Tailgate Tea

I’m back in the desert, living and working out of my faithful truck, Mr. Beebe. My camp setup is pretty spartan, ’cause I don’t want to spend all my time dorking around with stuff, and it’s just me out here. I save my energy for shooting and what passes for thinking or just looking around. I’m dirtbagging with a camera.

But I’m hardly suffering. I’ve got my cushy camp chair for reading and writing and dozing, and I sleep in the back of the truck in a cozy flannel “flying ducks” sleeping bag atop a folding futon that’s filled with 3” furniture foam—it’s more comfortable than my bed at home. And there’s one homey ritual I follow most mornings, which is almost like breakfast in bed…

Ever since I first read them in my teens, I’ve loved Colin Fletcher’s books—‘The Man Who Walked Through Time,’ ‘The Thousand-Mile Summer,’ and especially ‘The Complete Walker.’ When backpacking, he slept on a ground cloth and air mattress and used his propped-up pack as a backrest. And he always placed his little Svea stove and pot next to the ground cloth so he could just turn over and make tea in the morning from bed.

So I started doing this, too. And now, all these years later, when I’m on photo trips, I still set up for breakfast tea before going to sleep. I have my headlamp; my stove; a pot pre-filled with a half-liter of water; a Yeti mug with its lid and two tea bags inside; a spoon; plus a Bic lighter. It’s always arranged in the exact same way atop a bamboo cutting board that sits to one side on my open tailgate.

I still have trouble getting up in the dark when the alarm on my watch goes off. While draped in my warm bag, I’ll groggily sit up and poke my head out the back to see what the weather is like. Stars? Clouds? Windy? OK, OK, let’s do this. Light the stove and put the pot on top. My old stoves allowed me to lie back in bed for several more minutes—a built-in snooze button. But my little Jetboil heats the water in under two minutes. No more rest for the wicked.

If I don’t need my headlamp to set up and light the stove, I know I’m running late! Water boils…tea brews for 5 minutes…then I’m up and ready in jacket, boots, maybe fingerless gloves. I might add a splash of oat creamer from the cooler. Driving time, and/or hiking time, is already figured into wakeup time. On with the Mindshift photo pack; Yeti mug in the left hand, and Gitzo tripod in the right. Wearing the headlamp atop my rumpled flapper hat. So stylish. The world is as quiet and peaceful as it will ever get. Only burros are out here with me, snorting and stomping and blocking the trail. Hoodlums.

In clear weather, and especially in the desert, dawn light moves very quickly. It’s nice to know in advance where I’m sleepwalking to, and it’s hard to scout in that window. It’s a sinking feeling to watch some incredible fleeting scene that you didn’t expect and have no time to react to! (When that does happen, just sit back, tip your hat, and take it all in. And maybe come back tomorrow…?)

But the spread of warm, indirect light—what I call the “first flush”—and then the sunrise, about 30 minutes later, never get any less astonishing. And even if it was socked in earlier with clouds or fog, you just never quite know…those days can be the best! I’m almost always happy I got up.

Waiting for the sunrise? Have a sip of tea. Light’s gone hard and harsh? Guess it’s time to shut it down, pack up, hike back to the truck or straight to camp, and see what exquisite delicacy I might find to eat. My morning’s work is done.

EXAMPLE: My image “Mono Lake sunrise/moonset,” shown above, was made just as the sun came up at my back and the full moon was going down in front of me. I’d camped up a nearby dirt road in a Jeffrey pine forest and made my way here in the dark. Things were pretty cloudy, but I had a feeling—I’d seen this kind of thing before, where a layer of dense cloud sits just off the horizon as the sun is coming up; and when that happens, things can get spectacular. And sure enough, the first warm sunrise rays shot right through that gap and bounced off those clouds as if they were a giant barn door and scrim combined.

The moon moves surprisingly fast, and at the same time, it’s usually much brighter than its surroundings, so it tends to blur and blow out. Here, there’s a lucky balance between the bright, glowing, spot-lit tufa and water, the Sierra peaks, the still-dark western sky, the clouds, and the moon. In large prints you can clearly see the man-in-the-moon details.

I shot this on Fujichrome 50 sheet film with my old Toyo 45AII field camera and a 180mm Nikkor lens. The light show came and went quite quickly…

By Scott Atkinson

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