It was really too cold to camp.
But the tent is good and tight and I had a pad for under the sleeping bag, so I thought probably I’d be fine.
The first thing I noticed is that the ground is a lot harder than it used to be and other campers have already used up most of the comfortable spots. Probably wearing my coat with the hood inside the sleeping bag made things a little more lumpy than usual, too.
Still, I was warm enough. The sleeping bag was flannel on the inside, which feels warmer than the kind that has slick fabric inside that always feels wet when it gets cold. So why was it feeling wet down around my feet? Spilled my blue plastic cup of water, that’s why. The good news is that only a blanket got wet. The sleeping bag actually stayed dry. My feet warmed up as soon as I zipped them in.
As the night ticked along at the rate of about an hour per minute, I pushed my nose through a little space in the covers for fresh air. I was careful to exhale under the covers so as not to waste any of the warm air I’d heated in my very own lungs. And even though I realized the cold was deepening, I still felt plenty warm.
I also felt plenty stiff. Not considerate of those other campers to have left me no comfortable spots at all on the ground.
Inevitably, I had to get up in the middle of the night to find the bath house. This took an uncomfortably long time because the zipper on the sleeping bag stuck. Then, after I’d turned on the light to unstick it, the zipper on the tent flap stuck. But I got the flap open and made it to the bath house in time.
When I crawled back into the tent, I rearranged things so that more of the blankets were under me, since it had become obvious the serious discomfort was coming not from cold air but from cold ground. That kept me warm enough for a while.
At some point, though, I thought, damn, it’s cold, and by morning I’m going to be in hypothermia, throwing my clothes off in the snow the way hikers stranded on Mount Everest do because they’re so cold they think they’re hot. What I needed was more softness and warmth underneath me.
The only place I could think of was my car, so I lit the light again, hauled the pads and sleeping bag over to it, tipped the seat back and built myself a nest that felt quite comfortable until almost dawn, when I realized that while my top was warm because of my coat, my head was warm under my hat, and my hands were warm because I’d pulled them up into my sleeves, my feet were freezing. I couldn’t think of anything to do about that, so I went to the bath house again. You won’t believe this — the place was heated.
By the time I came back out, it was 6 a.m., getting light, a perfectly reasonable time to get up. I had some instant coffee (yum, yum, my favorite) and, after getting lost only a couple times in the park, headed home, where my son-in-law had left me a nice pile of firewood by the door.
I feel fine, chipper, rested. The house is warm.
But I gotta go now. I’m going to turn the electric blanket up to 10, crawl into bed and take a nap.
Sara Pitzer