Most people think camping gets you close to nature and your loved ones, while allowing an escape from the daily rat race. Others see it as an expression of the pioneering American spirit. Whatever the reason, hordes of us are driven to temporarily trade hearth and home for the great, paved wilderness. We are guided by the intrinsic American urge to discover and conquer, as well as by the latest GPS navigational system. We gab away on our cell phones while the kids are surrounded by the glorious sights and sounds of nature, only it can’t penetrate their iPOD-stuffed ear canals or the latest animated “classic” DVD piped out in surround sound in the back.
Don’t be fooled by these superficially sublime reasons. The real reason anyone goes camping is to gorge on ridiculous “foods” that would never, under normal circumstances, pass for a meal. Think you can get away with serving canned pork-n-beans, roasted hot dogs, and toasted marshmallows for dinner at home? I thought not. Remove access to the refrigerator and kitchen, though, and food standards vanish. As chief cook, I love losing the standards.
Last summer, before our eldest left for college, we spent four nights camping. It was supposed to be a final all-of-us-as-a-family blast. It was somewhat like sending the new graduate to England for the summer, except you just needed to add a little imagination.
My husband, who always thinks with convenience, comfort, and security in mind, suggested we rent a cabin with a kitchenette, bathroom, and climate control. If he wanted to suffer, he points out, why did he emigrate from India to the States?
Just like yours, our children are immune to parental wisdom. They can deflect and reject any advice we give. If we were smart parents, we would say the opposite of what we want the kids to do, but we’re not that smart.
“Your father thinks we ought to rent a cabin with a kitchenette at Jellystone Park in Luray,” I told them. That sealed our fate. Immediately the children turned on us, and were convinced that the only way to go camping was in tents. I must admit, that I also defected from the parental camp. (They outnumber us, plus they’ve got the cuteness factor.)
“What good is camping if we’re just going to open up a suitcase inside of a cabin,” they queried. I agreed and added, “And what’s the point of having half of our garage clogged with camping material if we don’t use it?”
I have this weird psychology. I feel we are “losing” money if we don’t use everything we have ever purchased, and this makes de-junking very difficult. Not de-junking makes finding all of our glorious purchases a challenge, too. Tent camping, in which we could employ the maximum number of gadgets that were clogging our garage, seemed to be the morally superior choice.
Want to see gadgets? Walk the camping aisle sometime. You can effectively furnish an entire household off those gadgets alone. We have so much camping stuff that we could camp out of our own garage if we ever needed, provided we could actually find the stuff in there.
We have the camp coffee percolator and the hot shower bag, which is an oversized hot-water bottle, just tougher and blacker. You leave it in a sunny spot and suspend it from a tree before use. (I hope it’s not too much of a stretch that there might be a tree or two where you are camping.) I warn you that “hot” is a relative term. If you are Inuit (notice my ethnic sensitivity precludes the use of the offensive term “Eskimo”) and don’t mind swimming with ice cubes, good. Otherwise, this “hot” means when the water hits any part of your body that you are foolish enough to expose, you will not shriek, shrivel, and die instantly. You will just shriek and shrivel. You will gasp for air. You will be glad you chose a campsite that has hot public showers, and you will stuff the black bladder back into the garage for another day…just in case.
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