Into The Wild
Nobody is in this tent because the bears got here before the guy with the camera.
Whenever I tell people that I’ve never been camping before, they always look at me as though I’ve just said, “Insofar as minorities are concerned, I could really do without black people.” This look of utter shock is usually followed up by outrage, which more often than not comes in the form of the words, “You’re an Oregonian!” as though I’ve allowed some sort of metropolitan elitism to influence my life for the past 20 years because I was under the impression I lived in Greenwich Village. They follow this up by shaking their heads in despair, muttering, “You have to go camping, Truman.”
I’d like to start by blaming my parents, as I do for most dysfunctional elements of my upbringing. While you and your parents were out pitching tents and heating up Ballpark Franks over a fire, my parents and I were playing Mario Kart and using a microwave to cook our hotdogs with a great deal more speed and efficiency. We’re just really not outdoorsy people, to the point that my childhood was almost entirely bereft of picnics, because my father thought it was crazy to prepare food and then, instead of eating it in a climate controlled environment with easy access to a sanitary bathroom, take all that food outside where bugs would come after it and wild animals could attack at any moment.*
*At first, I thought my Dad was just being a party pooper, but when I was in kindergarten or first grade I was sitting on our back porch eating a McDonald’s hamburger Mom had bought me when a crow swooped down and grabbed the top bun right off my burger as I was sitting there eating it. For years afterwards I was convinced that Dad either was an expert on the dangers of nature or had the ability to communicate telepathically with crows and was punishing me for not heeding his warnings about the evil of picnics.
I guess camping has always seemed a bit antithetical to my way of life. I’m a 21st century guy, and if I had the opportunity I’d love to be a 24th or 25th century guy in order to facilitate my desire to captain a smuggler’s spaceship and employ guile and laser cannons to solve all of my problems. Camping, to me, seems like the act of transforming oneself into an 18th century guy by living in drafty quarters with no electricity or running water. As I understand it, when you have to take a shit while camping, you basically go into the woods, dig a hole, shit into it, and then fill the hole. Don’t get me wrong – I love filling up the Earth with my excrement as much as the next guy, but sometimes I’m not up for the whole song and dance of finding a shovel and picking out an unused patch of my neighbor’s garden. That’s why I use the toilet that countless years of scientific discovery has seen fit to place inside my house.
The closest my family ever got to camping was a small green cabin on Lummi Island in Northern Washington. It had electricity, cold running water, and 400,000 mice, but no bathroom and only a wood stove for heating. We went up there a lot when I was a kid, and even though there was an outhouse and no TV and the radio there only picked up Canadian stations, I had a lot of fun. This was back before I realized how much I enjoyed bathing on a daily basis.
Even then, though, I still had a roof over my head and something besides a flashlight for electricity. There were beds and floors in that cabin; in a tent, as I’ve heard, it’s just you surrounded by nylon thinner than the clothes you’re wearing. If a bear or a serial killer or a serial killer riding a bear happened upon the cabin at Lummi, he’d have to contend with four walls and locked doors. When I think about spending the night in a tent, all I can see is a claw or a knife (or a claw and a knife) plunging through the thin, malleable wall and cutting a new entrance.
I bring up camping now because the month of August has become The Perfect Storm of outdoorsy activities. Early in the month, my family will be returning to Lummi Island for the first time in a couple of years, although this time around we’ll be renting a house that I’m led to believe has toilets, showers, and a bare minimum of local wildlife. A week later, I’ll be spending a few days in a yurt with The Girlfriend and her parents,* which will be the longest amount of time I’ve ever stayed in something with such an obnoxious name. Mere days after that, The Girlfriend and I are going camping in the vast badlands of Eastern Oregon with friends from school, who have told me that I can look forward to a “character building experience,” along with “tubing,” whatever the hell that is.
*I would say “yurting,” which is apparently a word in spite of what my computer seems to think, but my knowledge of a yurt is that it’s a primitive dwelling with few amenities, which sounds a lot like the cabin at Lummi, and we never called it “CabinatLummiying.”
Expect to hear more about camping in roughly a month, once I’ve run this gauntlet of new and interesting stuff. If you don’t, well, blame it on the bear mounted serial killers.
Truman Capps hopes Nature has WiFi.