When I was 16 I spent the first most uncomfortable night of my life. I went casual camping with Ellen and two other friends and got caught in the rain.

My parents’ house in Larkspur was on the very lowest part of Mt. Tamalpais. The back yard sloped down to the house and a storm creek bisected it. If you walked up the back yard, crossed the road above, and did a little left-right jog, you’d be on the fire trail to Lagunitas. If you resisted that and kept climbing the ridge, you also climbed Mt. Tam. Your hike would top out near Pan Toll and then it was just a saunter to the beginning of Steep Ravine. You could take that pretty fast in the shady damp and you would emerge at the swampy area near the sea. It was another short walk to the right before you hit the public beach. We were so young that we did it fairly comfortably with bad gear: cotton sleeping bags roped to rucksacks, hanging from our shoulders.

Stinson is public and didn’t allow camping, and north of there, Bolinas is private and also prohibited. But between them was a string of properties with houses that weren’t right on the beach, where it was legal to sleep.

So that’s what we did. We hiked up my yard to the ridge to the ravine to the beach to the strip where we could lay out our sleeping bags.

We made a meal. We talked. We settled into our bags. In the middle of the night the rain began and by the time we woke up and understood what was happening, we and our bags were wet. Our only recourse was to retreat with our stuff to the bathroom/change rooms on the public part of the beach. I have a solid memory of sitting on a wooden bench in that cinderblock structure for the rest of the night. I sat there because of the hand dryer on the wall above my head, nozzle twisted to aim at my cold self. I kept waking from my battered sleep each time the dryer stopped, to reach above me and punch the power on again.

I was cold, gritty with sand and sticky with salt, on a hard bench against a hard wall, exhausted. It was an agonizingly long night. I sometimes like to remember it, when I wake and have trouble returning to sleep. Immediately I am cozy.