cove was actually the campground that we were staying at, not the barren dirt road that we hiked almost an hour to get to.
We would hike back to Andrews Cove and our campground safely, and the rest of the night went somewhat seamlessly. Egan, in his arrogance, decided he would rather sleep in his hammock rather than in our tent. I would wake up around 7 a.m. the next morning to hear Egan complaining, at a volume our entire campground could hear, about how he was absolutely freezing the majority of the night and about how utterly uncomfortable sleeping in the hammock was.
We would drive back to our house in Atlanta the next day for a couple of hours, and I look back at the trip and can only think fondly of it. Sure, it wasn't eventful enough that my friend and I almost froze to death, but it was a spontaneous and unexpected experience that gave peace to our lives in times of chaos and instability.
This past weekend, that was how we experienced friendship and relationship. This past weekend, that was how I experienced God.
