The Thing About Camping
I don’t love camping. This doesn’t make sense and I’m sure it’s a sign of some inexcusable personal shortcoming. Camping has all the component parts of things I love. It’s outdoors, it usually involves sitting around a fire with friends and/or family, and you can pee outside.
And yet, roll all
these things together and the experience is just ok. I don’t hate it or
anything, I just feel like I should like it more. I’ve struggled with this
shameful secret for years. But this year, as I took the boys on the annual
youth group camping trip, I think I cracked the code as to why this is.
The reasons
camping, while seemingly exactly what I would enjoy, is only of middle-of-the-road
enjoyment for me are threefold.
Reason number 1: Sleeping
on the ground is the worst. And it’s not just sleeping on the ground, but
choosing to sleep on the ground knowing there is a comfortable bed I paid good
money for at home that I’m choosing not to sleep in.
There are ways to upgrade
the sleeping on the ground situation of course. You can get a foam pad to put
approximately ¼” of material between you and the jagged gravel that’s always underneath
your sleeping bag. Or you can bring an air mattress. This at first feels like
cheating but after tossing and turning on the slowly deflating mattress all
night you realize if it’s cheating to bring an air mattress camping that’s
because you and your sore back are the ones being cheated. I’m trying a cot
next time.
The second reason will
likely seem very obvious from the outside, but from inside the situation I’ve
been blind to it. When I go camping what I’m really doing is taking five boys
13 and younger into the woods and trying not to lose them. Which is about the
most subtly stressful game of hide and seek you can play.
Being Dad on a
camping trip means doing work. From loading the van with the absurd amount of
supplies we’re taking on the two-day trip to unloading it and then pitching the
tent and setting up camp, the up-front investment is steep and maybe that
clouds the payoff a little bit.
For the first time
this year the older boys loaded and unloaded the van. I admit, this shifted the
balance a little bit. But I’m getting older and even what I’m left with
(pitching the tent, making camp, etc) feels like more than enough to do. I’ve
been taking at least one of the boys camping for the last 10 years and I’ve
always had at least one (but usually several) boys under 8-years-old with me.
Although very eager, 8-year-old boys are far more liability than assistance
when you’re in the woods.
Case in point: the
8-year-old high fived a cactus while playing around the campsite. Not once, but
three times during our trip. And this wasn’t unexpected. Mom packed duct tape
for removing the cactus spines in anticipation of this very scenario. Camping
with youngsters is basically going outside far from home and waiting for them
to get hurt.
So sleeping on the
ground and the work and risk involved with taking so many young boys camping
can chip away at the supposedly relaxing nature of a camping trip. But neither
of those are the biggest reason that camping isn’t my favorite experience in
the world.
It’s the s’mores.
Those pernicious
and incomparably sticky handheld messes that somehow became THE fireside
confectionary concoction without which a camping trip would be incomplete are
the bane of my existence.
What hath man
wrought with this Frankenstein of desserts? The sticky fingers, faces, hair,
and sleeping bags. To see the sugar fueled high flickering in the eyes of child
with melting s’more oozing out of his hands and down his face in the glow of a campfire...oh
the horror, the horror.