SEVENDAYS IN A TENTS SITUATION
The great Kiwi camping holiday is neither great, nor a holiday, writes
I’m 47 and on January 16 this year, for the first time in my life, I went camping. I have spoken frequently about my hatred of nature and love of comfort. I have put up a tent exactly once in my life, at a music festival 23 years ago, and I broke it. I went camping after a lifetime of railing against it because my wife wanted to, and because I’d had enough of her shaming me at summer social occasions, where she would frequently tell strangers how I was cheating our children of a proper upbringing.
She booked the campsite mid-last year and bought a cheap tent on Trade Me not long after, but the whole thing only started to feel real after Christmas, once the chaos of the season had finally died away. By New Year’s Day, there was nothing left to look forward to. We were on a steep downhill run to the campground.
As the day approached, I was surprisingly serene, mostly because some people I used to respect told me I’d enjoy it more than I thought I would. They said I’d switch off from the anxieties of the digital world and spend hours reading. I held on tight to that thought. Too tight, I now realise.
Any tension I felt back then was mostly to do with the tent, which had never been erected. I had tried to do it once, in our backyard months earlier, and proclaimed it a success, mostly to appease my wife, even though I’d given up when it started raining, when I was quite a bit less than halfway through.
But my general sense of ease was shattered at 10pm the night before our departure, when I made my first major mistake. Exhausted after hours of packing, and anxious at the thought of not being able to watch television for a week, I suggested we knock off for the evening and watch a few minutes of Couples Therapy before bed. Zanna didn’t argue especially hard but made clear that she thought we should push on, ’til God knows when. She was anxious that if we didn’t finish the packing that night, we would be late to leave the next day, would arrive late to the campground, would have to erect the tent in the dark and would get ourselves so tangled in guy ropes and zippers that we would eventually give up and go sleep in the car.
I assured her we didn’t have that much more packing to do, but in the morning it was immediately clear my estimate was off by many, many hours. I could feel Zanna’s anger rising exponentially, but not as exponentially as my fear. It was early evening by the time we arrived at the campground. There was still plenty of light in the sky but not, I knew, in my wife’s heart. “It’ll be all right,” I said to myself, “so long as nothing goes wrong with the tent.” I opened the bag containing the tent and my heart sank. Sometime between my practice run months before and our arrival at the campground, the erection instructions had gone missing. As I searched, I found myself wondering which of my children would make the best scapegoat, clarifying for me that I’m not just an incompetent person but also a bad one. On discovering the instructions were missing, Zanna, fighting poignantly to keep the anger from her voice, said: “Did you at least check that we have all the equipment?” “No,” I said, because I was too scared to say anything funnier. “We should have checked that we had everything,” she said. She was calm and quiet, and used the word “we” when she meant “you” so I knew things were bad. Seeing only one possible escape route, I snuck off to the car and googled “tent erection tutorial”, but had barely started scanning the results when I felt her looming over me.
“I’m watching a video,” I said.
She was silent. There was nowhere left to turn. The combustible mix of elements in the emotional fireplace of our relationship had ignited. Things were going to get worse before they got better and there was no guarantee they would get better. I sincerely believe that, had it not been for one of our campmates intervening to project-manage the tent erection, I would still be at that campground today, my tent and marriage in tatters, my face streaked with tears.
As our friend hammered in the last of the tent pegs some hours later, another of our campmates, having watched the whole sorry episode, said to me, “So is this going to be your first and last time camping?” I laughed, because if I’d cried I might not have been able to stop, and we had seven nights to go.
As I lay awake in bed that night, I ruminated on the number of remaining nights I would be lying awake in bed ruminating. The next morning, when I walked outside our tent and saw a group of nearby families packing up their tents, I felt sick with envy.
We had been there a little over 12 hours but I could already feel on my body the sticky mix of grease and dirt that would be my constant companion over the days that followed. Inside the
tent, the white sheets on the kids’ mattresses were already brown with the sand and filth they couldn’t be bothered wiping off their feet on the mat we had put down.
Time thickened, slowed down and finally stopped. The hot, awful days sprawled endlessly before me. Seven days! In a tiny tent with a wife who vibrated with resentment against my general incompetence, and three children who had already covered the floor with their clothes. The tent smelled like diseased feet.
The one bright spot, the one thing I held on to, was my book, The Order of Time, by physicist Carlo Rovelli. The book was intellectually beyond me, but Rovelli had a nice way with words and concepts, and the bits I understood were mindblowing. From what I could tell, it made a convincing argument that time is not real. As I read, I tried to reconcile that idea with the reality stretching endlessly before me.
On that first morning, we went to the beach. I hate the beach. The sunscreen hurts my eyes and the sand burns my feet. No matter how hot the air temperature, the ocean is always too cold and is made worse by all the people insisting it’s lovely once you’re in. Sharks, jellyfish, sea lice, rashes, cracked feet — these are negatives that might be bearable were there positives to stack against them.
Back at the campsite, I made lunch for the kids, in the gazebo belonging to one of our campmates. It was stinking hot and absurdly humid under all that polyester, so I snuck away and lay under a tree with my book. I’d read two pages when my daughter found me and demanded I take her to the campground pool. Then there was afternoon tea, tidying and cleaning the tent, doing washing, hanging out clothes and blah blah blah.
And so the day passed, hot and slow. I became sullen, I suppose, and antisocial, and probably grumpy. After dinner, I snuck into our tent and finally, blissfully, was able to sink into my book. I was up to an extremely compelling section where Rovelli was explaining how time passes more slowly in the mountains than at sea level (or vice versa?), when Zanna came in. I knew immediately from her face, voice and general aura that I was in a lot of trouble.
“Oh, here you are,” she said. I knew I hadn’t been the best version of myself, but knowing it wasn’t much help at this point.
“You’ve been monosyllabic all day and you haven’t said anything to me unless I’ve said something to you,” she said. “You can’t spend your whole time here lying in the tent reading. Everyone’s going to think you’re antisocial. Have you ever heard of fake it ’til you make it?”
I knew I had no choice. I accompanied her back to the gazebo, where everyone was chatting convivially, except for me, who was sulking.
The next day, it rained. There was nowhere to go. It was wonderful. I snuck away for half an hour after breakfast to read my book in the car. In the afternoon, Zanna looked out from the tent and said: “If it carries on like this, I think we’ll go home a day early.” It was the first time since we’d arrived that I could say I was truly happy.
Tuesday and Wednesday were not days in any standard sense of the word. They were abysses, vast craters of time from which I thought I would never emerge. What happened on Tuesday and Wednesday? Only all of history.
Making breakfast, doing dishes, trying to get the kids to brush teeth, fighting to get the kids to go somewhere, eventually going somewhere, making lunch, doing dishes, going somewhere else, dealing with kids’ meltdowns, returning to camp sticky and uncomfortable, playing games with the kids that were 10 per cent playing and 90 per cent arguing, dealing with more meltdowns, making dinner, doing dishes, trying to get the kids to bed. It was like being at home but with many, many more guy ropes.
My 6-year-old spent much of the holiday refusing to go to the stinky campground toilet block, attempting to deny the basic facts of their body’s operations. “It’s disgusting!” they said, correctly. “I hate it! I wish I had a gas mask.” I fought endless battles with them over it, and it took its toll on both of us.
“For God’s sake!” they said to me furiously at one point, “I’m sick of it!” I knew what they meant.
After the endlessness of Tuesday and Wednesday though, Thursday felt like an emergence. Two sleeps to go! We went to the beach. Yes, it took three hours to get ready, and one of the kids cried for an hour before we left, cried throughout the drive, and cried for half an hour after we arrived, which was horrible, obviously, and while no one felt more sympathy for their plight than me, I felt light inside. Two sleeps to go!
On Friday night we had fish and chips for dinner. It felt better than any birthday dinner. No endless prep, no endless back and forth between the tent and kitchen, no whining from the kids about the delicious food we hadn’t spent hours preparing in order to later throw away. We ate on the banks of the estuary at sunset. It was a truly beautiful night.
And then it was Saturday. The day that had, for most of the week, felt like a temporal impossibility finally arrived, like a gift from a benevolent god who also hated camping. I woke at 5.30am, far too excited to go back to sleep. I lay there in the dark, smiling up at the roof.
At 6.23am, Zanna texted me from the opposite end of the tent: “Why are you awake so early? Are you that eager to get home?” I wrote: “It’s like Xmas morning.” She sent back a facepalm.
I was the best version of myself that morning. I felt a great rushing of goodwill toward my family and fellow campers. I was more sociable, more polite, possibly even likeable. I wondered if I might have had a better time if I’d acted like that the whole time.
I told our nearest neighbours how much it meant to me that their tent had no guy ropes on the side facing our tent, and I really meant it.
We packed like it was the packing Olympics. We were the first to leave. Second wasn’t even close.
‘ It was like being at home but with many, many more guy ropes.’
The drive home took nearly four hours. They were among the happiest I have ever spent in a car. I couldn’t believe I’d never before appreciated the beauty of Whangarei, nor been so moved by the architecture of Burger King. As a teenager, I had been through a brief Christian phase, inspired partly by a man who said his own conversion had made the world seem brighter and the birds sound sweeter. Christianity never had the same effect on me, but the drive home from the campsite did. I’ll never forget the joy I felt at the disinfectant smell and icy air conditioning of Mobil Whangarei. As I placed my Nippy’s iced coffee on the counter, I knew it would be a long time before I felt this good again.
But it wasn’t. I felt like that again and again throughout that drive: As we drove over the harbour bridge, as we approached our house, and most of all as I walked into our beautiful home. It was so clean and tidy! It had a kitchen near the bedroom and a lounge with a TV, a washing machine, separate rooms for the kids, beds, a shower, a relatively clean toilet and the whole edifice of civilisation I had for so long taken for granted and failed to properly cherish. Camping had been a trial, but that’s the thing about trials, I guess. They teach you to see everything anew; to realise how lucky you are. Time would move on, I knew, much faster at home than at the campground, and the feelings of gratitude for the good things in life and related euphoria would be gone eventually. Still, I knew enough to savour it while I could.
It lasted about a day.
‘I couldn’t believe I’d never before appreciated the beauty of Whangarei, nor been so moved by the architecture of Burger King.’