Can someone explain to me the purpose of camping? Seriously. I'm not sure I get the point of leaving a perfectly good house with perfectly good running water, electricity, and a fantastic lack of bugs, squirrels, and black bears, in order to pitch up in the dust and invite all the creepy crawlies and dirt in the entire western world to gather in my sleeping bag for a téte á téte with my toes.
I was up in the mountains yesterday with a bunch of girls, presumably helping them learn to survive in the wilderness. It was suitably buggy and hot, the place was being overrun by squirrels (known affectionately here as "potguts"), and there had been a bear visitation at our camp site a few weeks earlier. (Now what did I do with my instructions for the Martha Stewart bear trap?)
All of this would have been fine with you camping aficionados, right? I mean, it's camping. You're supposed to be all Lewis and Clark and hack your way through brush to sleep on rocks, eat mosquito stew and fend off wild jackalopes. And I suppose someday I'll learn to think it's fine.
But THIS campout was cruel beyond cruelty. There were cabins. Yep CABINS. Nothing fancy, but there were bunks and bathrooms, showers, actual electricity, and even a small kitchen. There were crafts and foot baths and treats out the wahzoo. Oh, there was a fire pit, and trees and bugs ran amock at the site. BUT THIS IS NOT CAMPING, PEOPLE!
When I was a girl and went to camp, I had to sleep in a tent with 5 other girls. We had to DIG LATRINES because there were no bathrooms. Showers? *snort* You threw a cup of water over your head from the trickle-for-a-stream and called it good. Your armpits became sweat sandwiches as you layered on the deodorant day after day. And you developed the type of tan that takes several weeks to wash out of your pores.
Also, we dug our own fire pits and then produced little guttering flames atop of which we had to cook all of our food (and by the way, have you noticed how much better food tastes in the great outdoors? A can of Dinty Moore soup is the Boeuf Bourguignon of life when boiled over a fire at the end of a day of sweat and mountain dust. Especially once you've picked the ash out of it.)
If you're going to take a bunch of people into the brush and call it camping, then make it camping. Don't make someone spend three weeks gearing up emotionally for a farewell to civilization, training herself to live without her kindle and blow dryer, building up immunities to camp food by living on beef jerky for days on end, and bathing in bug spray each morning so she can become a walking bug-zapper once she hits the camp site. It's exhausting. And once I got up there and saw how urbane the whole thing was, I went into shock. What had all my preparation been for? Where was the respect for the sheer effort it had taken me to get UP there, for Sacajwea's sake? I had to lie down on the memory-foam bunk pad and read from my kindle for most of the afternoon. Sort of like a detox. That kind of expectation-switch nearly kills people like me. We have to come down slowly.
Not that I think living out-of-doors makes any sense in this day and age, but I say if you're going to camp, then camp. If not then don't call it that. Some nerves can't take it.
In any case, I'm probabaly heading back up there. THIS time with my portable dvd player, fuzzy slippers and box of See's Chocolates. And don't nobody better say nothin' about it.
Awomen! That’s NOT camping, but if I have to go, that’s the kind I prefer. I never saw the point of camping either, except to scare us to death that someday we might not have conveniences and would have to survive in the wilderness. All I can say is that when I do finally come to the day where I meet my maker, and I haven’t had to use ONE skill I learned camping, I am going to be quiet upset with those who told me camping was necessary.
“Awomen!” Hahahahaha! That’s great. Equal opportunity, baby. If we can say “Amen” we can say “Awomen”
And yeah, the whole “You might have to live like this someday” aspect of camping does take a lot of the joy out of it for me. I do like nature though. Really. I do. In a civilized sort of way.