3 Lessons at a Campsite
Two days in Savannah, and I had already spent nearly $200 on two Airbnbs. Desperation and necessity led me to to that campsite with my very first tent in Georgia.
You just bought a tent and you’re going to a campsite? You’re never going to figure that out, you fool.
I did figure it out after two failed attempts. Three times a charm, bitch.
“He’s a true hippie. Not one of those I-wear-tie-dye-and-drive-a-Volkswagen-bus hippies.”
Hoping his friend wouldn’t catch my upward gaze, I quickly glanced at his ball-cap hat. U.S. Army Veteran. “I believe in peace and love to all,” his friend replied.
I wondered: Had he been all about peace and love before or after the Vietnam war? It was a service to his country that rendered him 100 percent disabled, leading to a supply of pain pills that the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department (VA) eventually discontinued from him during the opioid crisis — ensuing a desperate period of heroin addiction to manage the unbearable pain, and homelessness.
Perhaps service to his country could make a little sense, hoping that the lives taken — including his very own that he volunteered away — wasn’t all for nothing. “People are leaving this land to travel when they have beauty all around them, right here and right now,” he said. “I want everyone to experience this freedom.”
Take a closer look: beauty breathes all around us.
Two vets found themselves at the bottom of the barrel, uniting inside that homeless shelter. One, angry, in a wheelchair after three back-to-back wars; the other, hopelessly addicted.
“Most people pitied me in that wheelchair. They said ‘let me give you a hand there.’”
“Not him,” he continued, pointing over to his traveling veteran brother. I was given a death sentence; still, he demanded I get off my ass and walk. Day in and day out, he helped me gain my strength back. I no longer needed that wheelchair.
“Give a hand up, not a hand down,” they both said in unison.
It was the greatest love story. Two veterans were separated by at least a couple decades of history, and yet, it was the strongest friendship I had ever witnessed — bonded by traumatic events that could never possibly heal, and joy. The pains of their past were so present, and it could never be any other way.
“My mind is intact. If I lose that, I lose everything. This is the best I’ve got,” one of the vets would later to me.
Three miles down a muddy road and 30 miles away from the nearest city, I found myself at Barrington County Park for one week.
I was acquainted with the oaks; the mysterious and other-worldly Spanish moss; the smell of pine and firewood; the aliveness of the marshy landscape; the abundance of wildlife including cawing crows, exotic woodpeckers, mystical bright green caterpillars, and those morbid turkey vultures who ate any decaying thing in sight; and my off-standish vet friends who offered me crawfish boil my second night and the largest shrimp I had ever set my eyes on, tiger shrimp, my third night.
During one of our usual three-hour sits that went down a million different rabbit holes and conversations, I learned the vets were in the process of giving a hand up. The VA didn’t seem to really care about them or their reintegration into society — after all, they were left homeless. They wanted to reintroduce fellow veterans to their survival skills and help them restore their own lives through the power of nature and self-sustenance. A big fuck you to the VA was in order.
“How are the veterans going to find you?” Naturally my brain went to marketing. “They aren’t,” he replied. “I will find them.”
Give a hand up, not a hand down.
There were other stories from my nearby camper neighbors that rivaled the lasting impact these vets had on me, including a grandma who self-built her own bus with second-hand items within a year; an elder who had been on the road for five years after going through heart surgery; a couple from Colorado who had left their 30-year business to explore the road for two years; and a retired navy vet, in his converted ambulance, with a death sentence. He was living with a deteriorating frontal lobe that caused his wife to report his attempted suicide — an incident he had no recollection of — followed by a mental hospital stay and two years in a nursing home.
“Sometimes you own things. But usually, it’s the things that own you,” he said. He wasn’t sure how much time he had left with his condition, but one thing was certain: he better own his life and make the most of his precious time.
All of us are dealing with our own ghosts, I thought.
I knew my time was ending at the campsite. Intuition spoke to me softly, and she whispered it’s time.
“What are you thinking about?” one of the vets asked.
“There’s one thing you and the rest of the campers here have in common,” I replied. “Even though your stories are wildly different, there is a theme of heartache, hardship, and trauma,” I spoke slowly, fearing I could say something that might set off a three-time war veteran. That was my own personal pain. I learned, at a very young age, I needed to manage other people’s reactions. And that was the one thing I deeply admired about the two vets: they spoke no bullshit.
“You could have allowed those events to impact you differently. Instead of waiting to die, you all have been able to transform your heartache…and be led to the beauty around, and your joy.”
The next day, I spent a good three hours unpacking and repacking my car, with the decision to donate anything that had out-served its purpose. That was one thing I learned in that week; if an item doesn’t have more than two uses, create one or get rid of it.
I breathed in and noticed a mix of emotions come over me: gratitude, awe, happiness. And fear.
I was brought back to a vivid memory when a five-year old girl was splashing water at me. With cheer and giggles, she saw my hesitation and exclaimed: “It’s just water!”
Splish, splash. Nat, it’s just water.
I found myself on the road again, and this time, with a lighter load.
