This story was written while lying on my bed in Chula Vista, CA. This was originally posted in July 2020 on Medium.
An image of me holding up our grilled cheese at our campsite.
I’ve eaten a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches….obviously. One question I get a lot (and I have probably already discussed on this blog) is: what is my ideal grilled cheese sandwich?
And, of course, I do have preferences. Cheese: American. Bread: white or sourdough, golden brown but soft. Side: sweet potato fries. Drink: Root Beer or Coke with crushed ice.
I’ve had plenty of grilled cheese meals that don’t satisfy all of these preferences, and some of those have been wonderful still. Not every situation in life is going to be to our exact liking, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable or even enjoyable.
This is a story about one of those sandwiches that doesn’t satisfy all the preferences.
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Almost four months to the day since the announcement of stay-at-home orders by California’s governor, Orlando and I embarked on a camping trip. By this point, the “stay-at-home” situation had become murkier: bars and beaches re-opened to some extent, people were slowly returning to jobs, and it felt (and still feels) as though everyone is deciding for themselves what is safe and what is not. This isn’t a judgement, I’m doing it too. But navigating a pandemic without clear leadership is … confusing, to say the least. Is it safe to go to the beach? And is that more or less safe than camping? And at what point do you draw the lines between living in fear, staying safe, and enjoying life?
Why am I talking about any of this? It’s all to say that this is the mindset I entered our camping trip with: was I being selfish? Was I creating danger for those I lived with? I researched and believed that camping was a safe activity, but, as we’ve all heard ad nauseam, we’re living in unprecedented times and I think it’s near impossible for anyone to say what is safe and what is not with absolute certainty. So, after weighing the risks, we camped.
An image of Orlando as we played a board game together.
Despite these initial concerns, camping was wonderful. After months spent inside, months spent worrying and working harder than I ever have, it was (excuse the cliche) a breath of fresh air. It was the outside. It was more heat than I’m entirely comfortable with, and lying in a hammock, and hiking, and reading a book I fell in love with, and everything I wanted it to be.
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The grilled cheese sandwich came from a restaurant called Red Kettle in the town of Idyllwild, CA, close to our campgrounds. (Side note: If you have an opinion that ordering take out is not “real” camping, I respect you but don’t need to hear it, thank you).
When I write these posts, I think about the sandwich itself and then the thing that sticks out the most. In Nebraska, it was the friends I ate it with, in Big Bear it was a huge change in a sandwich when I didn’t expect it, in Nashville it was the reminder of home. With this sandwich, it was the inside.
To go back to my preference list, this sandwich was ideal when it came to the inside. The cheese was perfect in type, amount, and flavor. It was wonderful. The outside … less so. The bread was fine, just not ideal. Perhaps not as soft as I would’ve liked. And this led my brain down a rabbit hole, realizing that I had already been thinking about the dichotomy between inside and outside without fully comprehending that I was doing so.
Over the past few months, the pandemic has caused us all to become much more acquainted with the inside of our homes, and fear the outside world. While the outside is not all bad by any means (a lot of the “sanctioned” activities right now are those that take place outside), for me there’s still the ever-present danger of coronavirus that makes the outside less than ideal. This is surely evidenced by my over-analysis of whether camping was a good idea in the first place, and my tendency to sometimes over-wash my hands until they’re raw, and that fear that grips me every time I sneeze. What I’ll say about the inside is that I’m sure glad I’ve always been most content inside my own home.
In the more metaphorical sense, the “inside” (the core, the most important part, the cheese, if you will) of this trip looked the same as all of our other trips: Orlando and I (and Coco) spending time together and making new memories. But the “outside” (the surface, the appearance, the bread, if you will) looked a little different. We’ve been camping before, but it’s still a very new experience for us. The outside of the trip, where it took place, was a lot different than our city adventures.
A (slightly blurry) picture of my friends and I after we got matching tattoos at GLA last year.
This continued throughout the rest of the week as I attended Camp GLA, the virtual version of the Harry Potter Alliance’s annual leadership conference, Granger Leadership Academy. I’ve attended this conference every year since 2016 and am always left with new motivation for personal and community growth. This year, the inside remained warm, lovely, and quite cheesy (in the best way): the connection between campers (even over the Internet), the moments for personal reflection, and the collective action taken to make the world a little bit better. The outside was different, being that the the IRL component was literally gone. Just like my sandwich, it was fine and in some ways better than I expected. But in the end, it wasn’t my preference. Solely for the fact that I missed the moments of sitting around with my friends in a hotel room and walking around a new city and, who knows, maybe getting a new tattoo.
I know that none of the last few months have been anyone’s preference, and I’m trying my best to carry the feeling of the inside — the connection, the safety, the really good cheese — until the outside can match it once again.
