Most of the time, I wonder why people say I have an interesting life. Then something happens that leaves even me shaking my head.

Such was the case with the topless woman at our Crater Lake campsite.

I have to start at the beginning for this one. We had decided to stay a few extra days at Burning Man and help tear down and pack away the Lamplighters’ Village. We’d been completely out of communications during the week of Burning Man, so our first thought was to get a quick email out to family, letting them know we were still alive and planned to rejoin the default world on Thursday, instead of Monday.

Our friend Mike left on Sunday with the emails on paper. He sent them when he found wi-fi, down the road. Wheels began to turn, and a few days later, we were able to check messages. Much to our delight, Meps’ sister Daisy and her family were heading to Lassen National Park, a half-day drive from Black Rock City, on Thursday. And sister Julie could meet us at Crater Lake, a half-day further, on Saturday.

Burning Man is a leave-no-trace event, so tear-down involves taking down all the structures, packing them into containers, and then removing everything. Whether it’s trash, like a sequin or wood splinter, or abandoned items, like clothing or bottles of booze, we had to make sure they left the premises. As a result, we had a lot of liquor in the back of the van.

The transition from Burning Man to the default world is very disconcerting, a peculiar kind of culture shock. You find yourself in a rest area on the interstate, wondering why everyone doesn’t want to hug you, and what people would think if you started offering them jelly beans and telling them they look fabulous.

This transition takes time, and we were not quite over it when we reached the campsite at Lassen, where we rendezvoused with Daisy, Dario, Claire, and five other friends.

They were very patient with us, humoring our need to share crazy stories, costumes, shoes, and alcoholic beverages. At night, around the campfire, we also demonstrated the “apparitions,” two life-sized ghostly creatures that we fly on long poles.

It wasn’t all Burning Man redux; we also hiked, swam in alpine lakes, kayaked, and played a hilarious game of Chuck-it, orchestrated by none other than Chuck. But our large, noisy group and big noisy van drew the ire of a testy campground hostess, and I had to call on my I-just-came-from-Burning-Man-where-I-love-everybody mindset to deal with her complaints.

On Saturday morning, after ten minutes of anxious cranking, we left for Crater Lake and our rendezvous with Julie. When we arrived, she had put a note on the bulletin board for us with the site number, F12. At the bottom of the note, she’d written “on-on2,” a reference to the fact that some other Hashers had left a note on the bulletin board. Hashers are members of a running club, or, rather, a drinking club with a running problem. Their activities seem to consist of running from beer to beer and celebrating the end of each run with more beer.

A few hours later, we were hanging out around our campfire, when a couple of people burst into our campsite from the woods. They came up to us as though they knew us, so I figured they knew Julie. Meanwhile, she was probably thinking the same thing!

They turned out to be Hashers, drawn to our site by Julie’s note. We introduced ourselves, and Barry and I said we were not Hashers, just a couple of folks returning from Burning Man. That’s when one of them started laughing, and she said, “Oh, I know — we really enjoyed all your stories last night! We were in the camper van next to you at Lassen.”

Talk about no privacy. Lisa and her husband had spent two nights listening to all our stories, had watched the crazy game of Chuck-it, seen our ghostly apparitions, and even bought a jar of Nutella when they left Lassen because we’d been eating it with such relish.

We visited with them as though they were old friends, and they introduced the woman with them, a world-traveling Hasher they’d met at Crater Lake as a result of the other bulletin board note. Finally, they got ready to leave, and the other woman said she wanted to do a naked midnight run. “Come by for a drink, if you do,” I said. I was thinking to myself, “What are the chances?”

After the group left, Julie turned to me and gave me a joking big-sister warning. “Don’t offer liquor to Hashers, or you’ll never be rid of them!”

We chuckled about it over dinner, which consisted of grilled salmon-and-gruyere sandwiches and Cheetos. Julie and I have a long history of camping together, going back to our first grown-up vacation in the 80′s in my little orange pup tent. After all these years, we usually don’t plan ahead, we just compile our resources. We were washing dinner down wth Goombay Smash, the fruity and potent beverage partially responsible for our loud behavior at Lassen.

We were having so much fun with conversation and fire-poking, we didn’t notice how late it had gotten. Just after midnight, there was a crashing through the bushes. Out popped our new Hasher friend, topless.

She was clutching a bag of flour, leaving a trail for her friends to follow. She looked behind herself, nervously clutching the bag to her chest and complaining that none of the losers had actually followed.

So what did we do? We’d just come from Burning Man, where topless and bottomless are commonplace, and we made her feel right at home. First, we stoked the fire, because she was freezing. Second, we made sure she had plenty of antifreeze in here system — the Goombay Smash was gone, but there was the bottled Mojito, and beer.

About an hour later, the three of us were laughing and talking and staying warm (Julie and Barry and I had our shirts on), when a crashing through the underbrush told us someone was finally following the flour trail. It was her husband, fully-clothed, but just as entertaining and hilarious as his partner.

In the morning, there was little evidence of our nighttime visitors. Just a cold campfire, some empty bottles, and a mysterious trail of white powder leading into the woods.

If you’ve never been to Crater Lake, let me assure you that this type of visitor is not common. Chipmunks, magpies, even bears are more prevalent than topless women with bags of flour. So I guess this counts as another interesting life experience. This time, we had Julie as our witness. She’ll tell you, we don’t make this stuff up.