It was the hour to get organized, for it was time to head toward the airport and return Zach to Kentucky where he came from. So we began first-thing this morning. The trunk of the car was just a grand mess of all our things sort of mixed together: the boots, the backpacks, the flannel, flashlights, the park maps, the souvenirs.  We handed things back and forth as we got organized. “This is yours…..This is mine.” We also had to take down the tents and pack up the sleeping bags. It was quite an operation. I wasn’t sure how to feel about all this. Was I to be sad to send Zach off, continuing the adventure by myself? How would that feel after all this time together? Or should I feel happy and relieved to be able to have my solo freedom, to do everything as I wanted to and not have the stress of the complaining and the concern of trying to appease. I guess I sort of shrugged it off. I’ll find out when he’s gone, I concluded. 

Leaving Mount Rainier National Park, we stopped just outside at a little “backpacker lodge.” That’s how I described it in my journal. I didn’t bother to write down its name or provide any details, except that I bought a cup of hot tea and a scone for breakfast. I described it as a “backpacker lodge,” by the part-grungy, part-artsy nature of the place and the few patrons around sporting large backpacks. In writing about this place I’ve examined maps and have tried to locate this place, to give it a name here, but I simply cannot find it. Perhaps it doesn’t exist anymore, or perhaps it is just well hidden on the maps.

In recalling my adventures in the National Parks and the beautiful wild, this is not the only place I visited I haven’t been able to relocate. The very day I picked Zach up from the airport, and we were traveling our way up California on highway 101 in the semi-arid lands, passing by many a vineyard, I came to a sign boasting some sort of self-sustaining community. It was advertised as an all-natural farm working on renewable energy. Its signage read “visitors welcome.” I knew this was the kind of place Zach would like to see. So, I pulled off the road. This was for him. He seemed excited to see it. We pulled onto a dusty driveway. The land was dry and the sun was harsh. A box stood at a post with a suggested donation listed. We threw in a few dollars. I should have known better…Well, honestly I had no idea what was in store. 

So this was this little commune of various buildings and paths between them we could walk around on. We weren’t quite sure where we could go, or what we were to see. There was some interesting makeshift infrastructure, networks of homemade irrigation systems, green houses, lots of plants hanging around, buildings that were constructed…um…what’s the word… creatively. It was kind of intriguing, but then we came across a local. He was a middle-aged man, leathery, wrinkly skin from too much sun exposure. His hair was dirty and matted; his shirt only buttoned up halfway to show off his collection of hippie necklaces. He was super friendly and talkative…because he was drunk. The first piece of evidence was the smell on his breath. He welcomed us, and gave a slurred introduction to the grounds. He wanted to show us his home that he built himself. It was a hut, made of dirt clay and glass bottles. I’ll admit it was impressive. It even had some nice windows built into it. It had to have been a lot of work, but after I briefly saw it. I was done. I was done listening to him curse like a sailor so casually and I was ready to go! But he kept talking and talking. When we did get away, I made a comment to Zach about how drunk he was, “…and high,” Zach added. I hadn’t picked up on that, but it’s because I hadn’t been exposed to enough high people to know what that sort of behavior looks like. Then a notion started to dawned on me: I think we are on a marijuana farm. Again, I was done. I wanted to get out of here. Before we left we did go into a gift shop, which was surprisingly nice and put together, not very reflective of the jury-rigged nature of the rest of the place. By observing the type of merchandise my suspicion grew stronger.  

That was weird. We carried on. 

As I’ve gone back to maps and the internet to try and find this place, learn more about it, to confirm what exactly it was, and to give it a name, I can’t find anything. Perhaps that’s intentional, and that’s fine, because I really don’t care to know more. What I do know is that it was in California, and they can have it, and they can keep it. I suppose all I’ll ever know about it is what I remember. Just like the backpacker lodge outside Mount Rainier National Park, that’s all I got. 

After our brief stop for breakfast we only had a couple hour drive to the Seattle-Tacoma airport, so as we got close we made a few stops. Zach wanted to visit a Target to return a Nalgene bottle he had bought toward the beginning of our ttrip together. I have a tradition on my summer-long vacations to get a Nalgene bottle and sticker it up with stickers from each park I visit. I had a neon yellow bottle for stickers for my Southwest adventures I write about in my book Canyonlands: My adventures in the National Parks and beautiful wild. I have a dark green one with stickers from the Still, Calm, and Quiet: More adventures in the National Parks and beautiful wild summer, and I have two classic blue ones from parks I’ve visited on various smaller trips back in the Eastern United States. For this trip I had a dark turquoise bottle sporting my stickers. Zach had learned of my ways and wanted to do the same. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as they say, so I liked that he wanted to copy me, but the Nalgene he had bought earlier on the trip had a plastic casing around it that must have, at some point, melted onto the bottle and now could not be fully separated. So he wanted to exchange it.

I also let Zach pick where to have lunch since it was his last day on the trip, and he was always the one with the large and urgent appetite. It’s definitely telling that we were no longer in the wild when he chose ihop. We were in the city of Tacoma next to Seattle. It was my first time eating at an ihop. I was surprised to learn there was more on the menu than just pancakes. 

In the later afternoon it came time to take Zach to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. I parked and we went inside. He checked his bag, we said goodbye, and he quickly made it through the TSA security checkpoint. I did feel a poignant sadness. As much as he frustrated me, I felt this heavy aloness set in. It was the realization that I was so far away from home and now all alone. Why should this bother me? I’ve traveled so far away so alone so many times. But as I saw him move past security towards his gate, I knew deep within me, our friendship wouldn’t recover from this trip. Our friendship was built over a love for the outdoors and recreation. Those are great things, but they can also be superficial, especially when we view nature so differently. I view it as God’s design with purpose, intention, and messages which it beholds for mankind to draw closer to Him. Zach didn’t share that view. I also value human life so greatly much differently than Zach. We argued about this. He saw human life as too abundant and in need of being lessened. This sat so incredibly unwell with meI saw it all as sacred and designed by God with even greater purpose. Humanity is God’s most prized possession. Yes, possession. We are His. I felt I couldn’t bring up these deeply held views of mine. They would cause further arguments. Zach saw human life as too abundant and needed to be lessened. 

There also was no peace in this friendship. There was complaining and conflict and never a sense of security. We were not kindred spirits. We didn’t share any weightier values. At this time in my life I was too young and immature to realize that perhaps I could be an influence upon Zach’s life, but when it comes to forming friendships it takes a great deal of effort for me to form them. I also don’t throw the word friend around casually. I take the term friendship quite seriously. In recent years I’ve been very conscious of my use of the term “friend” versus “acquaintance.” I will only use that term friend for a true kindred spirit, for someone I can rely on, whom I share great values with, whom I am willing to get behind and advocate for in life, and someone who is willing to do the same for me.

I also believe friendship is a design of God for us to build each other up spiritually. The Bible has a lot to say about friendship. Take into account Proverbs 18:24, “One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. Then Proverbs 17:17 reads, “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity.”  Lastly, I’d like to mention Proverbs 27:17, which I also think has a lot to do with friendship. It reads, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another”. What I thought was a friendship between Zach and I was not reflective of any of these verses. 

We are all wired differently. It takes a deal of effort for me to create friendships. There’s this effort of really putting myself out there and sharing of myself that doesn’t always come naturally. I do it and delightfully so when I see the potential for a fruitful and lasting friendship. In such instances it encourages me. I get a great deal of energy from it, and my life is enriched, but to put forth the effort for a friendship based over a mere superficial hobby for nothing of substance, is exhausting. I am not saying that the way I maneuver friendship is the best and that my views are even the best for me. I find myself often to be solitary, lonely quite often. I suppose if I didn’t take friendship building so seriously, but more casually, and I put forth effort to connect even over the shallow and superficial things in life, I may have more people around me. Maybe I’d be less lonely, but also being surrounded by people on a shallow level of commonality I think is exhausting. I would probably feel even more lonely to be surrounded by people who do not share my values and outlook. I do say, that because I do take friendship so seriously, that the people I do invest in that I truly call friends mean a lot to me. I am very rich because of that, and maybe I feel a richness of friendship that some people do not, and for that I am very thankful. 

As Zach was now gone on his way back to Kentucky, a whole different mindset had to set in. I had to shift from accommodating another traveler, to just looking out for myself. I was free! Not gonna lie, this is what I wanted. 

Leaving the airport, I was able to quickly adopt the new mindset of being alone and free! The next leg of my journey would take me to North Cascades National Park, but tonight all I had to do was drive two and a half hours to a KOA northwest of Seattle, so I didn’t have to be in a rush. Therefore in Marysville, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, I stopped at a Planet Fitness. The original plan was to take a shower there, but then I realized I could just shower at the KOA tonight, and so I just enjoyed a workout. Normally I focus on one certain muscle group per day at the gym, but since I hadn’t been to a gym in a while, I decided to just do a little bit of everything. 

At this point in my life, I still hadn’t made the switch from the flip phone to the smartphone. I had an iphone, a cheap one, just to take photos and connect to wifi when the opportunity allowed. I needed to take the iphone into Planet Fitness and connect to the wifi to make a payment through mobile banking. In between sets I was trying to remember a password, reset a password, select all the images of stop-lights, get a confirmation code through the flip phone, translate that over— all of those technicalities. 

Next to the gym was a local thrift store. It was pretty large, and I was excited to check it out. Maybe I can find some fun camping gear. I’d really like to find a skateboard. That isn’t something I could have packed in my suitcase. Maybe I can find some good CDs for some different travel tunes. Since I hadn’t made the migration from flip-phone to smartphone, I also hadn’t made the switch over to digital media. I had no such luck with any of these hopes, but I did find an Under Armour base layer that would come in handy during the cold nights and mornings up in Glacier National Park. Leaving the thrift store, I did notice a couple homeless people loitering around the parking lot, one pushing a shopping cart as if it was a caravan. The way they acted, their demeanor, made it evident they were drug abusers. It was nice to get a workout in, and to wander around the thrift store, but the druggies were a stark reminder I was in the city and I wanted to be back in the wild. 

I got in the car and made my few hour drive to the KOA campground. After zipping up interstate 5, I was on highway 20 heading east along the Skagit River. Urbanization waned, and gradually more forest set in. I knew the KOA wasn’t going to be anything fancy in terms of KOAs. It was just a basic one, but all my experience with KOAs thus far had been good. Making the turn into  the KOA I was surprised to find that it was gated, and I had to press a button to open the gate. I went to the office to check in. The host seemed a bit frustrated. She went over the usual rules and explained how the gate will be located after 10pm. I wondered why this KOA needed such a security measure as a locked gate. We seemed to be in a pretty rural area, and back in nature, which is generally a safer place to be. It’s not like we were in a city. She pointed on the map where my campsite was. It was the furthest away at a dead-end road. “There was a picnic table at your campsite, but we’ve been having a problem. Some people entered in from the woods and stole the picnic table, dragging it off into the forest.” This explained her frustration, and now I knew why there was a locked gate. But who comes from out of the woods and steals a picnic table? It seemed so odd. I wasn’t bothered by the fact I wouldn’t have a picnic table, but it was unsettling that people come from out of the woods and steal things. 

I drove down the gravel path where it dead-ended at my campsite. I was farthest away I could be from any other camper in this campground, isolated. I stood there at my site and looked into the forest imagining some strange forest people emerging and scoping out what they could glean. Where were they coming from? What’s in those forests? Not having made the smartphone migration, I wasn’t accustomed to using any digital maps to check out my surroundings, so I just looked at that forest with a mysterious wonder, imagining people dragging picnic tables into its depths. Those were unsettling thoughts.

I drove back to the “recreation center” as it was called. It was like a community center in the campground next to the pool. There was a water dispenser and plastic KOA cups. I was a KOA fan and had never seen a KOA cup before. They were obviously meant to be taken. Souvenir! There I sat at a folding table, cracked open my Chromebook, connected to the wifi, and began transferring some of the photos from my point-and-shoot camera’s SD card to the Chromebook for backup and also to share some photos online. What an adventure thus far, from the Mojave Desert to the North Cascades in the Pacific Northwest. It was very relaxing to sit there for a while, and I was at great peace while looking at all these beautiful photos I had taken on my journey. I also proceeded to take a shower and was all refreshed and reset. Then I hopped back in my car and drove back down the dead-end to my campsite.

It was dark now, so there was a certain mysterious ambiance in the air. I stood there on the tent pad in the silence, alone, looking at the forest again. The host’s words reverberated in my ears, “Some people came from out of the woods…and stole the picnic table, hauling it into the forest.” I imagined them now hauling a body into the forest. I did not saunter over a decision. There was an unsettling vibe here. It was not strange enough to cause me to leave, but I was going to sleep in my car, and so I did. 

If you enjoyed reading this, check out my book “Still, Calm, and Quiet“

Check out my previous entry here: “Really, What Kind of Mountain Are You?”

Visit www.joshhodge.com