Still Here

I’m sitting at a picnic table right now, and I still don’t quite believe how quiet it is.

That’s not a metaphor. I mean it literally—I keep pausing to listen for something, some hum or rumble that isn’t there, the way your tongue keeps finding the socket where a tooth used to be. There’s nothing to find. A few hundred people are camped within a quarter mile of me, and every so often somebody laughs too loud or a dog barks twice, but mostly what’s here is trees, and dark, and the particular silence of a place that isn’t trying to sell you anything or get you anywhere.

It’s making me want more of it. Not in the abstract, someday-I-should sense. Right now, sitting here, want.

I almost didn’t make it out here at all—not because of any real obstacle, but because I’d talked myself into believing I needed to be ready first. For weeks I’d been circling the whole idea of a first trip the way you circle a cold pool: lists, gear videos, campground reviews, more lists, a spreadsheet I kept telling myself was almost done. Every list solved for the next thing I hadn’t thought of yet, which produced a new list. I could have stayed in that loop indefinitely. It has no natural end point—that’s what makes it a loop.

Eventually enough was enough. I made the reservation, packed what I actually had instead of what I still meant to buy, and left the next day. No perfect kit, no fully solved plan. I just got in the car and went.

The drive itself undercut the whole fantasy of it, at least at first. I spent most of it exactly where I always am—moving through the guts of a couple of urban centers, merging, braking, watching taillights, the ordinary noise of a lot of people going a lot of places at once. Cincinnati doesn’t let go easily. Neither does the interstate. For a good stretch I could have been running any errand in my regular life.

Then the roads narrowed, the trees closed in, and somewhere past the last gas station the noise just—stopped. Not faded. Stopped. Big Bone Lick doesn’t ease you in. It’s there and then you’re in it.

Setting up, I found out fast what I’d actually packed versus what I’d only convinced myself I’d packed. I had gloves. I had hand sanitizing wipes, plenty of them. I did not have hand soap, which I discovered at the exact moment I needed it. And somewhere in the transition from spreadsheet to actual bag, I had managed to leave behind every single pillow. All that planning, all those lists, and I still forgot the one thing you’d assume nobody could forget.

I laughed about it out loud.

Alone.

Which is its own kind of data point.

None of it mattered much once it got dark. What did matter was the quiet—not silence exactly, since a campground this size never fully goes silent, but something close enough. Mostly keeping to themselves, mostly asleep by the time it counted. No traffic. No neighbors’ TVs bleeding through a shared wall.

I slept about six hours. I woke up tired, if I’m honest, because six hours has never been quite enough for me. But it was a different kind of tired than the kind I’ve been carrying around for a while now—not the tired that sits behind your eyes and doesn’t go away no matter how long you’re in bed, but the plain, uncomplicated tired of a body that actually rested. I hadn’t realized how much of my sleep has been competing with other people’s noise—their traffic, their energy, their proximity, whether they mean anything by it or not.

You don’t notice what restorative sleep costs you until you get a night of it for free.

I’m still here. I haven’t packed up. I don’t know yet what this means for anything beyond itself, and I’m not in a hurry to figure it out from a picnic table.

I came here, wondering whether I was ready.

Now I’m wondering why I thought I had to be.