Bad at Birdwatching
On Eileen Garvin, cheap binoculars, and what I was actually watching
I tried birdwatching at the beginning of my trip.
I took the cheap folding binoculars I used at concerts instead of the larger, more legitimate pair I bought in Puerto Rico to watch tourists from my condo balcony (don’t judge a hobby). Economy was the key to this journey. Every item had to earn its place. I studied solo camping videos. How women packed to live out of their cars. What they failed to remember. What they learned to leave behind. Novelty, which is what birding was for me, was granted very little space.
On Mt. Diablo, I mostly used my camera to zoom in and watch. I’d stand still, waiting for a good shot. A stretched wingspan. A funny head tilt. Pretty quickly, I noticed them watching me because I was being weird. Had I just kept walking or breathed like a normal person, they’d go about their business. Instead, they clocked something was off and bolted.
I dropped the binoculars several times back at camp. One of the viewfinder trims kept falling off, so dirt collected inside the lenses, which felt like a metaphor but was just cheap construction. When the sun put on its evening show, campers gathered to watch birds soar from all directions like a choreographed dance. A Frenchman who had rented a tricked-out van for his family of four said the birds were having dessert, feeding on the gnat swarms basking in the last heat of the day. With each sudden dive, I imagined the drop in my stomach—that thrill of rushing toward something, then coasting once you get there.
I didn’t see birds in the redwoods, which seemed strange, but maybe they just lived above us. They were beyond our charcoal briquettes and the strict social hierarchy inside an ice chest. They had their system figured out, and the limited bugs on the ground weren’t worth dodging kids on bicycles.
My memories of the trip are already hard to recall with any clarity. I couldn’t write an itinerary if I tried, much less fill in the blanks of my little John Muir journal. But watching the footage of this strange version of myself, I have to laugh. I’m never releasing some of it, but I’m not deleting it either. The way I tried to act like the host of some nature show no one asked for is hilarious. And painfully transparent.
I didn’t think of the videos as my story. They were a travel vlog to remember the stops. I was imitating Wendy Outdoors or Nomad Unknown or any of the women who helped me pack my car and gave me the confidence to wander alone. Had I approached it as a story project, I’d have more footage of the campgrounds and the people I spoke to, but I wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Those people would expect to be part of something I had no capacity to promise. Not committing to an outcome saved me from turning the camera into the whole experience. Or worse, turning the trip into another job I’d stress over.
Instead, I delivered a badly improvised script until the camera became an imaginary friend I confessed shit to. I returned to being the kid in the woods talking to herself.
You’d never know I minored in documentary filmmaking from what I can splice together. My masked emotions were never just one thing. The dopamine hits came constantly, which really was cheating, constructing a daily excuse to live like it was my last day. Meanwhile, the lows of a life that could stretch on indefinitely and still feel lonely, even in a crowd, sat just behind those postcard smiles.
In Del Norte, I walked back to camp unsettled by the shabby state of the park and went straight into a swarm of mosquitoes. The repellent wipes I slathered on my arms and neck seemed to only get them drunk. Those fuckers were standing on my nose, staring me down as they left welts. The only plentiful insects probably didn’t taste good to birds, filled with our bitter, selfish blood and pesticides. I haven’t given up meat, but I don’t crave it often, and I wondered if that’s because, subliminally, chickens taste like their traumas. It’s probably good birds don’t prefer mosquitoes. They don’t need to develop a craving for us. I’ve seen The Birds. We don’t need to push that storyline any further.
Driving north through Oregon, I focused on bookstores and downloading photos and video at Starbucks. I started gabbing to the camera about the audiobook I was listening to, making absolutely no connection between the plot and my own experience. I didn’t even see the irony in what I was drawn to in The Correspondent until I edited the video.
Watching myself now is not unlike birding. Waiting for me to flap my wings. Seeing how I gathered books like straw and tucked them into my nest.
Spoiler alert: by Colorado, I had to ship a box home.
Oregon makes me think of Eileen Garvin’s books, which connect nature to human relationships in these quiet, beautiful ways I clearly missed while I was living them. I made mood boards for Crow Talk in late 2024, which connected how crows communicate to the struggles of a boy with autism who had stopped speaking verbally. A crow’s language is elliptical, which means very little is said directly. You have to listen for what’s underneath instead of what’s obvious. They can recognize human faces to a level of specificity I envy. Crows can create a special call for a person that will belong only to them, like giving them a name. Then there’s the waiting. Crows never rush anything. They hang back and observe. Making an approach only after things feel safe, having an inherent distrust that anything is, including the branch they land on.
I didn’t think about any of that until I started watching myself.
Oregon was where I tried to construct a digital nomad routine, reminding myself I wasn’t on vacation. Starbucks became my office, where I sat among busy people and pretended I was one of them. Being there for an hour was an attempt to reframe camping as just a place to sleep instead of a situation. There was a war going on between how I presented myself as another busy person with somewhere to be vs. the leisurers in daypacks.
Camping along the coast was limited, and I immediately judged the RV park at Sunset Bay as a departure from my first few nights as the “Bookish Nomad,” camping extraordinaire. My discomfort with the congestion matched the feeling I had after a full day of polite bookstore purchases I didn’t need but felt obligated to make. The camp wasn’t actually in the bay, so I took a path through a dark tunnel under the main road. On the other side, past a wall of tall sedge, a cove opened up with jagged cliffs and pines and the fog rolling in on schedule.
It was stunning. The parking lot packed with gas-guzzlers was the trade-off.
A pod of brown pelicans were making these spectacular plunge dives, hitting the water with loud, aggressive slaps. I couldn’t tell if the noise was part of a group strategy, driving fish outward, or if one of them was just being a territorial dick, ruining it for everyone else.
There’s always one.
When the fog thickened, I headed back through the tunnel, not wanting to test how brave I was after dark. Back at my picnic table, I felt people noticing me in that subtle way that makes you aware of your aloneness. I crawled into my car, turned on my little fan with vanilla essential oil, and read while campfire smoke drifted in uninvited.
I could hear gossipy aunts. Cackling cousins. Kids playing hide-and-seek. Dogs barking in conversation. It was a full ecosystem of people who knew how to do this together thing. My people didn’t come from that kind of community, though I do have one specific camping memory from childhood that included a lake, marshmallows, and learning not to leave your fishing pole on the ground while baiting a hook. But nothing like this. Nothing this… organized. This communal.
The kids outside my car were learning something I didn’t. I stayed inside, recording rants about silly nothingness because that was easier than participating.
Which, I realized now, was just birding in reverse. Instead of blending in quietly and observing from a distance, I made a show of observing, while keeping myself just far enough removed not to be part of anything. The pelicans and families in their folding chairs all had roles I could see but not step into.
I watched all of it, trying to assign meaning to their system and decide where I fit. I was the one hanging back, waiting to see if it was safe to land.
What I’ve been into…
My friend Deborah Blake just published a book on pagan deities through Llewellyn called Everyday Witch’s Book of Deities, featuring Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Norse pantheons, which offers practical suggestions for building relationships with the deities who resonate with you the most.
Episode 6 of The Bookish Nomad is up, featuring 4 Indie Bookstores along the Oregon Coast, which is essentially me buying more books than my car can reasonably support. I want to return all the love these people showed me last summer. Stops (south → north, like a responsible traveler):
Sea Wolf Books (Port Orford) — tiny, curated, the kind of place that makes you feel like you should be smarter
WinterRiver Books (Bandon) — roomy with an impressive selection of large print paperbacks and a substantial gifts section with bookish things like paper dolls and hilarious calendars.
Books by the Bay (North Bend) — mostly used books, specializing in series that are out of print, lots of niche fantasy, and OG romance novels.
Books ‘N Bears (Florence) — where I bought Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney because, well, Heaney is everything, and the cover had chainmail. I apparently make decisions like a medieval knight.
Currently waiting for Noah Kahan’s new album like a dog at the door. The Great Divide is already on repeat in a way that suggests I will not emotionally recover anytime soon. At least I’ve got Mumford & Sons’s Prizefighter to fill the void. Concert season is coming, people, and I hope you are ready. I’d die happy if they’d get together with Bradi Carlile for a folk jam session. Omg… heaven.
Need a laugh? Check out Shen Wang’s latest Netflix special. I just saw Trevor Noah’s special out next week, too. Make sure you laugh every day, so I don’t worry about you. SNL has been solid lately, so even just hopping over to their YouTube can spin a smile.