Miss Camps-A-Lot

Or, Why I Love Camping Even Though It Makes You Dirty And Exhausted.

As I recover from last weekend's car-camping eat-a-thon, and frantically try to plan a Labour Day Weekend canoe getaway, I pause for a moment to consider just what it is about camping that I enjoy so much. I've had a big summer for camping: Four trips, which is about three more than I usually manage to do. I had never thought to question my motivation before, as the joys seemed so self-evident. However, it was brought to light recently that not everyone really ENJOYS the camping, so much as endures it.
It started in Junior High, because my parents certainly didn't take the family camping when we were kids. No, my mother was the B&B and a play in Stratford type. I think her Honeymoon camping in Scotland pretty much did her in for wilderness adventures.
So, Junior High, and our tiny alternative school did a yearly trip to some provincial park. Despite the stresses of splitting up into three-or-four person groups to camp, (who likes me enough to be in my group?!) it was always a much-anticipated event. There was no drinking, an activity that became closely related to camping in later years, but we were a bunch of pre-teens far far away from our parent's watchful eyes, with essentially no rules beyond our day's planned activities, and no curfew as long as you could exit your tent quietly and avoid the patrolling teacher's flashlight. I hooked up with my first little boyfriend on one of those trips. Sure, it only lasted 27 hours, but it was a milestone event. We had to be fairly independent on those trips, even cooking our own meals. I had no problems there. It tested friendships: I fought with the girls in my group over who would sleep on the crack between the air-mattresses (we ended up taking turns - after the first night we realized that although you might end up partially on the ground, it was also the coziest spot and totally safe from the possibly rainy edges of the tent) and I lost my temper when one of them freaked out that she'd got dirt on her designer jeans (um...what part of camping did you not get?). But man, those trips seemed to take up more of the school year than anything else.
It was also on these trips that I became close personal friends with Her Majesty - the ancient tent that my father provided for us. This tent. How do I begin? Her Majesty is a canvas tent in a zesty pumpkin colour. Her Majesty has enormous metal poles whose elastic bits have long since rotted, and thus have to be carefully assembled by hand. They are almost too heavy for a 12-year-old to handle, never mind that the canvas itself weighs a ton. Her Majesty has to be erected in a manner just so; any deviation from the instructions -- given to me verbally by my father on a test-run setup in the back yard -- will result in leakage and probable collapse. Once you've got the tent proper up, you have to repeat the entire process with a fly. The guylines were a minefield of tripping hazards surrounding the tent. Maybe it was the inherent danger of Her Majesty that made me love her so. Once, my family loaned this tent to some friends -- Israelis: hardy, resourceful people -- and they were completely done in by Her Majesty. They came back from their Canadian wilderness adventure declaring that you would need Abdul the Tentmaker to help you set up that monstrosity. I don't think they've been camping since. Let me just say, after years with the big orange beast, Abdul ain't got nothing on me.
Throughout high school, my friends and I would take off for camping on long weekends. These were opportunities to escape, bond, drink and meet the locals. It would be the core group of just-us-girls, with the rotating guys in our lives moving in and out for the different trips. I have a scrapbook dedicated almost entirely to these either sun-and-sambuca or cold-and-whiskey drenched excursions. I'd post some pictures, but you know, none of us were at our best in those years. It was so great to not care what you looked like for a whole weekend, and to know that the friends you were with were not only in the same boat, but liked you that way.
Her Majesty never made an outing during high school -- too many other people had modern, nylon and plastic tents for us to have to bother with Her. Still, she had a revival later: I took Her Majesty on one particularly enterprising excursion involving a bus, a taxi, Penetanguishine, and a potentially dangerous pickup truck drive-by, where Jessica and I hid inside Her and waited for the threat to pass. And again on an autumn trip where, in the heavy, warm confines of Her canvassy protection, I told my future husband for the first time that I loved him.
The new tent that is now "our" tent was a gift from said future husband. I don't remember if he gave it to me before or after the accident that caused me to miss the yearly Labour Day Weekend canoe trip and be bedridden for a month, but I do know that having it in the corner of my bedroom while my bones and bruises healed was a great comfort.
So do I love camping because I am sentimentally attached to my gear? That might be part of it, only in the way that when you go camping you have to be a pared-down, basic version of yourself and your worldly stuff. It is definitely more than "getting back to nature". Nature, as such, is readily available on a day trip walk in the woods. Getting out into the back country is more about getting back to your nature. It can be revelatory, to realize how capable you are. It can be inspiring to suffer through and survive a wilderness-inspired hardship. More than anything, it is humbling to suddenly find yourself as a smaller part of the larger scheme of things. In a city, which is totally by-and-for humans, you can never get the sense of the world as it actually is: a living, changing, enormous world where we are barely managing to scrape by.
And yeah, I like being dirty and exhausted. It feels good. Bring it on.