My house for four days this past week was a tent. By choice, fortunately. Gloriously. Temporarily.

My daughter, husband and I went to Catalina Island with a group of friends, riding the boat over, then a bus, with our gear conveniently trucked into the wilderness by truck. Storybook to the point of non-reportability. Except our tent failed to be packed onto the truck. Had everyone else in our group been sleeping out, in their pillowy sleeping bags, it would have been fine. But they weren't. They had tents, and we didn't have one, and the desire to conform at a campsite can be as deep as the need for marshmallows. They put up homes, found good places for their necessaries to make themselves "at home." And we left our canvas bags and cooler, our this-and-thats in a circle out in the open, in the area where our shelter would have been. Of course it turned into an issue -- the ranger was involved, the driver of the bus. A snag. We had turned into the difficult people with needs that involved others. Precisely what camping is designed to leave behind. We had only just arrived and we felt singularly displaced in our new surroundings, the burden of fate our own responsibility, or fault.

The difficulty lasted only a few hours, but it put me in a funk. Irrationally, I felt bad. The pretty picture of all our tents pitched near one another was denied by the hole where my tent was not.

But, regardless of my mental architecture, it was all pre-designed to resolve happily. Our friends would have loaned us their kid's tent, squeezing into their own big one. We didn't need to borrow it, though because the ranger rented us a tent. And the next day ours was found and delivered to the camp site. We had a fabulous time in a place that was utterly beautiful. We kayaked in blue water, climbed lovely hills, sat on the cove beach, told stories at the campfire. We returned home-home suntanned, tired in a happy way, tent materials furled in their box. The duffel bag was now a sack of dirty laundry. Our house felt huge and comfortable.

But it made me think about tents...and houses. And the way my brother, Adlai, ran out of money in Fairbanks, Alaska, a few years ago. He was a graduate student in biology, feuding with his advisor, losing financial support. He gave up the hard shell of his cabin, took his tent and set it up in a field. Where he lived for a while. He was still living in the tent when he came to visit one April. I went to LAX to pick him up. It was in the baggage claim where I found him, recognizable only up close. Long hair, beard, limping, smelling.

A tent dweller. A person who hiked and camped alone in the wilderness. He had lived in Alaska for about ten years at that point. Camping was natural to him. When we got to my house, I threw all of his clothes into the washer immediately. It wasn't a good visit.

He now lives, studies, and works in Prague, the Czech Republic. He has cleaned up for old Europe. He resides in a land of old buildings in ornate styles that are as foreign to Americans as wilderness. Adlai has a long history with Prague, predating his years in Alaska. His ties in Prague are as deep as anywhere, including our hometown, Washington, D.C. I don't know when he's coming back. He seems to have pitched his tent, for the time being.