Base Camp

Extract from 'Panic Camp'. Abridged for course submission.

The phone call comes unexpectedly, the question itself being as much a surprise.  The ready answer will make perfect sense to me within second of the dial tone.
“Come camping with us.  This city is getting under my skin, trying to fuse with me and it’s giving me cabin fever.  I know you feel it too.  Meet us at our flat in half an hour.” I recognise the voices.
“Alright. See you in a bit.” The last thing I see through the double glazing as I leave is a thin line of trees that border the garden where a forest used to be.
*
The city centre is dead in the lull before the Sunday storm, never failing to get busy any night of the week. The tents, guitars and duvets bulging from plastic bags set us easily apart from the briefcases, laptops and lunchtime shopping being carried homewards by suits. The street lamps had flickered on along the riverside path some time ago, the number of dog walkers clearly dwindling the nearer they got towards the darkness beyond the back streets. Bantering idly back and forth, they only fell silent with concentration as the path became in indent in the dirt fringed with nettles. Trailing straps and the loose threads of a duvet snagged and snapped on branches along the way.
“I don’t know about either of you but there is absolutely no way I could have found this place on my own.” They had had to go deeper into the trees, picking an unsteady footing over and around the exposed roots of the terrain unfamiliar to most of them before suddenly stumbling into the clearing.
We had camped, for lack of elsewhere, in the woods just beyond the park. This seemed the only way to escape the artificiality of the sprawling city, the orange glow of which still pollutes the horizon; lending it the illusion of a town ablaze with the massive fire we wish we could start to raise it to the ground. Once in a while the blaring sirens are carried towards us on the wind to serve as discordant reminders of the world we are leaving behind. Above us a construction dust sheet billows and helps to keep trapped the rising heat.

In the darkness we silently set about out duties and are soon crouched in tent doorways facing fire-wards. That first night camp filled with welcome visitors who, braving the nettles and gorse, felt all the better for it and in our fir-lit circle we remain unthreatened by the people who inevitably pass by and inexorably never think to look.

Lilting guitar fills the air before dissipating between the trees. Cheep vodka and good conversation stave off the cold well into the night with more effect than any manufactured fibres seem capable. Empty cans keep a hollow vigil beside full ones running with condensation. Clustered in a sprawling circle, the faces around the flames were all sparkling eyes and teeth as the fire light came and went on the breeze. Cigarette cherries speckled the thick darkness as brittle twigs snapped beneath the weight of the wind in the shadows, their clean snaps punctuating their conversation. The stars, spewed across the near cloudless sky, glint through the canopy like polished pennies in a wishing well.

It seems so suddenly that the break of dawn claws its way over the mossy ground into the clearing towards us. The light reveals tired eyes surrounded by empty bottles and upturned glasses, layers donned to mask the cold now hung from trees, unzipped by the climbing heat of day. A strung out skein of geese fly across the fading moon, seemingly screaming escape to the earth-bound bellow.
Crawling around in the dew-wet dawn looking for long ears and white tails through the focus of a scope, stalking rabbits with more prowess yet less success than the drunk men chasing heels and skirts down the cobbled streets if the inner city. Shooting rifles was fun but we did not manage to kill anything, as though our pellets were misguided by the remnants of our city sensibilities. Then it dawns on me how easy it is to lose sight of the bigger picture when you focus too closely on the finer details.

Our chairs are chunks of railway sleeper that we carried across our shoulders over the wasteland under the moon.  A chair sat out in the open topped with empty, pellet-punched cans, it's splintered wood pocked all over with metal.  We are lucky to be so close to the river.  The froth in it reminds me of sea foam but there is no real beauty in the resulting contamination from a bleach leakage at a detergent firm upstream.  The discarded cans that give the weir its angles will be covered with algae within a year but there will be more ring pull pebbles, plastic bag pond weed, old boot reefs, traffic cone herons and car battery stepping stones.  On the other side there were dilapidated sheds at the far, forgotten ends of gardens where doors on fridges sit stand open with the vague promise that - despite the moss - they might still work.

Savouring our turns, the shower feels too good for us to worry about putting dirty clothes back on afterwards. We lounge around waiting for each other to finish gradually filling the room with fruit and mint and aloe vera. The sofa cushions are comfortable but it is not long before I feel like I’m being swallowed and it turns time to leave. The mood is shared, the suggestion is made, we are zipped up, tucked in and stood beyond a closed door still deciding where to go.
Arriving back at camp we make a broom from live branches, necessity breeding creation when we are still house-proud without a home. The bristles drag lines through the dirt, collecting bottle tops and shards of glass. It is not long before we have piles of wood – stacked beneath tarpaulin sheets – drying on rotation. We have tents and fire, water and wood. We find a shovel head beneath a bush by the lake and marvel at this testament to how the universe provides. It is only two days, maybe three before the full effects are felt, the same way that, if left long enough to its own devices, nature will slowly reclaim abandoned buildings, we are beginning to feel restored. Moss will settle on the cracked and crumbling bricks, sapling will emerge from long-hidden seeds that have taken root in the floorboards of our thoughts and birds will return through pane-less open eyes to roost in every eve.
No clocks, no phones, no internet.  The sun rouses us early, giving us the gift of time.  We are eased back into town: the path turns to concrete as you are poured over the river bridge, into the park and towards the traffic lights feeling somehow weaker for needling to tumble through the darkness into the fluorescent lights of the nearest shop on a mission for tobacco.
In the early morning we pool our coppers and mull over the true meaning of necessity. The embers still glow in the backdrop of our Custard Cream and cigarette breakfast, the blaring horns of morning rush hour heralding another working day.
I watch dirt cling to soapy water that runs down the drain in the electric light of the pub toilet. Beneath my hat and unwashed hair I blink, willing my eyes not to adjust in the hope I will soon escape. Someone buys us drinks and we sip appreciatively as they probe about camp but all we can say is to come and see for themselves, that way they might begin to understand.
*
Words were scrawled on scraps of paper barely visible in the blind darkness. The shreds were soon crumpled beneath twigs to start a fire and soon the flames, tinged blue by ink, consumed the words that were lost forever. We are all method actors in the dramas of our own lives. Unable to prove the existence of anything beyond ourselves, free and capable of changing at will into anyone and anything we want or can conceive of. For the time being we have rediscovered the nature of existence. Crossing the scrubland and bushes off into the rising sun, we are returned with a restored conviction to a society that will inevitably eventually grind us down and drive us back out again for trying to tear down the constraints we were raised to think would last forever.

Now I have my books and cigarettes stowed beneath a roof I did not know the week before.

Until next time.