Camping: Communing with Nature in the Great Outdoors or Club Med for Poor People?
I just wrapped up a two week vacation, though I didn’t actually go away. This is what is referred to as a “Staycation” by social scientists who give names to things the rest of us do and inexplicably get paid to do so. This was just fine for me. I had a bunch of vacation time to use up at work and for a number of reasons a trip wasn’t in the cards. And as much as I would’ve loved to have just fenced myself off in the living room like Al Bundy, watching European hooters movies in a beret and pretending I was overseas, I actually like my family so we hung out and did day trips and the like. The one actual getaway we have was the two nights we spent in our latest pursuit: camping.
I’m still relatively new to camping. I went once with my family as a kid. And again in my college years with my buddies as part of a white water rafting/ drinkathon. Both were fun, no question about it. But on the whole camping just always struck me as pretending you don’t have a house.
Even the most diehard camper has to admit it’s a valid point. I mean, I work my ass off all year... OK, I don’t, but let’s say for the sake of argument you do... why would you save up your time off and your disposable income and spend them on a vacation where you’re less comfortable than in your regular life? My trips have usually run toward the all-inclusive resorts, because they’re an upgrade from my regular life. The other 50 weeks of the year no one is feeding me free meals and unlimited booze and there aren’t swimming pools surrounded by hot coeds and no one is sanitizing my toilet every afternoon for my protection.
But lately I’ve begun to dabble in the camping lifestyle. And I’m not alone. According to a quick Google search camping is one of the fastest growing segments of the travel industry right behind cruises, Eco-tourism and Southeast Asian pedophile sex tours. OK, I made that up. But lots of people camp.
As a matter of fact I come from a family of campers. (And zero Southeast Asia-traveling pedophiles... just for the record.) My older brothers were all in Boy Scouts, but by the time I came along my parents had pretty much had their fill of buying fundraising crap out of Scout catalogues to pay for it so it was off to the couch in the den for me. And besides, this one story always stuck with me: My brother Bill told me about the time in Scouts when they finished a 5-mile hike on a hot, sweltering August day. And as they sat there exhausted, Mr. Jackson, our weird neighbor from up the street who was the Scoutmaster, dropped his shorts in front of everyone and proceeded to peel his sweaty scrotum off his inner thigh. Yeah, that was more or less a deal breaker. Nothing will kill a kid’s enthusiasm for anything like the thought of the Bataan Death March followed by looking at your neighbor’s schweddy balls. Thanks anyhow.
So all my brothers are lifelong campers. Jack does the hardcore wildnerness stuff, hiking mountain trails and sleeping in lean-tos and all that. Somehow when he tells me these stories, I always seemed to miss the part that sounds like actual fun. Jimbo spends a weekend a year crouching in the woods with a rifle in his hands covered in bottled deer piss. Whereas I’ve always preferred my caribou sticking out of the wall above the bar at the Elks hall.
All my brothers are bright, normal, well adjusted guys who simply like doing outdoorsy stuff, so they camp. But it always struck me that they were the exception. I’ve assumed your average camper would be the kind of guys you come across in the camping/hunting/fishing section of your local WalMart. Mulleted, porn-stached rednecks in wife beaters who look like they played “Bar Patron Who Gets Hit With Chair" in “Road House.” Guys whose girlfriends have rose tattoos on their shoulders and sit at red lights singing every word to Heart’s “What About Love?” at full volume. Sorry if I’m stereotyping, and I don’t want to come off like a snob, but we all know who I’m talking about. And I’ve just never seen couples like that and thought to myself “You know what would be relaxing? To spend a week sleeping in a canvas house 25 feet away from those two...”
But, I tried it anyway. A couple of Christmases ago I got a bunch of gear... tent, sleeping bags for me and the kids... the works. My Darling Lass was reluctant at first. She’s no princess but like the vast majority of women she prefers to sleep in a bed with 10,000 pillows with nothing but plush carpeting between her and a clean bathroom. But she was willing to give it a whirl on one condition: I get her an air mattress to sleep on that’s approximately the size and height of the cushions pole vaulters land on. Done.
So neither one of us is predisposed to tent life. But we’ve got two very good reasons to start. And they’re both boys. Having kids today is a constant battle to get them to turn off the goddamned TV and put down the flippin’ controllers and go live a life of some sort. Seriously. And before I start to sound like Grandpa Simpson, believe me no one spent more of his childhood staring into a cathode ray tube than I did. And I was playing IntelliVision, fercrissakes. If I was 13 today and had the choice of fighting the battle of Leningrad in High Def or having a catch with my dad in the backyard... well guess who’s not getting his Kevin Costner moment.
So the best thing you can do for kids is haul him away from that. And not just to some hotel room where they’ve got eight Nickelodeon’s on cable which your kid insists on watching while you’re screaming at him to get dressed so you can beat the crowds to Splash Mountain. But to get them outdoors someplace where their chief form of entertainment is seeing what stuff looks like when you stick it in a campfire or how much you can burn a marshmallow before the Smore is too gross to eat. I count myself lucky that my kids love it. Because you want to believe that inside, every boy is a throwback. That just because every 8th grader has seen Britney Spears vagina doesn’t mean he wouldn’t rather be walking down a dirt path through the woods with a fishing rod on his shoulder like he’s Opie Taylor (remember, I said I watched a lot of TV). I’ve seen it for myself, and that’s why I’m now a camper.
I mean, I like it. I don’t love it. Given the choice I’d still rather be in Antigua waking up to breakfast then immediately afterward checking out the drink special. Because to be perfectly honest, nature kind of sucks. I know its sacrilege and I’ll probably be stoned for saying it, but it’s true. Everything in nature is hellbent on making you uncomfortable. Everything outdoors either bites, stings, crawls, slithers, swarms, makes you itch or sprays stinky stuff on you. That’s why we live in big wooden and stone structures, to keep all that crap out. The simple act of getting up to go relieve yourself of the six beers you drank while the kids were tossing stuff in the campfire invites flying hordes of God’s creatures into your tent. Somehow Thoreau forgot to mention that when he was waxing poetic about the Beauty of Nature.
That aside, I’m in. I’m liking this business of being a camper. I have serious doubts that I’ll ever be hiking mountain trails or spraying animal pee on myself (other than my own by accident). But going to some local campground for a couple of nights to get away from everything and help create a few family memories? Sure. I’m all for it. There’s always time for European hooters movies when I get back.