Sleeping Around Deon Matzen   © Copyright 2025 by Deon Matzen

Photo by Matthew Ang at Pexels.

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.--Og Mandino

This is not an X rated chapter, too bad. It is suitable for children and family. It is PG.

Last night my husband and I slept under the stars for the umpteenth time in our lives. It is summer and this summer it’s really summer. Living in western Washington, summer is an iffy thing. Usually three out of four Fourth of Julys it rains, which is better than having brush fires start from carelessly fired fireworks. This summer the days are dry and temperatures are in the seventies. Nights are in the low to mid fifties. It is clear. Since we live in the countryside, we can run around outside in the all together. (Maybe this is X rated) We can also sleep outside.

My husband and I started sleeping outside when we would take weekend trips to remote areas and sleep in the back of the station wagon. Traveling light was a necessity with two dogs and both of us working on Fridays with little time to pack efficiently. We needed room for a camp stove, not tents. And I had slept outside from a young age.

We could, and still can, hear all kinds of things at night. Coyotes howling at the moon in three part-harmonies for hours on end is one of the highlights. Deer walking within a couple of feet of our staked out territory. Mice ruffling though the dry leaves under the bed. Squirrels chipping at you in the morning. In our farmyard the rooster starts crowing about 3:30 in the morning, or so my husband tells me. This morning it was the peahen at daybreak wondering where I was with her treat of corn. One of these mornings she’ll probably discover where we are sleeping and give us her nasal, hollow-sounding honk right next to the bed. I am almost deaf, so cannot enjoy all the audio delights, it is all visual joys for me at this point in my life.

My sis and I slept on the ground, in the barn, in the woods, on the deck. We slept outside the night the first Sputnik crossed the sky and we could see its blinking light, or at least we were told that was what it was. It could have been a distant airplane, though you couldn’t hear it.

The year of the Sputnik my bed was an aluminum chaise with woven plastic webbing on the patio and a Dacron sleeping bag purchased in 1954. (This sleeping bag has finally been retired in 2014. It had a good life.) Many years it was sleeping on the ground, sometimes on plastic and sometimes on grass. Plastic, we discovered, was too loud when you rolled over. Sometimes it was camped in the back of the Volvo station wagon with the hatch open and our heads to the back so we could look out the rear hatch window at the sky. Some years it was in the hay in the hay loft of the barn and for a number of those iffy summers, in a walled army green tent.

Last night, Bob, my husband, and I settled down on our airbed mattress in the backyard, the more sophisticated arrangement we have now. It consists of a futon frame with an airbed mattress. We have sheets, pillows with cases and a big fluffy down quilt to keep warm and comfortable. Since it is a particularly dry year, we skipped the mosquito netting as they seem to have dried up. Some years they are voracious and as a result the netting is a necessity.

As I lay there, I thought about all the times we had done this. What is the attraction? Well, primarily looking up at the stars. At this point in my life it necessitates wearing my glasses, but without them I can still see misty spots in the sky and watch them pass overhead. Now when I wake up during the night, I can check their progress across the sky. At times we have tried to stay awake to see the Perseid star showers and have had some spectacular nights once they started. (Usually two out of four years we get cloud cover for those days, so it is a treat to see them.)

What else draws us to this? I thought..... the cool, refreshing breeze that literally caresses my face. Last night it was gentle, sweeping across my cheek and putting me to sleep like a gentle kiss. Sometimes the briskness of the air can be refreshing too with extra quilts piled on. Some years we have made it through late October before giving up for the season. Usually September is about the limit as the heavy dew or fog can make for very wet bedclothes. We have even tried to stay out during light rain, which is really nice on your face if it isn’t getting everything too wet. The sun can dry out a light wetness during the day, but heavy rain requires throwing the handy piece of plastic over the whole thing and retreating to the bed in the house.

In 2014, when we had been sleeping outside for about a month, the night of August 11^th, I make sure I have my glasses and off to bed to watch the Perseid meteor showers. I look up, no stars. I look again and since the sunset, and the sky has become dark, the clouds have rolled in. Instead of the Perseid, we are treated to a wild and merry electrical display of lightning. At first, very loud and close. Our weather “Spark” (a modern phone app) warns us, the strike is within 2.3 miles, take cover. As the storm progresses it becomes heat lightning without the thunder but lots of light display.

After I am asleep for about an hour, a light drizzle starts. This is one of those intermittent, spitting drizzles. We decide to wait it out. It stops shortly and the bed dries out before you know it. This is repeated about three times during the night, each time waking us up, but we enjoy the refreshment it provides. It is warm.

The next evening we are back outside and waiting for the clouds to clear. This is the last night that this year’s meteor shower is to be visible. Clouds, Clouds, Clouds! We fall asleep. An hour later, the drizzle begins again. We wait, trying to decide if it will be wet, or if we can dry out between drizzles. No way. We covered the bed with plastic, headed in the house to sleep indoors. By the time we got up in the morning the drizzle had become a gully washer and .77 inches of rain had fallen. Good decision to retreat.

At one time my sis and I decided it would be good to move to the barn loft, lots of hay for a bed and out of the rain. My sis had made a cozy spot for herself. When I awoke in the morning, she was gone. It was still pretty early, so I went back to sleep. Later when I went in the house for breakfast, my sis was real mad. It seems that her camping site was directly under the loft light fixture which had a swallows nest on top of it. The baby swallows were about to fledge and were standing around the edge of the nest making a lot of poop which fell directly on her head and face. Boy, was she mad and her new sleeping bag got its first washing. She found another place in the barn to sleep after checking for overhead objects before bedding down.

These days, it is pretty dark outside where we sleep, and Bob and I go out with a flashlight. A few seasons ago we pattered out to the bed parked in the orchard some distance from the house through our gardens to discover that there was an animal in the bed. The neighbor’s cat thought this was a lovely place to sleep too.

Once when sleeping out in eastern Washington in the spring, we slept on the top of picnic tables because there were rattlesnakes around. The night was very cold. We didn’t want any unwanted guests crawling in the bag with us for warmth. When we awoke in the morning the apple orchards nearby were covered in the most beautiful ice. To save the blossoms from frost, the orchardists turned on the irrigation systems. This encases all the blossoms in ice, but saves them from damaging frost. It was almost as beautiful as the stars the night before.

Sleeping on the ground has its drawbacks. Well into my seventh decade, sleeping on a hard surface does not bode well for getting up off of said surface the next morning. Nor does it bode well for a happy day later either. Thus the more elaborate sleeping arrangements we use now. There is another drawback to sleeping on the ground which will wake you up with disgust. In our temperate climate zone we have a large population of slugs. I woke one night to something that felt like sucking on my neck. Washington State may have vampires in Forks, but those thirsty predators don’t seem to populate the area around our house. I woke with a start and suddenly realized, IT WAS A SLUG, and it was crawling across my neck. This shelless mollusk leaves a diaphanous, gelatinous, slime trail. UGH! We don’t like to even touch them around here and the goo is hard to remove from skin, requiring a scrub brush. This does not make for happy camping and happens more frequently when sleeping on plastic. Slugs like to hide under the dark damp material during the day and come out at night and crawl across your exposed skin. We wondered if the lariat trick worked for slugs, but it doesn’t. (The lariat trick, an old wives tale, was supposedly used by cowboys sleeping on the trail. If you opened your lariat to surround your bedroll, a rattlesnake would not go over it to snuggle with you.)

Varmints can be a problem, earwigs, spiders, deer, coyotes, raccoons, cats, chickens. Four o’clock wake up calls from the rooster, midnight howls from coyotes or the neighbors malamute, cooing of the raccoons near enough you think they may want to bed down with you, pesky robins looking for worms in the flowerbed next to our bed or splashing in the birdbath in said flower bed, and more, can interrupt sleep. I have the advantage of not being able to hear most any longer unless I wear my hearing aids to bed. I like waking up to the birds, and I CAN hear some of them.

But.....if you have never slept outside without a tent, just lying on the ground or on an air mattress or in a hammock under the night sky, you are missing a wonderful treat. Try it just once and you will be hooked for life. It doesn’t have to be in the back yard; it can be on a picnic table in a campground or on your apartment balcony. Privacy is nice, but not totally necessary. Do it with your kids sometime and start a lifetime tradition!