Proof that I don’t learn from my mistakes is that I have gone camping more than once.
Please remind me to never do it again. Nature should be looked at, not lived in. Camping is a substandard living arrangement that no one should put themselves into voluntarily. It’s communing with nature on a far too intimate level.
When I was very young, we spent one summer at a campground while my dad built our summer home nearby. As the second to youngest of six kids, I rarely got first choice of anything. There was limited room inside the tent and my older siblings wanted it. I had to share the pop-up campervan with my infant brother. I envied those tent-sleepers and whatever secret fun they must have been having. I had no idea that being on a soft, dry mattress in a clean, bugless camper, I already had the catbird seat.
My mother had later warned me, “Don’t go camping unless you like being wet and dirty.” Like a lot of parental advice, the lesson went unheeded, the wisdom unappreciated. I had to learn it on my own, the hard way.
My friends know that I like to stay clean, it’s important to me. I brush my teeth frequently because I can’t concentrate when they’re dirty. And my absolute closest friends know my peculiarity about being partially wet. I like to be either fully dry or fully wet. But I hate to be partially wet. It’s not a mild type of annoyance, like when someone pronounces apricot as “ape-ricot”. It’s a straight path to insanity.
I like to bathe, swim, or get completely soaked in a rain shower but I can’t let lemonade run down my elbow and let a dog lick my face. Ever.
There came a time during our trekking experience when I found myself re-evaulating my entire life and the decisions made that put me in that spot. Not that I’m playing the victim, I realize it was all my choice, but come on!
As a reasonably functioning and semi-privileged adult who used to live quite comfortably in different homes and in different states of the comfortable U.S., to find myself stuck outside in the dismal, depressing, and third day of ongoing rain, squatting beside a freezing cold mountain stream, pounding my wet socks on a rock to scrub the out mud really caused me to think – What in the world am I doing?
No one wants to do this, not even people who love the great outdoors, and I am not one of them. Any time I go camping, and it is a rare event only to get rarer, I feel like I´m the first person to ever get rained on or have to suffer through the indignity of sleeping outside. Tents are best used by kids in living rooms. No adult should ever have to sleep outside on the ground.
People do not work hard, scrimp and save their money with a goal to live more uncomfortably or with less conveniences. Illegal immigrants willingly risk their lives trying to enter the U.S. for the economic opportunities available and creature comfort fulled lifestyle. It’s a sure bet that they are not hoping to make enough money to take their families camping. It’s more likely that their families are already living a “camping-like” existence and those desperate conditions lead them to extreme actions.
As we were hiking during the day, I would rehearse my story about camping because I really thought that I would be interviewed on CNN world for surviving such an ordeal. I have decided that trekking and camping should be done only as a last resort, a method of escaping a disaster, like a plane crash in the wilderness. And that’s how I felt, like either a survivor or a victim, depending on whether I was inside some basic shelter or stuck outside again.
I imagined myself talking to an astonished interviewer. I´d just tell her some of the horrors, like “Yes, and we walked for hours and hours, and we had to carry everything on our backs.”
“Oh no!”
“Yes, at then, at night, we were still too far from help and we had to sleep OUTSIDE, in TENTS!”
“Oh my god, how did you survive?”
Then I´ll sigh, roll my eyes, and say, “Barely.”
Camping is a horrible way to spend time, although if you are looking for a way to slow the pace of your life to a crushingly slow crawl, camping can do that for you. And maybe that is its appeal, its purpose – to temporarily refresh the sense of misery in your life, so you can more easily return to a boring job and be grateful just for a clean place to sit.
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