I was awakened at 2:45 this morning by chatter and clamor from a nearby tent.
From their voices, I could tell it was a gaggle of women, whooping and hollering, yakking and giggling at mosh-pit volume levels, not 20 feet from our tent. It was impossible to tune them out and go back to sleep, so I spent 45 minutes seething, trying to imagine what kind of person lacks even baseline self-awareness. How do they not realize that it’s 3 a.m., that their voices are too loud and that our walls are made of canvas?
Keith eventually woke up, too, and we lay in the dark bickering about what we should do. Keith, of course, wanted to charge over there and confront the women, while I worried about making a scene.
The picture I had conjured was of women in their 40s who had gathered for a weekend yoga retreat and/or Harley Davidson convention. This is California, after all, and in my mind every woman in the state looks like she could simultaneously star in a season of “Real Housewives” and belong to a biker gang. I decided that they are all single and child-free. They sheathe their slender bodies in short, slinky dresses. They have expensive taste in alcohol, but they still drink hard. They wear too much make-up. They meet up in Vegas semi-annually.
The fact that they were loudly partying, with complete disregard for the rest of the campground made them rude, yes … at 3 a.m. But at any other time of day it would just mean that they had confidence and swagger. And if they were confident and full of swagger, it was because they were all tall, blonde, svelte and clad in designer duds. (This is now my mind, which is set to “inferiority complex,” works.) Automatically, I was intimated by them, and fretted about being branded as the angry old people next door, so I begged Keith to just wait for them to settle down.
Eventually, Keith slid out of bed and promised to be nice before he went over and knocked on their door. “It’s 3:30,” he said. “You guys need to quiet down, please.” Through the canvas we could hear a chirpy chorus of shushing and apologizing. “Oooh,” they giggled. “We’re sooo sorry! Shhhhh!” Clearly, they were beyond hammered. Keith came back to bed and we waited for another hour for them to wrap it up; they didn’t calm down until close to 4:30.
I drifted back to sleep. Then, just before six, I was awakened again by the sound of knocking nearby, and a woman’s voice. “She’s baa-ack,” she sing-songed, referring to herself in the third person and chuckling as if it was funny and somehow amazing that she managed to return from wherever she had wandered off to in the middle of the night.
Except she hadn’t managed to return. Because I quickly figured out that she was knocking on Charlie and Clare’s tent, next door to ours. “Mary?! Is that you?” she called out.
I heard Charlie respond softly, “Ma’am you have the wrong cabin.”
“Oh. Oh, shit,” she mumbled, clearly confused. And I heard her shuffle closer to our tent. I shifted into Mama Bear mode and leapt out of bed toward the door. Sure enough, she started knocking on our tent. “Mary? Mary? Where are you?!”
I opened the door and she stumbled back a couple steps and looked up at me. I was kind of stunned. She was not even close to the picture I had painted in my head. She was a pudgy, middle-aged mom sporting a bowl haircut, leggings and a hoodie, and she was absolutely sauced. Her eyes tried to focus and her mouth formed a little “o” as reality started to register with her, somewhere behind her glassy eyes.
“You’re not Mary,” she managed to say. Behind her Dutch boy bangs, her brow furrowed. Then: “Where’s Mary?!” She looked up at me and waited for an answer, as if I would know.
“Yeah,” I said. “Mary’s not here because This Is Not Mary’s Cabin.”
Pause.
“Where’s Mary?” she repeated. Her face was the personification of the word “stupefied.”
“Mary is in one of those tents over there,” I said, pointing back behind our tent. “And I know that’s where Mary is, because you guys have been keeping us – and everyone else in this campground – awake All. Night. LONG!”
She stumbled around the corner and presumably found the right tent, because I heard the women fuss around inside for a while before I fell back asleep again. I was finally awakened around eight by the sounds of the rest of the campground coming to life: kids playing and riding their bikes around.
All of the tents in this part of the campground are arranged in pairs. These are the “family suites,” with one tent for mom and dad, and the second tent, with bunk beds, for the kids. The party tents are directly behind us, and from the one of them I saw a woman emerge clad head to toe in camouflage athleisurewear, size XL. I saw her again in the bathroom. She didn’t look at me or acknowledge me in any way. I can’t tell if she’s sheepish, or clueless. Or if she just doesn’t care.
In front of another nearby pair of tents, a family with tween-age kids had spread their breakfast out on the picnic table. As Keith walked past, he nodded good morning, then said, “Long night!” Everybody there rolled their eyes, chuckled and agreed.
I know the women last night were loud – loud enough to be heard many tents away. But it was a strange relief this morning to know that we weren’t the only ones bothered by the noise. In the middle of the night, the pitch-blackness isolates me, making me feel as if my struggles are mine, and mine alone. That’s when my problems loom the largest, and they weigh on me the heaviest.
But in the light of the morning, I can see that I’m not alone. There are others who know just how I feel. It’s reassuring. We’re all in this together. Life goes on. The world turns. And breakfast is served.
***
We got a slow start this morning, because we were all so tired. After a big, late breakfast at the Cascade restaurant, we hit the road, driving north up the coast then turning inland at Half Moon Bay. After about an hour in the car, we arrived in Palo Alto and found our way to the heart of the Stanford University campus, where we walked around the iconic Main Quad and Memorial Court, and popped into the bookstore. What a stunning setting, made even more appealing by the absolutely gorgeous weather. On this mid-July day, it was 72 degrees, without a cloud in the sky.
From Palo Alto we drove back south toward Santa Cruz, but detoured into Cupertino to check out Apple Park, the site of the new $5 billion Apple HQ corporate campus – including the “The Spaceship,” a four-story circular building that houses over 12,000 employees. We were not able to see much as we cruised through, though.
So, we got back on the highway, went back over the mountains and dropped back into Santa Cruz. We hadn’t seen the downtown yesterday, and today we realized that we hadn’t missed much. It’s pretty grubby, with a mix of second-rate mall stores and fast food joints. We stopped long enough to grab cookies at the Pacific Cookie Co, then beelined it out of there. We still have no sense of where the students hang out. It would be interesting to visit when school is in session.
We drove a few minutes to Lighthouse Field State Beach, just a few minutes outside of downtown, and spread out on a bench for a crackers-and-cheese lunch. Nearby there was a little beach shack called Steamer Supply Co. selling tacos and house-made tamales, so Keith and I split a tamale, too.
(Side note: The road, the lighthouse and the grassy bluff above the beach are featured prominently in the opening scenes of “The Lost Boys,” the 1987 teenybop vampire flick that was filmed in Santa Cruz. Keith is surprised and a little disappointed that the city isn’t rife with references to a 34-year-old Corey Feldman/Haim buddie movie. Aren’t we all?)
Continuing our tour of area landmarks, we drive to the Santa Cruz Bicycle headquarters and discovered that it’s open only by appointment, so we continued on to Wilder Ranch State Park, just up the PCH from Santa Cruz, and hiked a short two-mile trail along the bluffs overlooking the ocean.
We then continued back up Highway 1 to the tiny town of Davenport and pulled over for dinner at the Davenport Roadhouse, a lovely lodge with a roaring fire, live pianist and a mammoth menu of hearty comfort food, including tacos, wrap, pasta and pizza. Our Davenport Roadhouse dinner was enhanced by the arresting smile of the dreamiest, most handsome server ever – and I can say this because our entire table agreed. As Clare put it: It’s as if Zayn Mahlik and Oscar Isaac had a baby.
After dinner, we drove back to Costanoa Lodge for showers and catching up on books and blog before bedtime. We think that the loud women have checked out from the next-door tents! They probably are nursing some record hangovers, and I hope they slunk out with their heads hung low. Perhaps their confidence levels are just a couple notches lower today. Fingers crossed.
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