Unnecessarily close to nature
My idea of camping is a hotel without room service. And nothing my friends — who engage in this throwback activity to the days before running water, flushing toilets, electricity and beds with luxury foam mattresses and pillows were all gloriously brought together under the roofs of climate controlled buildings — say is going to change my mind.
I mean we got ourselves off the ground, into perfectly decent domiciles only to regress — on purpose, for pity sake — to sleeping on dirt basically exposed to the elements, insects and fauna. And, in doing so created an industry that generates $22 billion annually. This, this is what happens when insanity meets capitalism.
I mean seriously why would you make reservations, often a year in advance, spend big bucks on gear, load your car to overflowing, spend hours driving just to sleep next to a tree, in a tent, on the ground (or even an air mattress), in a body bag, donating blood one mosquito at a time when, often for not that much more money, you could get a pest-free room with heating and air conditioning, a private bathroom complete with hot and cold running water, queen-size bed and a lock on the door a mile from a Starbucks? I just don’t get it.
It’s all about being in nature, experiencing nature, communing with nature, letting go and getting in touch with your heart center, they say. Ohhh, I see, for them it’s like
John Muir said, “And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.” For me, it’s like “and into the forest I go, to lose my mind.”
Just this week, in my own backyard where there are trees and other growing things, while I certainly didn’t get in touch with my heart center, I did commune with nature. I communed with four deer eating my rose bushes, a pair of wild turkey, a family of quail and a fox. The front yard also held plenty of communing opportunities — a couple of racoon on the picnic table, a passing through skunk and a rattlesnake. It was, I grant you, a very brief communing with the snake during which I kept my head but, thanks to a sharp flathead shovel, the snake lost his.
Through all this communing I felt a lot like Melman the Giraffe in “Madagascar”: “Ahhhhh! Nature! It’s all over me! Get it off!”
Now it’s not like I’m knocking something I’ve never tried. I did go camping (under protest) a few times when I was a kid and pre-teen. Here’s what I remember: fried Spam for breakfast (disgusting) and that no matter where I sat, the smoke from the campfire always blew in my eyes and s’mores were just a hot gooey mess that ruined perfectly good chocolate and left my hands impossibly sticky. What a treat.
My tent buddy got angry about something and stormed out of our tent — as best as one can storm on hands and knees out of a two-person tent — and “slammed” the flap. Do you know what happens when you slam a tent flap? Yeah, the entire tent collapses. How fun is that?
I also clearly remember being cautioned about bears and the camp leader telling us to go everywhere in groups because “bears like to have options.” Like this was reassuring to a 10-year-old? I think not.
On the first night, I was woken by something large, many somethings large right outside our tent. Terrified that two didn’t qualify as a group, I knew I was about to be eaten alive by bears. I lay petrified in my body bag and promised God I’d be a good girl and never, ever, ever do anything bad again in my entire life if he would just save me. When the sun came up, I discovered we weren’t nearly devoured by bears just, surrounded by a herd of hungry goats. I thought this was a pretty weird way for God to answer my prayers but, hey, goats were better than bears.
The premise of camping, as I understand it from friends, it to “get away from it all.” Really? Are you sure about that? Seems to me you just rent a patch of dirt next to complete strangers renting a patch of dirt just so you have the transcendental privilege of hearing their morning bodily sounds or, even worse, noises you never wanted to hear and can never forget coming from their tent in the middle of the night.
Yeah, camping: the art of getting unnecessarily close to nature while getting further and further away from cleanliness, privacy and a decent cup of coffee. No thank you. Hard pass.
But to those who enjoy it, all I can say is: May the forest be with you.