Boots and a Tent

The ferry left Dover at five in the morning, and I was on the deck for it because I figured if I was going to have a nervous breakdown about my own life decisions, I might as well do it with a view. The water was gray. The sky was gray. Everything smelled like diesel. And I stood there with a coffee that cost four pounds and asked myself the same question I'd been asking for three weeks.

Clay, what are you doing?

I'm thirty-five, by the way. That matters later maybe. Thirty-five years old, an insurance adjuster, and in eleven days I report to a new office in London. A promotion. A real one. More money, a flat allowance, the whole package. And all I could think about on that ferry was that I'd packed my tent poles in the wrong bag at two in the morning and had to dig through a duffel in my underwear to find them.

That's the kind of week it had been.

The trip was my own idea, sort of. My doctor didn't tell me to do it, but she did use the phrase "manageable stress" in a way that made me want to book something immediately. So I booked a ferry, a campsite in the French countryside near some little farmers market town, and told nobody. Four days of camping, then a week to pack up my flat before the transfer. Sleep in a field. Drink cheap wine. Come back a calm man.

The packing had gone badly. I want that known. I own a lot of gear for a guy who camps maybe twice a year, and every strap and pouch looks the same in a dark flat at two in the morning. I had three bags that all seemed like the right bag. I'd labeled exactly none of them. So when I grabbed the green duffel off the floor and heaved it into the car, I just trusted past Clay, and past Clay was a liar.

I finished my coffee and went down to the car deck to check on my stuff, because I'm the kind of man who checks on his stuff on a ninety-minute crossing. Car, fine. Cooler, fine. Green duffel, fine. I didn't open the duffel. Why would I? It was my duffel.

Except it wasn't, which I found out about six hours later.

* * *

The campsite was outside a town so small the sign had two names on it, one French and one older and stranger, and I never did figure out which one the locals used. The site itself was nice though. Terraced grass, real showers, a bar that opened at six, and a view of orchards going down the hill. The woman at reception spoke better English than I speak anything, gave me a map, and circled my pitch in pen.

"Number forty-one. Flat, good shade. The market is Sunday in the village, you will walk it, no car, yes?"

"Yes!" I said, because when a local tells you how to do a thing, you do the thing.

I set up camp, and this is where I should have noticed something. Because when I unzipped the green duffel and pulled out what I thought were my poles, what came out instead was a bag of stakes, and a folding stool with a flamingo print on it. I don't own a flamingo. I've never owned a flamingo.

I sat on the grass and dug through the bag properly. No poles of mine. No stove. Instead, a tent in a compression sack, a camp quilt, a small gas burner, a French press, a jar of instant coffee, a paperback, and an envelope marked FINDER with a note inside, which said:

"If found by a kind stranger, this is Tegan's bag, please text the number below. If found by an unkind stranger, the tent is cursed. Tegan."

That made me laugh out loud on my own pitch like an idiot. I read it twice. Then I checked the pockets, found a phone number and, weirdly, a little copper distilling token on a string. My own duffel, my actual duffel with my actual poles and my stupid four-person palace of a tent, was somewhere in the world with a stranger named Tegan.

How does that even happen? Two identical green duffels, I get it, they're common. But both on the same ferry, both loaded in the same lane at Dover? What are the odds? I've spent my career calculating odds for a living and I still don't believe this one.

So I texted the number. "Hi, I think we swapped bags on the Dover ferry. This is Clay, I have your flamingo stool. No rush, I'm at Camping Les Orchards, pitch 41."

Then I put up her tent, because I was curious, and it turned out to be a lovely little one-person dome that went up in ten minutes, and then I stood there like a fool because my actual tent, the palace, was in that same bag someone else had. So I slept in a tent that wasn't mine, on a quilt that wasn't mine, and used the French press, because come on, I wasn't going to waste it.

She texted back around nine.

"Oh no!! That explains SO much. My bag had a man's rain jacket in it and I thought I'd lost my mind. You're at Les Orchards? I'm at the site near the market village, the other one. Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow works. I'll drive over. Bring the palace."

"The palace??"

"It's a four person tent. It has a vestibule. You'll see."

"Lol ok. Mine has a flamingo stool. Fair trade. Goodnight Clay from the ferry!"

Goodnight, Tegan. I went to sleep thinking the name suited a person who wrote a joke note into her luggage, and I was right, but I didn't know it yet.

* * *

The next morning I drove the twenty minutes to the other campsite, which turned out to be less a campsite and more a field behind a farm that sold cider at an honesty stand. Her tent was already packed down and waiting by a little blue hatchback, and standing next to it was a woman arguing gently with a tent bag that clearly did not want to go back into its sack.

That was the moment I understood the full scale of my crime. Because the tent she was wrestling with was mine. The palace. A four-person dome with a vestibule, fiberglass poles, and a packing routine that I have never once managed in under fifteen minutes.

"Need help?" I called out.

She looked up. Late twenties, I'd guess, maybe twenty-nine, short dark hair shoved under a cap, work boots, the kind of forearms you get from hauling things for a living. She had a smudge of something on her cheek and didn't seem to know it.

"Oh thank god, are you Clay? Please tell me you're Clay, because if you're Clay, that means this monster is yours and I've only been fighting it for twenty minutes and losing."

"I'm Clay." I put my hand out. "And that's my fault, that tent packs down to about the size of a golden retriever and it fights you the whole way."

"A GOLDEN retriever, exactly!" She shook my hand hard. "I got it rolled and then it escaped. Twice. Tegan, by the way, though you knew that."

"Tegan who puts jokes in her luggage."

"You read the note." She laughed. "I stand by the curse. Did you text me or did you just quietly steal my whole campsite life?"

"I texted. You have a French press, by the way. I used it. I owe you coffee."

"You owe me nothing, that press is a luxury I bring and never use. Did you actually use it? Was it good?"

"It was very good."

"See." She pointed at me like I'd proved her point. Then she looked at the palace, then at my car, then back. "Okay so, logistics. I have your tent, you have mine, we're two campsites apart. Do you want to just, hm." She chewed her lip. "What's your site like?"

"Flat, shade, real showers, a bar."

"This is a field behind a cider farm."

"Those are strong points for my site, yeah."

She squinted at me, and I think she was deciding something, but honestly it took her about two seconds. "Look, no pressure at all, and tell me if this is weird, but my plan was to walk to the market tomorrow and be lazy the rest of the time, and your site sounds better. Do you want to just set up both tents at your pitch? Swap back Monday at the ferry, done."

Both tents. At my pitch. A stranger I'd met on a ferry deck at five in the morning without meeting, technically.

"Is that weird?" she asked again, and she was smiling, and she had a flamingo stool in her car.

"It's not weird," I said. "It's practical. I'm very practical. It's my whole thing."

"An insurance man?"

"How did you know that?"

"You literally said logistics," she said, and started loading my palace into my own car, which felt very symbolic, though of what I couldn't tell you yet.

So we drove back to Les Orchards in convoy, her little blue hatchback following my rental the whole twenty minutes like she didn't trust me not to disappear with her flamingo stool. Fair, honestly. At pitch 41 we did the whole neighborly thing, tents up side by side, and it took ten minutes for hers and forty for the palace, because mine fought her again anyway.

"You owe me a beer for this," she said, standing back, hands on hips.

"The bar here is real. I checked. Twice."

"An insurance man who pre-checks bars. Terrifying."

We got beer at the bar. We sat outside under a strung light that wasn't even on yet because it was only afternoon. And that's when she asked the question I should have been ready for.

"So what does an insurance man do in France alone on a Saturday? Divorce? Midlife crisis? Tell me it's a midlife crisis, I love those."

"Job transfer. London office. I report in ten days, and my doctor said my stress was, quote, manageable, and I decided manageable meant leave the country."

"Your doctor told you to do this?"

"She told me to manage my stress. This is me managing."

She raised her glass at that. "To managing." And I raised mine, and I remember thinking this was the most sensible toast I'd ever been part of.

She talked. I mostly listened, which is unusual for me because normally I fill silence like it's my job, which it kind of is, in a way, claims adjusters hate silence, silence is where people say things you have to write down. But she talked enough for both of us and it was fine. She was a distiller. An actual distiller, back home, gin mostly, with a sideline in something she described as "a whiskey I'm not allowed to call whiskey yet because of the lawyers." She'd come over for a trade thing in Calais, tacked on a few days of camping, and her busy season started in ten days and she was squeezing the last of her freedom out like juice.

"You carry a copper token," I said. "In your bag. What's that about?"

Her whole face changed. "You went through my bag?"

"I looked for my stuff. There was a token sitting on top."

"It's my first distilling token. The place I apprenticed at, when you finish your apprenticeship they hand you one, cut from their old still. It's basically the best thing I own." She patted her pocket like it was in there. "I take it everywhere. It's a good luck thing."

"And you put it in a bag with a note about a cursed tent."

"The curse note goes in every bag. Different camping superstition. The token is real luck, the curse is comedy."

"I respect the system."

The market was the whole reason either of us had picked these sites, and she'd been before, so she was the guide. We agreed to meet at the church square at eight on Sunday, and I was there at ten to eight like a nerd, and she rolled up at eight fifteen with her cap turned backward and said "coffee first, haggling second," and I said yes ma'am.

The market was cheese and honey and a man selling forty kinds of sausage and a woman with a folding table of nothing but garlic. Tegan knew the cheese guy. She'd been here three days and knew the cheese guy. I bought cheese I didn't need because she told me to and it was, no contest, the best cheese of my life.

Then, near the honey stand, a voice behind us said, "Tegan? No way."

And I want to be fair here, I had no idea who this was. Big guy, thirty-eight maybe, flannel, a tote bag full of what looked like sixty onions. But Tegan's shoulders did a thing. Went up around her ears.

"Derek. Hi. What are you doing here?"

"Market conference. In Lille. I drove down, I thought, I'm in France, I have to hit a real one, and here you are. Small world, huh?" He stuck his hand out at me. "Derek. Friend of Tegan's."