Another thing I’m aging out of: camping.
My parents were not outdoorsy. My first intensive nature experience wasn’t with them but with my grammar school gym teacher. Every summer, Anthony Noto took a dozen sixth-grade boys on a six-week camping trip to the American Southwest in two Volkswagen buses. I loved it, though I can’t recall what, specifically, I loved about it.
The landscapes? The camaraderie? The campfire tales? The swimming and hiking?
Here is what I remember:
- Our tent. This was the age of heavy canvas. Ours was a two-man, umbrella-style design. Oddly, I don’t remember anything about my tent mate, not even his name.
- Chores: Unloading the duffles and tents today, fetching wood and water tomorrow, cooking the day after, KP the day after that… I must have enjoyed these tasks because at trip’s end I got the “most cooperative camper” award (probably all 12 of us got some kind of award).
- The food, specifically, spam, beans and apple sauce, a meal we ate so frequently that we chanted its name.
- Sprinting out of a low-ceilinged cave in New Mexico after seeing a tarantula above my head.
- Eating my first Mexican food and going to my first bullfight in Ciudad Juarez.
- Getting out and walking so those gutless VW buses could make it up the steepest grades in the Rocky Mountains.
- Hearing scratching on our tent during the night and assuming our fellow campers were pranking us, then finding bear tracks and a destroyed watermelon in the morning.
- Place names: Watkins Glen, Niagara Falls, Cahokia Mounds, Bottomless Lakes, City of Rocks, Petrified Forest.
- My mom not recognizing me at summer’s end because I’d grown several inches and lost my baby fat. (I’ve since regained it.)
Perhaps what I loved most was the first inkling that I could get along without my parents. Yes, Tony — we didn’t have to call him Mr. Noto now that he was no longer our teacher— and Pete, an Aussie who drove the second bus, served in loco parentis. But after six weeks of campcraft, I felt ready to go into the woods on my own. Which is what I did throughout my teens and 20s.
At first I was a car camper. Before long, though, numbered campsites, water spigots and flush toilets weren’t rugged enough. The cool kids were shouldering backpacks and hitting the trail with water purifying equipment and trowels.
Car camping and backpacking seem like closely related activities, but they couldn’t be more different. When you’re car camping, you bring whatever might make the experience more enjoyable and more comfortable, from bocce balls and boogie boards to pillows and Pilsners.
When you’re carrying everything on your back, you try to travel as light as possible. That means no cans, no perishables, no toys and few changes of clothes.
The best thing about backpacking: getting away from cars, humans, light, noise. The worst thing about backpacking: the backpack.
The best thing about car camping: a cooler full of eggs, bacon, milk, beer. The worst: outhouses. You might think doing your business in a structure with a lockable door is preferable to squatting out in the open. It’s not.
I say this having just visited more pit toilets than plumbed facilities during a month of touring campgrounds, parks and beaches on beautiful Vancouver Island.
The campground “washrooms,” as the Canadians call them, are the worst, and a fine illustration of the “tragedy of the commons”—the idea that when no one is directly responsible for a resource that everyone uses, the resource deteriorates. I don’t think of myself as a squeamish person, but these outhouses were close-your-eyes/hold-your-breath ghastly.
To distract myself from the ghastliness, I held imaginary conversations with the resident insect.
Me: Now really, what kind of a life is this?
Bug (sheepishly): It’s a living.
Me: Have a little self-respect.
The worst part of the outhouse experience, of course, are the middle-of-the-night visits. During these 3 a.m. treks, I couldn’t help wondering why we subject ourselves to such discomforts.
Countless essays on the joys of camping extol reconnecting with nature and bonding with your camp mates while disconnecting from technology. All true, but as I wriggled out of my sleeping bag and into my shoes and down the moonlit path to the reeking toilets, I decided I could reap those same benefits from day hikes.
What about campfires, the camping aficionados will object. What about the night sky? What about basking in the morning sun while sipping that first cup of coffee? What about s’mores?
Good arguments, all, except for the s’mores (not a marshmallow lover). My counter-arguments: Nothing’s to stop us from taking night hikes, stoking backyard fires or savoring our morning coffee on the back deck. And then availing ourselves of such unsung gifts of civilization as comfy beds, hot-and-cold running water and flush toilets.
Note to self: In future, day hikes from inn to inn, yes; tenting, no.
