Where does one of the youngest most traveled person in the world still travel to after they’ve been to nearly every country in the world?
Home, of course. I’ve hitchhiked onboard the train through the endless expanse of The Sahel, slept in guesthouses in Bangladesh, and BBQ’ed mystery meat in countries most people can’t find on a map. And yet somehow the Hudson Valley in the Fall and Spring, with its overcast skies, damp grass, the particular smell of woodsmoke mixed with incoming rain, still calls to me. And while I don’t usually blog about the thrice-yearly camping trips I organize for local monsooners who don’t necessarily all join on my international trips, this was our most attended local camping trip yet. 20 people for the weekend, 15 more joining Sunday for lunch. 33 total, crammed into a Mongolian yurt that was booked for 28, at a farm that now has a t2-year waitlist. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Our camping trips always starts at the campgrounds, where car by car and friend group by friend group arrive at their leisure and setting up our tents before the sun sets. No orientation. No agenda.
I love this part. Once oriented with our natural surroundings, we head to what I always feel is the best part of any camping trip: the first provisions run.
I know the scene isn’t really what you expect, but there is this air of a new adventure — even if it’s a familiar one — that makes new bonds in a supermarket feel electric. Different pockets of friends intermingle and joust over quantities. Someone pulls a spice off the shelf nobody else has heard of (Slap Ya Mama, anyone?). Someone else starts a debate about how much water 20 people actually need per day. The answer, for the record, is 7.5 gallons per 20 people per day.
There’s no better bonding exercise with strangers than negotiating real basic survival needs together. Maslow maybe didn’t write specifically about the grocery store aisle, but he might as well have made a reference.
After half an hour we pay and head out into the sunset.
Back at the campsite, unloading onto the picnic tables (always get a campsite with a table; you don’t appreciate raised flat surfaces until they don’t exist) something remarkable always happens on monsoons: Nobody assigned roles or called a meeting, and yet within twenty minutes: the fire was started, the grill was figured out, the firewood retrieved, the meal prep underway, cocktail recipes being improvised, seasoning tossed back and forth. Someone found the charcoal. Someone started grill grate. Someone else figured out the optimal Asian squat position for tending it.
All our burgers and hot dogs came together like a symphony.
I got creative: Lettuce burgers to Bagel burgers. I regret nothing.
We then tossed fire coloring powder into the campfire and watched it sprak green and blue to a chorus of genuine, unironic oohs and aahs.
Then a wild Yuhan appeared from nowhere with a birthday ice cream cake for Jenny that she’d quietly smuggled into the provisions run. The group then cracked out tin foil as makeshift plates for rapidly melting ice cream cake.
We stayed up late under a sky full of stars.
As the night cooled, people split off into smaller campfires by their tents, especially the first-timers, who began to learn that camping is mostly just finding increasingly creative ways to stay warm.
Morning was waking up to instant and Moka pot coffee, scrambled eggs, and sugar-coated bacon on the grill. We learned the delicious way how sugar caramelizes in the fat. If you haven’t had it, you’re missing something.
After a lazy breakfast, we drove out to Soons Orchard for local produce that included popcorn, blueberry and apple pies, celery for Uriah specifically (don’t ask, but we did), portobello mushrooms, sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts, corn.
Then to Angry Orchard for ciders, food truck lunch, and live outdoor music.
Before sunset, we headed to the local ShopRite for final provisions where, by pure coincidence, we ran directly into the other half of our group who’d had the same idea at the same time. You can’t plan that, though: You can only be the kind of group it happens to, which for monsooners, is quite often.
We then recongregated for one more night of dinner around the campfire.
The second night’s dinner was more ambitious: corn on the cob, sweet potatoes, more burgers, sausages, vegetable skewers, grilled mushrooms, and strawberry gin mojitos.
Then someone mentioned if this camping trip had already happened.
And then we were off.
Spirituality into the non-linearity of time. Then if there’s life after death to the concept of God and love. Defining consciousness. What makes us exquisitely, frustratingly human. The cube and wall-in-the-desert personality tests. We wondered what would life be if sleep didn’t exist — would it be any different from death? Campfire conversations that formed this uncanny alternate pocket universe of 15 strangers finding themselves together under millennia-old stars that for once have nowhere they have to be, whether they be strangers or stars.
And if not everyone necessarily found themselves on the same page, nobody needed to; there was a narration of The Egg by Andy Weir by yours truly, and after that weekend, felt like its unscheduled appearance felt almost too on the nose.
Maybe by virtue of quantum physics, this has already happened.
We now know that a feeling that something is happening doesn’t mean that it’s actually happening, but what if it’s not a feeling? What if that feeling was actually, intuition?
We then retreated to our tents eventually, chased there partly by spider bites.
We woke up to our second morning, which was a warm 83ºF. Breakfast again and packing our things, before ending with auctioning the last of our provisions to whomever wanted to take back with them on their rides home.
Once fully clearing the campsite and tying up the trash for disposal (leave no trace behind!), we drove 17 minutes towards New Paltz for the grand finale: a reservation made 5 months in advance for a sesame crusted roasted lamb experience at Bobo’s Farm, which is now booked on the waitlist for 2 years. And there 15 more people were waiting for us; friends who’d passed on camping but not on this. The reservation had been made 5 months in advance and after numerous warm, firm, texts in Mandarin, they’d agreed to fit 33 people into a space meant for 28. I’m not sure what the Mandarin word for “we’re all small people and have shared small spaces before” is, but whatever I wrote apparently worked.
We toured the farm first as we waited to watch our lamb lifted from the pit oven.
We saw where it had been marinating for 22-24 hours, rubbed in spice paste, crusted in sesame seeds, and slow-roasted into a traditional, in-ground pit oven, often referred to as a yao.
It slow-roasts underground for about 2 hours until the skin is crispy and the meat is tender.
And for the next 2-3 hours, I watched as countless monsoon groups all reunited, met for the first time, and caught up over old times since adventures past.
By 1:45pm we were seated inside the yurt.
17 dishes that included our whole roasted lamb, stewed goose, beer-braised duck, iron pot fish, pork ribs, sauerkraut pork belly, Sichuan bacon, cucumber salad, black fungus, cold cut beef, pig’s ear, jelly noodle salad, spicy cabbage, sweet and sour pork (2 orders!) and minced pork with pickled long beans.
And by 2pm the lamb was lifted out of the ovens and presented in true majestic style:
The meal was a harrowing array of dishes that came at us fast and furious. We tried to fit it all, and when we got hungry again, we ate some more. Some of us dissected the lamb to the bone. Stripped out eyeballs and found the spinal cord; it was the kind of feral eating you only really do when you’re in a once-in-a-lifetime eating experience in northwest China, or apparently, in a yurt in the Hudson Valley on a Sunday afternoon.
And through the blur of it all, by 3:40pm it was all over:
I’ve had monsoon weekends around the world. And then I have them here. You can spend months organizing carpools, tent assignments, dish votes and Mandarin negotiations with a farm boasting a 2-year-waitlist. You account for everyone’s dietary restrictions, who needs a ride, and whether the yurt you never been to truly fits 33 people if they’re all willing to sit close.
And then it’s all over in a flash, and you’re driving home late Sunday evening wondering how to hold onto something that was never supposed to last.
8 of us lingered behind; we drove to Poughkeepsie, checked out Lauren’s apartment in her last year of emergency medicine residency, took an elevator up the Walkway Over the Hudson for views over the river. Just one more small side quest and a few more hours before the weekend closed.
On the drive back, I thought about what actually makes weekends like this work. Sure you have the logistics as if they were the ingredients to a roasted lamb recipe. But you also need the yurt and the yao, or the fire coloring or even the grocery store debate about water quantities.
But what then brings all of the components together was the act of beholding a process: that everything unfolded when nobody needed to be told what to do. 20 strangers and friends showed up and naturally found their roles not out of an assignment, but because that’s the magic of what happens when you put the right people in conditions of cooperative survival and creative comforts. Or, maybe, this felt all so effortless because it already has happened before.
You can’t perform or manufacture that. You can only build the conditions and then get out of the way.
The writer said something in her piece that stirred something in me; that watching me move through the world with joy in bringing people together reminded her she still has it too in her somewhere. That she worried sometimes her discernment was calcifying into cynicism. That she wanted to believe cynicism wasn’t inevitable. I came from reading that realizing we all have “it” in us, and the potential from “it” to turn into “that.” Both can be true at the same time.
I’ve been to 192 countries. I’ve organized trips on all 7 continents for thousands of strangers. And I still don’t fully understand why a campfire in New York state, under stars, surrounded by people who figured out their roles without being asked, resonates with me the way it does.
Maybe I don’t need to.
Maybe this has already happened.
Sure feels intuits like it has.
See you at the next one.
