Quick back story: I’m backpacking in the Badlands National Park and I spent the entire afternoon hiking to a spot about 15 miles away from a dirt road that I parked on.  As I went to sleep the rain and gentle rolling thunder started up.

I remember having some dream that I was extremely upset about waking up from.  So much so that it took me awhile to realize what was happening.  The tent would occasionally light up as though some one was turning the lights of a room on, then off again.  I don’t know why I didn’t hear the thunder right away, because I’m pretty sure there wasn’t much of a delay from lightening to thunder.  All at once everything clicked.  I was camping.  I was in a tent.  That sound is rain hitting my tent.  That light was lightening.  That sound was thunder. There was a storm.

Now that I understood what was happening I tried to sit up, but couldn’t. Right, I’m in a sleeping bag.  I started feeling for the zipper, but could not find it.  My arms were able to move side to side, but not up and down.  I was confused for what felt like awhile, but I think was only a few seconds.  As lightening hit just a mile away I realized what was wrong.  The sound I was hearing wasn’t rain hitting the tent, it was wind. Huge gusts followed by strong sustained wind.  I wasn’t in my sleeping bag, but instead on top of it.  The tent was pressed down onto by body.  The next flash showed me that only half the tent was collapsed onto me, which was a good sign.  The tent poles hadn’t broken (probably) but the wind was strong enough to be pressing half the tent flat.  I shifted to the side of the tent that still functioned and through through options.  The obvious thing to do was check the tent stakes.  When I had hammered them into the ground it had been dry and the ground was crusty.  Now that it was soaked, some may have come out and that could have been why my tent was acting the way that it was.  I moved to the door and then realized the wind had shifted on me.  Instead of blowing from the back of the tent to the front (where the door was), it was now blowing from the front of the tent, towards the back.  This meant that if I opened the flap then got out, wind would pour into the tent; potentially sending it flying away if the tent stakes weren’t holding.

At this point I was afraid the poles were going to break from the wind.  I’d find out later that wind gusts reached 50 miles per hour in this area.  I put my rain gear on, packed everything into my backpack just in case (but left it in the tent), and unzipped a small part of the tent.  I held onto it as I stepped out into the blowing rain and zipped the tent back up.  The stakes on the four corners of the tent were holding, so it would not blow away.  But the rain cover on the top of the tent was a different story.  Two of the four lines that held this part down were either pulled completely up or just about out of the ground.  The lines had all loosened in the wind.  I put the stakes back into the ground as deep as I could get them then went to work on realigning the tent with the poles.  Everything had shifted thanks to the one stake that didn’t hold.  I fixed it as best as I could, then went back into the tent.

Lightening was lighting up the sky in a beautiful way.  While I was outside of the tent, streaks would dance like fingers reaching out and touching the horizon.  The rumble of the thunder was unlike Missouri.  Instead of loud violent crashes, they were long, drawn out rumbles that seemed to echo across the plains.  The thunder sounded deeper in tone than Missouri as well.  I was fascinated by it as I lay in my tent.  If I wasn’t worried about the wind, it would have been incredibly peaceful.  However my fix didn’t solve my tent problem.  Almost right away, half the tent was laying on me again.  There was nothing else I could do.  If I were at a campsite with my car nearby I would have packed it in for the night and slept in my car.  But that was 15 miles away, across at least one creek that could be a river by now.  So I left my rain jacket, pants, and shoes on and waited for the tent to completely collapse.

I was exhausted.  I could feel my body begging me to sleep, but my mind not letting it.  I was in a strange fight or flight no man’s land.  I wanted to fight back somehow, but I couldn’t do anything against the wind.  I wanted to run away, but to where?  There was no where to go.

The wind kept up and occasionally during huge gusts I’d reach up and support the tent – trying to protect the poles from snapping.  Eventually I nodded off and when I woke up the storm had turned into a light rain dancing on the tent.  Gentle thunder and occasional bright lightening would roll through and light up the tent.  It was peaceful – finally.  It was also cold.  The temperatures during the day were in the 90s, but at night in the 60s.  I crawled back into my sleeping bag, taking my rain gear off, searching for the deep sleep my body so desperately wanted.

The sun woke me up around 7am the next morning.  I had survived. Survived sounds like such a dramatic word now.  We think of surviving as making it through a long day in the office or an epic night on the town with friends.  We don’t think of it in it’s literal form anymore when you have a bed and a roof to sleep under.  If my tent had collapsed, I would have been ok, most likely.  But that isn’t the point, at the time, in the moment, it felt like I just needed to make it through the night. I just needed to survive.  It’s not a feeling that is easily describable.  It was a mix of wanting to do something, anything, but being helpless, afraid, unsure, and at the same time.  For me this storm was a reminder that backcountry backpacking has real consequences, but also that the trivial things we bicker about in the office or at home are just that – trivial.