Nature

In the summer of 2018, I had the perfect weekend outdoor adventure.

I grew up in New York City, so when I say I want be in nature, you can drive me two hours away into Pennsylvania and I will be ecstatic. That’s exactly what a group of five friends and I did one weekend.

On Friday night, we drove two hours to stay at our friends Sophie and Dasha’s family house in the Poconos. On Saturday morning, we rented kayaks and rowboats to row the Delaware Water Gap.

For those who don’t know, the Delaware Water Gap is a part of the Delaware river that cuts between mountain ridges of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. See, I wouldn’t want to be in either of those states for a weekend away, so we thought the water in between them would be ideal.

We rowed halfway through the water gap the first night and then camped out.

On Sunday morning, we rowed the second half of the water gap, dropped off the boats at the dock, stopped by a steakhouse on a farm on our way back to New York City, and came home rested and invigorated from our quality time spent with nature.

I’m the type of person who likes to escape into nature because here in New York City, I find myself being the most type-A personality version of myself here. In nature, I find that I can feel free, go with the flow, and connect with the Earth. That, and because my friend Toby, who was a Boy Scout and planned everything so I didn’t have to think.

I’m from New York City - if there isn’t a bodega nearby, I can’t feed myself.

In the summer of 2019, that same group of friends and I try to recreate the magic of that trip.

On Friday night, we drive from Brooklyn to Pennsylvania. I do what I always do on long road trips to compensate for the fact that I don’t drive: be the best in-drive entertainment there is.

About an hour and a half in to the two-hour drive with Sophie and Toby, my artfully curated Weird Al and 2000s pop punk playlist is interrupted by a call by Dasha. Dasha’s already at the house and asks if Sophie has keys because Dasha doesn’t have them.

We furiously search the car for the next half hour for a set of keys that Sophie doesn’t have. We arrive and they’ve already tried to get in through the garage doors and windows.

I’ve drunkenly lost my keys many times. My suggestion of picking the lock by wrapping my fist in a sweater and punching through the window are very quickly ignored.

At 2am, we begrudgingly camp out in the backyard but I cling onto my positivity and see it as starting our time with nature early.

Saturday morning, we wake up at 8am, pack up the cars with our camping gear, and pick up sandwiches at the only thing that makes drives to Pennsylvania worth it: Wawa. If you haven’t been to a Wawa, think of it like a gas station where they care that you don’t vomit from eating their food.

We drive to the boathouse to rent two rowboats to carry our camping gear and one kayak for the slackers. We’re all cranky, but when we get on the water, we remember why this was so worth it.

It’s quiet and all we can see is water and trees. Our cell phones are packed away, not that it matters since we barely have reception anyways. The sun is beaming on us without any buildings in the way, I’m the only one in this group of people that has any melanin so I’m fully satisfied with taking my shirt off and basking in all of it.

I look over at my friends’, Jon, Toby, and Laika’s boat. Laika is Toby and Sophie’s dog who is named after the first dog to make it to space, and consequently, also the first dog to die in space. I think about this fact as I see Jon using a red solo cup to scoop out water in their boat.

Jon is one of those, go-with-the-flow type people, which really means that he ignores his own needs and sense of self-preservation for the sake of making other people feel safe and comfortable. He very nonchalantly says, “there’s a leak in our boat but I think we’ll be OK.”

After a long and very unnecessary discussion, we finally stop to call the rental company to replace our boat. They say it’s going to take an hour for them to get there.

I think it’s a sign that we need to rest anyways, so we have lunch. We’re all eating apples, like true woodspeople. When I kindly offer to throw my friends’ apple cores into the trash, they throw them at me from 20 feet away and I trip over a large rock that came out of nowhere. I scrape my shin and it’s bleeding. I politely ask that no one throw fruit at me for the rest of this weekend and they oblige.

In the hour that we wait for our new boat, the sun starts to set and we see dozens of boats on the water pass us. I hope they’re not looking to set up camp.

Sadly, when we get back on the water, I was right. Every campsite we pass is too small for us or taken. We try to find the camping site from last year had the perfect tree to poop behind, but it’s occupied, quite like my bowels.

If you have not pooped outside, you have not lived. I understand why my dog does it. It’s liberating.

We find one possible campsite, but when we get there, it has fire ants everywhere. Jon is allergic but insists that we stay here. He assures us that he just develops hives and his throat closes up a bit. After another unnecessary debate, we leave and decide that we to row to the end of the water gap, drop off our boats, and camp there.

The sun sets. We have a few more hours until the end of the water gap. I look for a distraction. My boatmate, M, talks to me about the Me Too movement. I think I will be educated until she says, “I don’t see what Louis C.K. or Aziz Ansari did wrong.” I have never rowed a boat faster in my life.

With an hour left of rowing, we reconnect with Toby and Jon’s boat and hear that they capsized our boat with all of our camping gear. Our tents, sleeping bags, clothes, and food are now soaking wet.

Now, the river is pitch black. Toby and Jon decide to row faster than the rest of us - because they’re men - and at the home stretch, we lose them. We don’t see anyone or anything, and we’re tired, hungry, and freaked out.

We dock at the closest spot, spend 30 minutes finding a bar of cell phone seconds, and call Tony. When Toby finally picks up Sophie’s phone calls, and it turns out they’re only a few hundred feet away. Sophie and Toby are dating, as indicated by how condescending this phone call felt.

It’s now about 10pm at the dock. We pull in our boats and soaking wet gear and we come together to decide what to do.

We suggest camping at the dock but we can’t because all our gear is wet.

We suggest going back to the house and staying there but we can’t get in.

We suggest staying at a motel, but at that point, we might as well go home.

We call an Uber with that one measly bar of service and have the driver bring us to our cars parked a couple of miles away. We pack our gear back into the car and stop at a diner where we form a small, very niche, group therapy group to process this together.

We drive back and I am finally in my bed in Brooklyn at 2:30am in the morning and I tell myself I am never doing that again.

2020 made sure I never left my apartment.