Sierra Nevada Field Camp.
The sign hid shyly off the road like a mountain creature, flashing by before I could brake and turn in. It was a quarter mile before I found a wide enough shoulder to turn around and go back.
A low wooden building faced the parking lot and an open meadow spread out to one side. On all other sides the ponderosa pines and firs of the montane forest crowded closely around. The air felt fresh and thin after the heat of Silicon Valley. I went inside to register.
"Is this the astronomy camp?" I asked the girl inside. She was wearing a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and jeans of the sort that you work in rather the sort you wore to the mall to be seen in. She looked like she spent a lot of time outside. I couldn't tell if she was staff or another camper.
"Yes it is." She nodded towards a clipboard on the table. "Check your name off on the sheet, then go pitch your tent in the meadow. There's a bathhouse down there for washing up. It's coed. Dinner's up here at six, and the professor will tell you about the schedule then."
I thanked her and picked up the clipboard. It looked there were eight people registered, five guys and three girls, and only one was here before me. The girl in the checked shirt had disappeared, so I went out to find a camping spot.
There was one tent pitched like a fortress in the center of the meadow. It let you know that it expected to soon be the center of a thriving village, with lesser tents set up about it. I found a secluded spot under a gnarled old black oak that looked like a good companion for reading. I'm not much of a joiner.
After I had my dome tent set up, I still had three hours until dinner time. I had picked up a trail map in the main building, which indicated a number of loops fanning out from the meadow. I picked up my Pentax and started up a trail that was marked as an overlook. There were much more modern cameras than that Pentax, but we had been friends for nearly 20 years and I knew how it thought. I can't stand a camera that thinks it knows what exposure I want.
I came back a few hours later, pleasantly tired and with a couple of rolls of pictures. The vistas had been grand, but it had been the small things that I had photographed: the poppy by the knobby rock, the wizened pine bent by the prevailing winds. The small things tell the stories.
The meadow now had six tents, including my own. One had pitched by itself at the top edge of the meadow near the trees; another one who valued quiet. The other three had clustered around the tent in the center, completing the village that it had expected.
Everyone had gathered in the main room, which appeared to serve as both dining room and classroom. An older man with a white mustache came over as I walked in.
"I'm Professor Fields. I'm teaching the class this week. Have you already signed in?"
"Yes, I got in earlier. I'm Ben."
"You're just in time for dinner. Let's get some food and then we can go over the course."
I started to get a sense of the others as we lined up to fill our plates. I pegged the confident young guy with curly dark hair and a Chicago accent as the leader of the tent village. There were a couple of other college-age guys who left no lasting impression on me. There was another fellow about my age, which is to say 29, with a dark, trim beard and coke bottle glasses.
Then there was the girl. An urban pixie in a tube top and tight shorts. Close cropped deep brunette hair framed twinkling eyes and an upturned nose. The three college guys were about to strain an eyeball on her.
I sat next to the guy who seemed my age. College kids were starting to seem a little young to me. His name was Robert, and he turned out to be an architect and designer in San Francisco. We got to talking about science fiction, found we both liked Roger Zelazny, and spent the meal talking about the finer points of "Lord of Light."
After dinner the professor briefed us on the outline of the class: class time in the morning, labs in the afternoon, observing sessions in the evening. Then we adjourned to sit around the campfire outside.
To my surprise, the urban pixie came over to sit next to me. I'm too nerdy to be much of a girl magnet, so I tried to figure out what had brought her over. She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, and shivered slightly. Goose bumps marched up her arms, and her nipples jutted desperately through the fabric of the tube top, trying to stop it from slipping any lower.
"You're not really dressed for the weather, you know."
"It's the middle of summer! It's not supposed to be so cold!"
"We're at 5600 feet. When the sun goes down, it gets really cold up here." I reached into my backpack and pulled out the extra flannel shirt I had taken on my hike. "Here, you can wear this for now."
She gratefully pulled on the shirt, making the view marginally less distracting. I could still see a lot of leg. "Thanks! I'm Geri."
"I'm Ben."
"You don't look like you're here for the easy science credit so you can graduate."
"I guess not. Is that what you're doing?"
"Yeah, I need to complete the science requirement. I'm a design major, so I was just looking for something with the least math and memorization. What about you?"
"Well, I actually already took astronomy in college, um, a few years ago. I actually took Carl Sagan's introductory astronomy class when I was a sophomore. But I haven't done any more since then, and I just bought a new telescope and wanted to get some observing time in. This seemed like a good way to do it."
"Carl Sagan, huh? Even I've heard of him. He must have a really big telescope."
"That's the thing about professional astronomers. They never actually look through their telescopes, they just hook cameras and instruments on them."
A little while later I wandered off to my tent. Geri was still sitting and chatting with the others, and promised to return my shirt in the morning.
During the night I was awakened by someone nearby with a bright light, followed by the sounds of tent assembly. I guessed that one of the two missing students had arrived late and decided to camp near me. Eventually the clanging, shuffling, and loud zipping subsided, but by then I was thoroughly awake and grumbling at the latecomer. Much, much later, I fell asleep again.
In the morning the sun thumped on the tent flaps and generally insisted that it was time to be awake. When a cook's triangle added a call to breakfast to the ruckus, I reluctantly unzipped my sleeping bag. When I poked my head out of the tent, I found another tent had been put up about ten feet away. There were no signs of life just yet.
The washroom was open air, and quite chilly. One of the guys was trying to use the shower, and was yodeling "Cold cold cold cold" at the top of his lungs. I decided to postpone my shower until later when it warmed up.
Breakfast was in the main building, and the only takers were the five of us guys from the night before. Professor Fields came in, but only had coffee. He looked like the sort of person who got up at dawn. There was no sign of Geri, but near the end of breakfast a tousled redhead wandered in.
