Getting away from it all, more or less

NATURAL PERSPECTIVES

If your idea of “roughing it” is a weekend in Palm Springs without

an au pair girl, then our idea of a vacation might not appeal to you.

Don’t get me wrong. We enjoy a romantic bed and breakfast or

four-star hotel as much as the next couple. But that wasn’t on the

agenda this past weekend.

Our main goal was to escape our urban environment and enjoy the

ambience of a wilder place. We invited our buddy Larry Rolewic to

accompany us on a camping trip to Ronald Caspers Regional Wilderness

Park, which is along Ortega Highway in southern Orange County. For

Vic, it was actually a working weekend. He had a birding class to

lead near there on Saturday morning at 6 a.m.

We set up camp Friday afternoon under huge oak and sycamore trees

near San Juan Creek, which was bone dry. Vic pitched our tent, while

Larry simply threw his sleeping bag down on a tarp under the open

sky. While our sleeping accommodations were primitive, our food was

not. Larry had treated us to grilled salmon steaks, wild rice and

asparagus on a previous camping trip. I rose to Larry’s challenge

with recipes from Food Network’s star chef Emeril Lagasse.

We started with great ingredients. Our neighbors, Bill and Maria

Coffey, have several beautiful peach trees that hang over the fence

into our yard. At this time of year we are awash in peaches, so I

featured them prominently in our meals.

For Friday’s dinner, we had chicken marinated in bourbon and

orange juice, sprinkled with paprika and cooked in the marinade with

green onions and chopped peaches. We served it with couscous and

asparagus, followed by a homemade peach-blueberry pie with streusel

topping that I had baked at home.

Before the days of electronic entertainment, people amused each

other with old-fashioned conversation. That’s what we did. Like

friends and families of old, we sat under the stars and talked about

the weather by the glow of candlelight. The live oaks around us were

stricken by the drought and we wondered how the deer would fare this

winter with so few acorns. We listened in vain for the wails of

coyotes. Without even a trickle of water in the creek to slake their

thirst, they may have moved to developed areas in search of urban

runoff.

Vic awoke at some ungodly hour on Saturday morning to meet his

students. By the time I awoke, Larry had made coffee. For breakfast,

we had buttermilk biscuits that I had baked at home in a cast iron

skillet. I sliced the biscuits, slathered them with creme fraiche,

topped them with blueberries and a few peaches, and drowned them in

half and half. Daniel Boone never had it so good.

Vic joined us after class. As the day heated to the mid-90s, we

marveled at the native landscape’s ability to survive such conditions

without rainfall. Late in the afternoon, we availed ourselves of the

camp’s solar-heated showers to clean up and cool down before

preparing dinner.

Saturday evening, Vic and Larry made a green salad with fresh

veggies. I marinated tri-tip steaks, which they grilled along with

corn on the cob. I whipped up a batch of garlic mashed potatoes with

buttermilk, and topped each serving with a garnish of black lumpfish

caviar. Dessert was leftover peach pie warmed on the grill.

Sunday morning breakfast consisted of huevos rancheros, buttered

flour tortillas and bacon, a beginning to the day that is definitely

not approved by the American Heart Assn. I must confess, this was not

our normal camp fare, but it sure beat beans and franks.

We spent the morning snuggled in our comfy camp chairs under

towering trees, letting the birds come to us. Acorn woodpeckers,

wrentits and oak titmice flitted about, along with an occasional

butterfly. The lovely San Juan Creek Valley offered a relaxing break

from our usual routine.

We enjoy Caspers Park because it is a wilderness park. From inside

its boundaries, there is no evidence of the surrounding urban

development that is rapidly growing toward it. At Orange County’s

O’Neill Park, development eventually encroached right up to the park

fence. On our last camping trip there, we could actually see into the

upstairs bedrooms of the neighboring houses and could watch their TV

sets from our campsite. Apparently the residents disliked having

campers under their bedroom windows as much as we disliked having

them there, because the mesa campground was closed the next year.

We appeal to Huntington Beach resident and County Supervisor Jim

Silva to prevent this from happening to Caspers Park. Critical

decisions will be made soon regarding Rancho Santa Margarita, the

open space that surrounds Caspers Park. We hope we never see homes

creep over the ridgetops surrounding Caspers as we have at O’Neill

and Santiago Oaks Regional Parks. We need to keep at least some

Orange County parks wild.

Huntington Beach can never have a wilderness park because our

community is too developed. That’s why it’s important for people in

Huntington Beach and other urbanized areas to help save Orange

County’s last remaining wilderness parks. People will always need a

place where they can get away from the stress of an urban environment

and renew their souls as we did last weekend.

* VIC LEIPZIG PhD and LOU MURRAY PhD are Huntington Beach

residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at

[email protected].