026. rummikub by headlamp

kicking off camping season

June 2, 2024. Icicle Creek, Leavenworth, WA

We were lucky to snag a cozy campsite along the rushing creek, one of the last few available. Even 2.5 hours away from Seattle, spots are hard to come by on a Friday night in the high season. The 3rd Annual Pod Camping Trip was off to a good start.

Four of us formed a tight-knit group (the Pod) during the pandemic, providing much needed support and friendship during those dark days. I don’t know what would have happened to me without the Pod, with our stabilizing weekly hangouts and little escapes from the city. Since then, we’ve all gotten much busier, so the annual camp is all the more important.

The first (perhaps biggest) hurdle to making this trip happen is pinning down a weekend where we’re all free. This must happen months in advance, or it won’t happen at all.

The second hurdle is deciding where to go. After much deliberation and research for things that didn’t pan out (but planted the seeds for a very cool trip next year!), we ended up doing more or less what we did last time: staking our tents outside Leavenworth, which offers quite a few decent camping spots close to scenic trails.

Another aspect of the Annual Pod Camping Trip is that inevitably one of us will drop out at the last minute, due to Reasons. So, alas, it was 3 for 4 once again. This also happened to be a couples trip: the year of the +1s. When the Pod formed in 2020, we were (more or less) single; now we all are in stable, happy relationships. We’ve all come a long way since then, and it feels pretty amazing.

On Saturday night, we got a late evening start on a few games of Rummikub. While waiting my turn to play, I decided to capture the moment in my sketchbook. Alex (pictured on the far right) rigged up a lantern out of a headlamp and a translucent water bottle. It cast a soft glow over my friends’ faces, the white tiles, and my paper.

It was pretty simple to capture the figures: they were much more still than people usually are when I’m drawing them. They held poses for long minutes, strategizing for their next turn, or trying to figure out how to get out of Rummikub jail. I was pretty happy with the likenesses.

Once the sun finally completely set after 9:30pm, I wanted to show the intense darkness of our wooded surroundings, with the looming shape of the mountains behind us. Watercolor felt like it would be too light, and scribbling it all in with a pen would take forever. Then I remembered that I had impulsively added a bottle of purple liquid watercolor to my pack. I captured the silhouette of the trees and hilltops in one wash with it, blotting some out with a napkin for the glow of the lantern.

Just as I finished that laying the satisfying layer of color, out of nowhere it started to rain! We frantically packed up, but not before some drops hit my wet paper, blotching up the wash. It becomes a record of time and the experience of being there.

I did a few drawings on this camping trip, but this one was my favorite: partially for how it looks, but mostly for how it felt.

Sometimes, camping trips become nightmares. Unfortunately, this has happened a few times, and I’m trying to understand what makes them that way — sometimes it’s the company, and sometimes it’s my state of mind. The week before going to Leavenworth hadn’t been great and I was worried that I might take some of the bad feelings with me into the woods, where they could manifest into something worse.

But here, while drawing this rummikub moment, I felt totally content, safe, accepted, and happy. It’s how this group of people always makes me feel, why our friendship was so critical to my survival of the nadir of the pandemic and our concurrent toxic situations. Although those times are thankfully behind us, I’m grateful to still have the Pod in my life.

Happy summer, northern hemisphere friends! (the fact that the season officially doesn’t start for a couple weeks yet is just wrong). I have a few more camping trips planned in the coming weeks. Hope they’re all as nice as this one! Maybe I’ll write about them too.

My mailing list email went out last week with lots of news. You can catch up on it here, and subscribe if you’d like more of that kind of content (it goes out 3-4 times a year).

One thing that didn’t make it into that email (due to timing) is that a new travel workshop was just announced! I’m teaching with Anna Barnes’s Art Food Culture in Hoi An, Vietnam in April 2025!! More info here. I went to Vietnam in 2016 and found it to be an amazing and invigorating place. I loved the food and city-architecture and the liveliness of it all. I’m super excited to back & experience the more rural parts this time.

• Eleanor (linktree)