YURT: [yərt] NOUN, a circular tent of felt or skins on a collapsible framework, used by nomads in Mongolia, Siberia, and Turkey.

I don’t know why I even bothered to put in my teeth, for surely they are about to be rattled out of my head. I stand at the top of a ravine along the edge of a wood, featuring a 1/2 mile plummet through washed-out rock bed and culminating in a mud pit before rocketing up another hill/meadow/cliff/Himalayan peak on the other side. To my left, the beautiful Lake Anna state forest we have just come crashing through on mountain bikes–over horse paths, stream beds, and biking “trails” that are more roots, rocks and rubble than anything resembling a “path.” Beneath me, $90 of new-to-you bike with the cushy ol’ lady seat. Above me, the bright November sun and an occasional circling hawk over the heads of trees burst into flame of fall coloring. Waiting for Bill to emerge from the woods and join me, I stand, surveying the bright expanse of hill and sky and watching the boy’s descent as he, without so much as a second thought, launches his bike over the edge and careens down the hill, skidding and spraying dirt and rocks behind him. I stand, leaning my bike against the weathered official state park sign: WARNING: Steep Grade ahead.

CAREEN: [kəˈrēn] VERB North American, to move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction.

Maybe this whole weekend needs a warning sign, for it is a steep grade. It’s true, I’m the one who planned it. After all these years, Hanover County School gets a clue with election Tuesday and throws down a four-day weekend–the ink hasn’t dried on their county calendar before I am researching state parks and looking up places to go. Bus Driver Bill never gets a break. Although, in this chapter of The Old Man and The Bike, perhaps the word “break” is a poor choice. What he really needs, along with our online-school boy, is a weekend totally unplugged. Okay, maybe not totally. Bill reminds me that he has the matter of his C-pap machine to be considered… My hovel of choice, a nice two-bedroom cabin with heat and air, fully stocked kitchen, proper bathroom and wall outlets for all is–no surprise–already booked. It’s a long weekend, even longer Pandemic and this is Lake Anna State Park, one of the first to fill. What’s left in the entire park when I make my reservation? Not the 2-BRs, not the 1-BRS, or the camp cabins, just one “YURT.” Okay, we’ll take it! Just call me enviro-Jenny.

Home sweet yurt. The Virginia State Parks started erecting them several years ago as an environmentally friendly alternative to cabin camping. Here, compliments of Wikipedia, a few fun facts for the weekend ahead: “A traditional yurt (from the Turkic languages) or ger (Mongolian) is a portable, round tent covered with skins or felt and used as a dwelling by nomadic groups in the steppes of Central Asia. The structure consists of a latticework of wood or bamboo for walls, a door frame, ribs (poles, rafters), and a wheel (crown, compression ring) possibly steam-bent. The roof structure is often self-supporting, but large yurts may have interior posts supporting the crown. Modern yurts may be permanently built on a wooden platform; they may use modern materials such as steam-bent wooden framing or metal framing, canvas or tarpaulin, Plexiglas dome, wire rope, or radiant insulation.” Pay no mind about those last two terms–I assure you there was nothing “radiant” or “insulated” about the experience. Except maybe my delusions.

The adventure is fun until it actually begins–talking about it, thinking about it, being glad we have somewhere fun to go in the midst of our land-locked, log-jammed, sadly paused lives. Yep, that’s us, them wacky, happy-go lucky Burks–always on the go to somewhere fun and oh-so-post-able; have tent, will travel. Packing for it, to be honest, is where the advenchah begins, and I get that familiar panic, as I often do, that I have gotten into something I’m not ready for. There is a college formula for study versus class time ratio I found helpful way back when: For every hour in the classroom, that’s two hours of studying outside the classroom. Undergrad. For graduate school, obviously it’s more, like 1:3 or even 1:4. That’s how you know how much to register for and get yourself into (Yes, Ellie B, I’m talkin’ to you!). For Burk world, similar rules apply for the packing-to-expedition ratios, but the proportions are a little steep: For every simple outing (like dog to a park or bike to neighborhood roads), it’s an hour in gearing up and gathering necessary items. For every moderate trip such as to a store, movie, theater or social event, the packing and prep doubles. For every beach vacation, like our years to Chincoteague or for this sort of outback, off-the-grid dealio, whoooeee, we just–heck, we just bring the grid with us. For this “yurt” bound trip camping, already we are four hours into the hunting and gathering before the first provision is even placed in the car. It’s good, though–if the Armageddon comes, as it has been threatening to do for months now, we’ll be prepared.

But not too prepared. About 3/4 of the way to our cabin-but-not-a-cabin, Will is apparently going through a mental inventory of what we brought… and sadly, what we didn’t. State parks no longer supply linens. Pandemic, you know? Can’t be bothered with all that laundry. BYO bedding. So, heaped on the dining table back at the ranch of course, for several days awaiting this day: piles of nice warm flannel sheets, blankets, layer upon layer. I’m a mom first, here, boy scout, and I say bring the %$#@! stuff and see what we’ll need later. Boy is different this way. Minimalist. Leave the stuff and see how bad you miss it later. Somewhere in the loading process he hollers at me from somewhere in the house, “Mom, I don’t need all that stuff–Mom! No–look, I don’t need all that, I’ll just take my sleeping bag.” Coming and going with armloads of ropes, bungees, bike paraphernalia that clearly he does need, and shaking his head at ol’ nube mom. “Yeah. For sure. Way warmer anyway.” So back up the stairs I truck with one set of twin flannel sheets, two fleece blankets and a mattress pad (Really, people! Did I say I was going camping without a mattress pad?? I think not. I said I was adventurous, not Neanderthal.) Dutifully I put away his linens and head for the car, and then we’re off. So it is not a welcome question an hour later to hear boy pipe up from the back seat: “Mom, did you happen to grab my sleeping bag?” The dawning, gradual and silent among us in the car, but like the engine just threw a rod and all forward movement has abruptly ended. He is sheepish, Bill is shocked, and I am already nine miles down the road in make-do mode. In my body, I ride along in the passenger seat, dimly smiling and doing that trick where I stare as far out into the horizon as my eye can see and wish myself there, summoning the calm that this spicy little sitch will require, while inside, my planner brain is kicked into high gear, methodically counting items currently in the vehicle that are big enough and flat enough to lie under, screaming REGROOOOOP! I swear, boy could be standing in front of me with a mushroom cloud inferno behind him and he’d still look me in the eye with those words that defy known reality: I got this, Mom.

Family life has always brought out the sacrificer in me, can’t help it. It is a natural as a bear’s duty in the wood. So the “my house is your house,” “my yurt is your yurt” hospitality we would extend to strangers in the same predicament, for me, kicks in heavy for blanket-less boy. For heaven’s sake, before the car is fully unpacked and the dinner begun we’re sharing firewood with a neighboring family next yurt over, so you think for an instant I’m going to deprive my son of what few linens we did bring, like, tough luck, son? Bummer for you. Really? Let me tell you where to stick those “natural consequences” this time around. Just so you know. I would sleep with AIR on me before I’d let him go cold. That’s what I mean when I tell Bill we’ll “be fine.” I did not say we’ll be warm. As for Will, inwardly he’s still coming to terms with his omission. He knows. He’s camped in sub freezing temps before. Like the Eskimos, he has a multitude of words for “cold” (or is that “snow”?) — some of them so cold they involve profanity. So as we pull into camp, in the last hour of daylight and find our perky little palace in the woods, holding at a damp 45 degrees inside before the night winds come howling, that becomes our first project, even before making a fire: make up the beds. In this regard a yurt is more like a cabin; we have a large, lovely vinyl-clad queen mattress with a sliding trundle underneath that holds a largish twin. It’s all downhill from there, starting with the forgotten sleeping bag. Our flannel sheets (make that sheet, since mom and dad now have half of what we came with) is not, in fact, a queen sheet, and the two blankets I brought are also not very large–one-man throws, really, for a sofa. A sofa with central heating, gas logs, and another half dozen throws just like it in the closet upstairs. That sort of sofa. “No worries!” says Sherpa mom, “No worries! We’ll be fiiiiinnneeee!” (can’t quite get the word out clearly for my clattering teeth). From the car I produce another fleece blanket — smaller than the other two, two airline “blankets” (about the thickness of a well-washed napkin), a large Sur la Table cotton table cloth, and two plaid picnic mats with laminated backing. Princess and the pea, may we be, but we’ll be warm–maybe…?

We are not warm. Not in the least. Operative word here: micro-fleece. The cold damp settles into the circular little slide-projector of a hut, making it feel less like a shelter and more like a walk-in cooler. The wind–I forgot about this part, it was so terrifying I blocked it out–the wind howled all night, occasionally dropping a tree branch or a limb Ka-thunk in the woods around us, or clattering to the wood deck surrounding the yurt. I had to leave off my musings about the onset of hypothermia and contemplate the structural integrity of the wooden ribs of this glorified tent as I lay on my back staring up, barely moving so as not to expose a square inch of my prone body to the elements, wrapped in a flight blanket and a fleece throw big enough for a 9-year-old, sure that before morning light I would be crushed in my not-sleep by a falling limb. And cold when it happened. Next to me, poor Bill is stone silent as well, having been so worried about running his C-pap machine off a rigged lawn tractor battery, now finds he has no need of forced air as he is too frozen to sleep. Each time I reach over to try and warm him or attempt to re-cover his shivering frame, another piece of clothing–fleece jacket, flannel shirt, bath towels–slides off the pile of everything he has heaped on himself to keep warm. It is a little like cozying up to the swamp thing. Near dawn, the wind relinquishes its hold on the night and the tree tops silhouetted in the clear dome over my head stop writhing. Still prone, I blink and move only my eyeballs around the gradually brightening room to look for gashes and punctures in the fabric walls, but there are none: our little Frigedaire-in-the-round has the survived the night. Later, we study our abode more carefully, including the dome/skylight top which we discover in daylight boy had mistakenly left propped OPEN (!!) as he came in at arrival with his internal “must-mess-with-everything” checklist. When it comes to that, he is most thorough. Never forgets a thing!

Luckily, the skills lacking in forward thinking and essentials remembering are fully compensated with boy’s gifted pyro-engineering, and we shall have hot water–at some point. Will is a bit of a purist, so right away disses the charcoal/grill combo I envisioned delivering me a hot cuppa for numb hands, along with my handy sterno/campstove bee-line to flame. I can’t get the Sterno to light anyway, or to stay lit, and when I check the expiration date I discover that it’s only one year younger than the boy. I would do better to just light him. Will’s perseverance and tenacity amaze me–we’re on our fifth or sixth attempt now to get a fire going, and each time the wind snuffs out what boy has made. I think back on those early days of tent camping in the pandemic (See Three Chairs, April 2020), when Will spent at least the first block of his “virtual” school day cooking his own breakfast, freezing, sore, tired and hungry–all within fifty feet of our house. I get it. Well, I don’t get it, but there is a logic deep within wilderness boy, and I respect it. So there will be a wood fire in this ice crater–er, fire ring, even if it takes all day. It doesn’t, but it does fill the morning till, like painting the golden gate bridge, we might as well pull out lunch and start all over again. Unfortunately, my fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination are too compromised by the frostbite to gather much in the way of twigs and tinder, so I take to hauling whole limbs and branches out of the woods for boy to use. Handy, that the friendly neighborhood cyclone brought down so much dry wood–car crushers and widow-makers abound in a thick radius around our yurt, making it look a little like Sasquatch played pick up sticks all night. In a fitting fight-back, the ones that aimed for my head will now be fuel for my coffee.

Keep in mind, I have not had coffee for eight months. Gave it up when I was so sick last winter. And I have not drunk instant coffee in well, eight years and probably more. But that’s what I brought because I knew Bill would want his and I sensed that the production of something as simple as a cup of hot liquid might could present some obstacles–and so it does. The wood is all very damp, decaying and done with being messed with. The wind is still persistent enough to snuff out whatever little hopeful heap of warmth Will manages to coax into life, and it takes hours. Hours. I am so twitchy about the boiling water I try to think of ways to jump start the process, suggest a second fire, a little charcoal fire perhaps, right here in this clean, dry, off-the-ground grill? “Geeze mom!” exclaims boy, “This isn’t like home you know! It’s not just like, Boom: coffee! You gotta work at it, mom.” He is huddled over his craft and lets the frustration and failure release on his mom, who won’t shut up already about the hot water. “Mom!” says Will, issuing a command I happen to be excelling at, quite well, in fact: Chill!

CAMPFIRE camp·fire/ˈkampˌfī(ə)r NOUN, an open-air fire in a camp, used for cooking and as a focal point for social activity.

So by the time water is actually boiling, the glorious steam rising over a cast iron pot licked by even more glorious orange flames, I am so giddy that the tears are squeezing from my eyes as I heap a plastic teaspoon full–OK, two spoonfuls–into each cup–and now there are three, for boy will join us in the adulting ritual. Yesss, coffee. For heaven’s sake, the kid has produced fire out of a semi-frozen sog-fest of a forest; if I had any on hand I’d pour him a slug of moonshine. After all, he’s earned it. His I mix with cocoa, though the second steaming mug he takes straight. I figure the caffeine is the best sleep replacement program we got on hand, and don’t forget we have a day of mountain biking to get through. (After all, we did not come to the woods for a three-day getaway to passively succumb to the elements. Now we can actively seek our demise on sports befitting a teenager.) And what did we eat, you ask–we three, stuck by centrifugal force in a two foot radius around this ring of fire? Will has cut his teeth on campfire cooking, so we had no worries in this department: lovely boiled sausages sautéed with onions and farmer’s market bell peppers in rainbow colors, and in the skillet–the sleekest, grayest most scrambled eggs I’ve ever been served. Let’s call them “twice” scrambled, a delicacy of open fire cuisine. Everything is cooked in such a liberal dose of vegetable oil it all slides down wonderfully well and sits nicely on the second cup of Maxwell House. Did I mention we had pan-seared gluten free banana bread to go with and close-out organic lemonade to drink–I tell you what, those Burks, we camp in style! No, don’t eat the tin foil. Just peel it off with the blackened bits and you’ll be fine. And just like that, there we are, rocking Yurt world, eating eggs as gray as carboard, heavily salted and oiled, drinking instant coffee from china mugs. (“Mom! Really! Ya don’t take china mugs on a camping trip. Geeze.”) Oh really, boy with the toasty warm hands around something so lovely it makes me want to weep with relief in the frosty, unforgiving air. “Ya” don’t?

Let me abbreviate the rest of the menu here, and it will all taste heavenly when you factor in the time spent gathering sticks and hauling fresh tornado-produced lumber: for dinner the first night we enjoyed Andouille sausage kale and potato soup with a side of hot dogs and good ol’ fashioned canned beans. Fresh chopped cabbage and kale salad coming at ya, fresh from the cooler that needed no ice refill the entire time, thanks to our freezing nights (who needs an ice pack? I am an ice pack). And on the second morning, we were going to go with hot instant grits in our thrice-used and washed Styrofoam bowls but changed up and went with empanadas (steamed in a sort of dutch oven/defunct Sterno stove contraption Bill rigged up) along with fried potatoes and onions, figuring lunch was just around the (already turned) corner, so let’s maximize our fire time and have at least part of the day that is not about building, fanning, feeding and tending a fire. For dessert both nights — what else? The must-have S’mores and plenty of roasted marshmallows.

Everything we own, eat or touch reeks of wood smoke. I don’t know how easy it is to separate a Mongolian from his underwear, but as for me, the pull of a hot (okay, warm) shower in a warm (okay, indoor) bathroom, cement floored with kangaroo crickets and clean clothing has worn off by the night’s insistence on more cold. Clean, schmeen. I really was going to shower. I was, honest mom. But by dark (5:30 in the afternoon!!) the layers closest to me are easily 50 degrees warmer than the layers exposed to the elements, and I think that “getting clean” will be far less thrilling than just brushing my teeth, putting my hair in a ponytail and pulling on another layer. Once I see what’s on the weekend agenda–basically fire smoke and mountain biking–I decide personal grooming can take a vacation, too, in favor of the many layers I donned that have quickly become my BFFs. Honestly — a change of clothes? Clean underwear? What was I thinking? Before I know it I, too, am in Boy Scout mode that must make a world o’ sense to boy when he’s out here in the Arctic tundra: Coming home in the clothes you go out in looking absently at your toiletry kit like a relic from another life and happy you brought along this nice terrycloth blanket. Will has done plenty of cold weather camping –27 degrees, 20 degrees, 33 and sleeting–and I will never again fuss at him for his board stiff unwashed hair or stinky clothing. Don’t cha know, dirt keeps you warm?

Let me just say. I am a problem solver. I never went to school for it or seemed smart enough, and I’m not your calmest go-to in a crisis, but I am card-carrying member of the make-do club and the shut- up and put up, and the power-through society. Laminated picnic mats work fine for bed linens, especially if a dentist shows up in the middle of the night for an X-ray. Feels about the same weight laid over my body. So when you say you “forgot sleeping bag,” I say “tablecloth.” When you say you “forgot blankets,” I say “Delta airline flannel freebie” (thinner than your sleeve), and when on a camping trip with such a provisional bent you say “gluten free,” I say “not today!” Or “lactose intolerant,” I say “thirsty!” Nothing brings out the make-do like a family camping trip for technically the first time. Sure, cabin camping, Absolutely. Any time. I like my wilderness to involve a light switch and a flushing toilet. I guess this yurt thing had me fooled. Because it has a door, double hung windows and two beds off the floor, I think we got it made: and with the internal temperature of 41 degrees we do–for meat storage. There is a reason, I guess, that “yurt” rhymes with “hurt.” I am so cold I my bones feel like metal rods clanking against my cold skin. My shoulder are so shrugged they vie for hat space.

Fun Fact: The lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth was a reading of -89.2 C (-128.6 F) measured at the Vostok weather station in Antarctica on July 21, 1983.

But like I say, nothing like a crisis to energize me. Though I am not the engineering genius of my two travelling companions; not the daredevil, why-not, whacko of my son or the seasoned, what-if? of my husband, I do have resourcefulness in my wheel house. I rifle through the tangible proof of preparedness I lovingly packed for this great unknown I got us into: first aid, road flares, sewing kit, safety pins, bandana splints, switch blade, battery operated candles, hand warmer packets, compass, camp matches, mini tool kit, and then…I come across a handy supply, indeed: the check book. Now, hang on–this is not a cop out! Minus the sheep and the loom, I may have something a little more expedient. Let’s face it, problem-solver moms know when to throw money at the problem. So on day two we were on our second bike trek around the park and stopped at the Ranger Station to inquire about the mystery “electrical charging kiosk and common-use spigot” closest to Yurts 3 and 4 (ours). The ones described in the handy brochure. We had hunted at dusk, dawn, and day for the bloody thing and couldn’t find it anywhere. Handy, you know–to be able to just plug in Bill’s machine with an extension cord? But we had been looking for it since we arrived. No go. Come to find out, the dude producing brochures from a desk in his cushy heated office just hit “cut” and “paste,” so that the text detailing one set of yurts somewhere in the state park system now makes that claim for all of the yurts in the state park system. Ooops. Hence Lake Anna’s pretty sizeable false claim and a recurring stream, like us, of disgruntled campers to the Ranger Station. In discovering this not-so slight oversight, however, I thought to ask whether they happened to have a lost and found we might pick through for a left-behind blanket or lost sleeping bag (I mean, we got plenty o’ those, but this one would be lost here, rather than keeping our linen closet warm at home). “Ah,” says the Ranger, “actually, no. But we are selling linen bundles for folks who forgot theirs or didn’t read the fine print.” Really??! I read the fine print: It said, “Due to Covid, the Park Service is no longer supplying linens as part of your reservation.” What it should have read: Bonehead! I don’t care what you think you’re hauling out of your house in the way of linens, but think again. Think… like… sleeping in a Siberian ice hut. In a blizzard. “Oh sure, yep… it’s a nice bundle too.” She nods and produces an actual price list as my eyes brighten over the mask and I gaze on her as one who has solved world peace, summoned a genie, sipped from the fountain of youth, pocketed the Holy Grail and secured a vaccine all in this single minute. Really?? I can’t believe I even thought about it, considered the cost, wondered for a single second–should we? And then, as the ink thawed I wrote the check.

BEDDING: [ˈbediNG] NOUN coverings for a bed, such as sheets and blankets. Straw or similar material for animals to sleep on.

My bed bundle is like Christmas at the yurt. In the bin are two crisp white queen-sized sheets (one is even fitted. Wait–where am I? Is this the Waldorf Astoria?), two white pillow cases smelling of soap and summer breezes, two thick white cotton blankets and a double set of fluffy white bath and hand towels. I dig in the bottom for the “His” and “Hers” white terrycloth robes, but alas that must be for the deluxe set. Gently, Bill and I remove our gloves long enough to make up the beds–sheets, so thin and stiff they might have cracked in the meat locker we called home, and one of the large cotton blankets (other one’s for Will, who can now have our complete set of flannel sheets), heavy like the X-ray shield/picnic mats only softer, cleaner, smelling of fresh laundry and sweetest of dreams. On top of that we piled all our other random textiles and odd bedding assortment, neatly secured and tucked in by–what else? The French provincial tablecloth. Classy touch, anyway. Onto our bodies we slipped one after another layer–the three of us, silent and determined by flashlight, pulling on layer after layer. I got to five on my top, including the first two I did not remove all weekend, and Will got to seven. Seven layers! He had five on his bottom, or he said he did, which would explain why he literally could not bend over to get into his bed. We had to gently push him so he toppled into it like a falling fence post. But on this night the wind was off terrorizing some other park and the stars shone through the little dome (which Bill had snugly cranked closed and latched) and I realized the slow perk of body heat making my space warm. Little by little, truly, radiantly warm. At last…I prayed my prayers and slept.

SLEEP: [slēp] NOUN, a condition of body and mind such as that which typically recurs for several hours every night, in which the nervous system is relatively inactive, the eyes closed, the postural muscles relaxed, and consciousness practically suspended.

But not quite. In my dreams, I’m standing at the top of a huge hill. Behind me, the woods glow with their fall colors, radiant and alive. In front, a ridiculously steep rocky “trail” leads straight down and then up again through the open field/meadow of this bike trail running over the terrain cleared for power lines. Boy has sailed down the one and then just as easily mounted the other, and he is hollering across the ravine and waving for me to follow. Bill arrives at my shoulder and we both stand staring at the bottom like, How in the h%$#!?? are we are supposed to follow? It is the Autumn of our our parenting days. We’ve had a child at home, in our care, for the past 24 years with four more to go. All told, ol’ Billy will have been at it for a grand total of 37 years. And here he is, sleeping in an unheated matchbox with his C-pap hooked to a jerry rigged lawn tractor battery, drinking instant coffee and crashing through the woods on Sophie’s bike so that junior could finally have his. “Rock Hopper.” That’s the name of his bike. Mine, “Road Lover.” Or this: “Seat easily mistaken for the stationary kind at home.” For just this time, though, this weekend away, the elements have worn us down, worn us together, and maybe even recharged us for the pandemic, the politics, the last adolescent peak and the steep grades ahead. I look up at the mile-less sky, squint into the bright sun, clamp both hands around my handle bars (and the breaks!) — and push off.