Stealing Fire

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK – We stole fire.

Well, we didn’t steal it, steal it. Didn’t pick it up and move it, though we did put some brief thought into doing just that. Delaney and I simply borrowed it for a few minutes.

Our neighbors in Yosemite’s Upper Pines campground had retreated to their plush RV, leaving their fire — warm, so warm, with roasting coals and a gentle flame — unattended. Poor planning on our part left us with damp wood that refused to be lit, which had us eating salmon and mac and cheese at our table, chilled to our cores by the 19-degree night, with a little help from warm water we boiled on our miniature kettle.

So we simply borrowed our neighbors’ fire, sneaking over and toasting a little before piling into our tent with one long sleeve, one short sleeve, one sweatshirt, one winter jacket, one beanie, one pair of gloves, leggings, two pairs of socks, and sweatpants each.

It was, for a few moments anyway, terribly uncomfortable. It was indelible.

“At least we have the car, as backup,” Delaney said a few times as we drove in, watching the temperature drop, then drop some more. We did. The car was there. A good backup. A reliable backup. A respectable backup. But we weren’t going to use it, and we both knew it. We knew it because this year has been one of adventure, of trying new things. Sleeping in temperatures below 20 would be an adventure, a new thing.

Nine hours, we slept. The most I’ve gotten in quite a long time. We weren’t even that cold, to tell you the truth. And when we woke up, with snow smiling its glittering white smile at us outside our tent, and the crisp, freezing mountain air proving more effective at waking your body and mind than the strongest of coffees, it confirmed, once again, why we do this, why we freeze ourselves to death, why we sleep in tents when there are cozy AirBNBs 30 minutes up the valley, why we opt to layerlayerlayer up to sleep.

There’s magic out there.

By “out there,” I mean anywhere far enough away where you don’t get a single bar of service. No texts, calls, emails, Instagram notifications, Tweets — whatever your virtual vice may be, there’s none of it.  

There’s value, of course, in those things. Most of us need them to make a living.

Nature, to me, is what makes a life.

The vastness of Yosemite, viewed from Yosemite Point, or halfway up the four-mile trail, or Tunnel View, or at the top of Nevada Falls, or from Clark Point, or anywhere in the entire God blessed park, swallows everything else whole. Small problems, problems we think are big, problems that have been nagging, problems we worry about before they’re even real problems — they disappear out there, in the woods. At least, they do for me. I think they could for you, too, if you gave it a chance.

I was listening to a podcast recently, on the Jordan Harbinger show. Resilience was the topic, and how to build more of it. Embracing adversity, not shying from it, developing deep relationships, cultivating new experiences were three of the ingredients of the secret sauce to building resilience.

Camping, backpacking, hiking, getting outside, grabbing a friend for the experience. It’s the all-in-one resilience package. A perspective package. Illuminates how small our individual problems are, when viewed from the top of Taft Point, where trees the size of office buildings look like toys, and cars appear no bigger than ants.

Delaney and I have been asked, a few times, if we are actually as happy as we typically appear to be. We are. It doesn’t mean we don’t have problems, or stresses. We have plenty. We’ve simply found the place that swallows those problems, returning us to our car and apartment with a dose of perspective: That we’ll be just fine, because it’s an awfully big world out there, and whatever it is that’s going on — this, too, shall pass. We’ve found a love for nature, the outdoors, and have become enamored with the effect it has on our souls. We’ve found our fountain — or waterfall, in this case — of resilience.

We’re stealing fire.