The Last Word On Nothing

I’ve been lucky to travel to some beautiful and fascinating places while reporting on the complex human relationship with the rest of nature. In May 2014, I bought an REI Half Dome Plus tent for $175.19 to use for field reporting. The first trip I took it on was an excursion hosted by Oregon Wild to look for wolves in Eastern Oregon. I stopped overnight near Bend for the night and camped solo and I remember how incredibly cozy it felt to be tucked inside. It was small enough to feel womblike and large enough not to trigger claustrophobia. I felt at home.

Since then I have carried by tent around the world several times. I’ve camped in my Half Dome:

• on a tiny uninhabited island in New Zealand for a forthcoming National Geographic story, where two kind teenagers wove me a little wall to demarcate my space.
• In the Amazon rainforest, twice, once at a scientific research station to write a story about figs, and then again the next year to write about indigenous people and conservation in Manu National Park, both for National Geographic. When the heat and biting insects got to be too much, I would retreat into my Half Dome and read about polar exploration to cool off. Sometimes I just lay inside to escape the flies and mosquitoes and counted my bites. I once got up to 109.
• In the backyard, with my kids, who love looking at the stars through the mesh top. We sleep surprisingly well with all three of us tucked inside.
• In the Australian Outback, earlier this month, for a forthcoming story for The Atlantic. I kept the fly off the first night to see the overwhelmingly beautiful stars in one of the darkest places in the world. From Australia, you can see the shape of an emu in the Milky Way. It was freezing at night though, so I reluctantly put the fly on the next night and my own body heat kept me toasty warm.

Often, when you are reporting in the field, you and your sources are thrust together into a quite close intimacy for days on end. I need my alone time, like anyone else, and doubly so when I am “on” as a reporter. So my tent is frequently a place of social refuge on reporting trips, and I have many happy memories of simply lying on my back being alone for a few minutes inside its familiar shape.

It is also simply a good tent. It consistently gets great reviews. I like the way the poles are designed and I can set it up by myself in five minutes. I once had a tent putting-up race on a sandy Amazonian riverbank with with Ron Swaisgood, General Scientific Director of Cocha Cashu Biological Station, and won. It has excellent headroom. It has lots of good pockets inside. I even love the colors.

I had what felt like a near-death experience in my Half Dome tent. On another trip to the Amazon, during a multi-day journey down the Manu and Madre de Dios Rivers, we camped on the riverbank. In the middle of the night, a storm hit us, with fierce winds and so much rain I was terrified the river would rise and drown us all. I kept unzipping my door and sticking my head outside to see if I could see how high the river was in the starless night. It was impossible. All I got for my pains was a drenching. The tent’s sides whipped back and forth with loud cracks and I was sure the whole structure would fold up and blow me and my gear into the river in a tangle of nylon and poles. But it held. The next morning we put our tents away wet, then went downriver and set them out to dry while we bathed in some hot springs.

My tent is a reminder of past travels, a pleasingly first-rate bit of gear (and I cop to loving outdoor gear), and an excellent traveling companion–and everyone knows how hard a good traveling partner is to find. It simultaneously provides the wonderful but seemingly mutually-exclusive feelings of home and adventure, all at under four pounds weight.

Later this summer, I am taking my step-sister camping for her first time. I’m loaning her my Half Dome. I am not sure she realizes how much this is a gesture of love.