I rolled over and sat up. Across the tent, Ray’s head emerged from his sleeping bag. 

“What time is it?” I whispered.

“3:30.”

“No it’s NOT. IT CAN’T BE. How do you know that?”

“I just looked.”

See? Even Mr. Camper couldn’t sleep. Shit. At least two hours before sunrise and I was zipped in a tent with my family, having what was clearly about to be a bona fide panic attack. My heart and head were both racing. I couldn’t feel my toes or my nose – it was that cold — but still, I was sweating. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t relax. I couldn’t breath.

And more than anything else, I was thirsty.

Calm down, I told myself. This is the third night. The last night. Just a couple hours to go. You can do this.

I couldn’t do it. All I could think about was the Diet Pepsi in the bear box. Yes, I said bear box. When you camp in Yosemite National Park, you are strictly prohibited from sleeping with your food — or even drink, even if that drink contains no natural foodstuff. You can’t leave it in your car, either; the bears will rip the doors off. All food, drink and toiletries (even the unscented wet wipes I thought I was so clever to buy) must be locked in a strong metal box with a squeaky, hard-to-do lever, bolted to the ground in the middle of your campsite, next to the fire ring.

You’re practically required to crawl in the freaking box to eat. And with good cause. Just that day (or was it the day before?) we’d seen a bear — it crashed past our campsite twice. Cute, but enormous. Someone chased it off, but all day, we could hear people yelling at it. Not the kind of thing you want standing between you and your diet soda at 4 in the morning, and we’d heard the sound of rubber bullets (or maybe fireworks) shot repeatedly in the middle of the night to scare the 400-pound creatures off.

Still, I knew what I had to do.

I threw off the covers and stumbled to my feet, catapulting across several half-inflated twin air mattresses.

“Where are you going?” Ray asked.

“I’m dying of thirst!” I whispered, giving Sandra Bernhardt a run for her money.

“OK, well, you better pee while you’re up.”

I muttered some expletives, but the truth is I’d already thought of that. Despite the fact that I had purposely limited my fluids so much over the past three days that my tongue was a piece of felt, I still had to use the bathroom. Luckily there was one at this campground, and the toilets even flushed. But the bathroom was several campsites over. And I know it’s been, what, a decade since that serial killer was loose in Yosemite, and I know they caught him, and I don’t even know if he was ever near Tuolmne Meadows (don’t tell me if he was!) but that’s all I could think of as I held my lantern in front of me.

Well, that and bears.

I clumsily (and noisily — sorry, neighboring campers) opened the bear box, grabbed my soda, and chugged as I trudged up the hill to the bathroom, where I checked the three stalls for beheadings (or beheaders) and all manner of beasts. (I’m not interested in meeting  up with a squirrel with my pants down.)

Business over, I walked back to our tent, trying to enjoy the quiet night, the smell of pine, the full moon. It was no use. I’m just not a camper. I take a deep sniff of the fresh air – and inevitably, I sneeze. Silence scares me. In my world, it’s bad enough that I can’t find the Diet Coke in the small campers’ store and have to buy Diet Pepsi instead; don’t tell me I can’t bring it in my tent with me.

At the entrance to the tent, I bent to unzip the not-so-bug-proof nylon flap dividing my family from the big, scary world, and suddenly had one of those crystal-clear reality checks you get in life from time to time.

“So,” I asked myself, “if this is what it’ll take to make Ray happy — this whole scary, smelly, miserable, camping in the dirt thing — can you do it?”  

The answer came immediately. “Absolutely.”

The truth is that there was a lot of good on this trip, a lot of slow, silly family time and private jokes (like the time Mommy got up to pee in the middle of the night!) that we’ll tell for a long time. Ansel Adams-picturesque lakes, the aforementioned meadows, smores by a real campfire, not the kind Kate Gosselin made last week in an homage to Coleman and Hershey. (Could that have been any more obvious?!) The kind of memories Ray has of camping with his own family, growing up.

 “Absolutely,” I thought. “I can do this, and I can even do it again — as long as I can take my Diet Pepsi in the tent with me.”

There is just no way a bear is going to come crashing through a tent, looking for a half-full diet soda. Right? I crawled in between the girls, tucked the bottle by my feet, and slept like a baby til 8.