Dreaming of My Kind of Boondocking

I’ve been thinking more wistfully than ever about a certain kind of boondocking.

First, let me parse out the different uses of that word. (Fun, stuff, yes?) Most people use the word when they’re parked without hookups, simple as that. I’ve even seen people call it boondocking when they spend the night in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel. You can boondock in a campground in a section with no hookups; you can boondock in designated pull-off spots in state and national forests; you can boondock with a kazillion other people on LTVAs (long-term visitor areas). Sometimes it’s called dispersed camping, sometimes dry camping. As long as you spend the night in your camper and aren’t connected to electricity, I think that qualifies as boondocking.

For me, there’s only one characteristic that defines boondocking in my heart of hearts. To clarify from here on out, let’s just go ahead and call any camping with this quality, “shellydocking.”

To shellydock, you must see no one the entire time you’re parked in a location. No neighbors, no gawkers, no tourists. It’s like you’re the only people on the planet. It’s glorious.

Tracy likes to do this, too, but he also really likes to go on a different hike every day. Maybe have a nearby waterfall or two. He likes options to keep him active. I like that stuff, but they’re not requirements. Really, the less there is to do, the deeper I gel into a mindful state of suspension. Is that a thing? Can you try for a fugue state? Whatever that is when you have zero items on your calendar for days on end, no outside interruptions, and time takes on an entirely different shape. There’s no reason to go inside. Your biological clock gets in sync with the rising and setting of the sun. Hours stretch. You can learn a new song on the ukulele by singing it at the top of your lungs over and over and over and over. Heck, I’ll do anything—I’ll wash my dishes in a bucket for a week—if it means I don’t have to wear a bra because I won’t be seeing a soul. Shellydocking. The best thing in the world.

In all those retrospective posts I like to make, I’ve leaned heavily on certain shellydocking spots as year-end favorites (the above two are outtakes from Alaska that got a lot of press here.) There’s the reliable beach camping. The unquantifiable time spent on Lake Koocanusa in northern Montana. But, as I daydream about getting back out there, I end up thinking about the boring places. Bring on the shellydocking.

There was that week we parked on the side of a dirt road in Southern California in search of a seasonal flower bloom. Except, there was no bloom that year, which suited me just fine because that meant we were the only ones there. Literally. Can you see the truck and trailer way off behind Banjo? (Truthfully, we did see a car drive down the road about once a day. No one stopped, though.)

Tracy about lost his mind with boredom because the landscape really was this for miles. The only excitement was one evening when Tracy shined a flashlight on whatever it was Banjo was batting around outside. Turned out to be a tarantula, one of several that had burrowed underground right where we’d camped. Maybe not uneventful after all.

There was a week in southern Arizona when we parked among the cactus and had to watch our steps outside because of all the old mines. Saguaro, organ pipe, a bazillion types of cacti were our only neighbors.

I wrote about it in a pretty good post, in retrospect: Mines, a Desert Cemetery, and One Awesome, Useless Map.

Or the time we pulled off the road near Tucson and discovered we were under the airspace of a glider airport.

One summer we shellydocked across Montana. Once on what felt like our own private mountain, another time off in the woods when I saw a moose right by the trailer. Another time when our friend Tom drove around hell’s half acre to find us for a visit.

Maybe the bestest of the boring is our favorite east coast shellydocking spot in a state forest in Maryland. This was before we had our additional solar panels and lithium batteries, before we had internet access through starlink. No news, no weather app, no streaming, no doom-scrolling. We could stay only five days in the hollow those days, but this is what I wrote, after listing all the things we did not have:

“There is the sound and the movement of the creek. A few small animals on the forest floor. The sunlight coming all the way down through the high green leaves to warm up a certain spot in a clearing. Then clouds that make us wonder about rain. That’s it. Water, light. And wet earth in the morning.”

No wonder I keep thinking about those days.

We have plans to boondock this summer as we travel through the southwest and western U.S., but there are so many places we want to see—that other people want to see, as well—that even when we’re boondocking, we’ll surely be in crowds. Tracy’s been dedicating part of every day to all this careful planning, but my heart will not be broken if we have to settle for shellydocking at least for a tiny bit.