Sleeping in Klamath Again

It was my twentieth birthday the last time I slept in the town of Klamath. I didn’t know it then, but life was about to give me one of those abrupt shoves that send you skidding across the gravel of adulthood, skinning your knees and pride in the process.

I had just gotten the boot from the Air Force—a fine institution, but apparently, they’d decided I wasn’t quite the poster boy they were after. I needed time to decompress, so I pitched camp in the redwoods, the way a tired soul might slip between the pews of a cathedral when nobody’s looking.

The forest was kind. The silence was thick, only broken by the occasional Steller’s jay with a beak as sharp as its gossip. I built myself a small camp on a hillside, lived off beans and whatever I could cook over the fire, and let the sap and soil work on my restless spirit.

But birthdays make you restless, too. So I hiked out of the woods to the family home, thinking maybe Mom would bake a cake, or at least roll her eyes at me the way only mothers can. Instead, I found the house abandoned—Mom and the kids had moved on without so much as a forwarding address taped to the door.

Still, I knew where the spare key was, as some secrets never die, so I let myself in. The electricity was still running, humming like a stubborn old mule, so I took a hot bath—the first one in weeks.

I built a fire in the fireplace, the kind that snaps and hisses like it knows all your secrets but won’t tell. In the kitchen, I found a dusty can of beans, which I heated as if it were a five-course meal.

Then I discovered a forgotten half-bottle of wine under the sink. It was cheap, but I drank it anyway.

To me, it tasted like proof of how quickly life can scatter—half-eaten meals, half-finished stories, half-full bottles left behind. That night, belly warm with beans and old wine, I slept by the fire.

It was a strange peace—lonely, but not cruel. The next morning, I packed my things, climbed the fence into Camp Marigold, and headed back to my hillside camp in the redwoods, and that was the last time I slept in Klamath.

Until now.

Forty-five years later, my wife and I found ourselves unpacking our luggage at my friend Lori Collins’ Airbnb in Hunter Creek, which she co-owns with her dad, Tom, and brother Mike, Lori had left the cabin with small kindnesses—fresh eggs and jam, bagels, smoked salmon from the Klamath River, plush folded towels, and coffee for the morning.

It wasn’t the same as my abandoned family home, of course. This time, there was no scavenged wine, no dust settling where laughter used to live; this time, there was intention—care stitched into every detail.

I lay there, thinking how life circles back in ways you don’t expect. I’d once slept in Klamath as a runaway from my life, eating beans and burning fallen branches.

Now I was here as a guest, a man with a life’s worth of scratches and stories. The town had changed, I had changed, but the peace that settled on me that night was real, the kind that doesn’t depend on beans or forgotten wine or even electricity.

Sometimes we spend decades trying to return to a place we didn’t know we needed. For me, it wasn’t the house, or the fire, or even the redwoods—it was the simple act of lying down in Klamath, breathing easy, and knowing that for the first time since 1980, I was at peace.