Happy Camper: Part 1

I come from a long line of non-campers. 

If you asked me as a kid what I thought of camping, I would have missed the verb distinction and provided breathless detail of my love of going to camp. 

My only point of reference for camping was the place you go for a week that had cabins and a lodge perched on the edge of a lake. You swam, practiced archery, canoed and built campfires. I wasn’t really sure I could be missing much when I was already in camping heaven, at camp.

When I realized there was another kind of camping, I found it to be a curiously mysterious activity and for families much more healthy than mine. This kind of camping required a tremendous amount of teamwork and willingness to do manual labor, skills we did not possess in large quantities. 

I also missed the logic in spending days preparing to take belongings with you in order to do all of your inside activities, outside. I apparently shared a similar view with my grandmother. When I asked her if she was going to go with us on a rare camping outing, she replied, “Why would I go camping for fun? No thank you honey, I camped the first thirty years of my life.” That pretty much summed up the great outdoors legacy my father inherited and passed along to me. 

My mom, on the other hand, desperately wanted us to be a camping family. She tried many times to get us primed for camping with camping-lite activities like picnics, hikes, walks, books about the great outdoors, etc. I believe Mom saw camping as something she could add to her toolkit of techniques to ward off the evils of modern culture. Camping combined chores, the outdoors, potential contact with wildlife, limited television-time, physical activity and being together as a family. Really, all that was missing was Sunday School.

Despite her earnest and clever attempts, my father’s mindset prevailed. He was simply uninterested and his lack of cooperation was the same as a direct counterattack. By the time we actually went camping for the first time, my brother and I were teenagers, and with no connection to camping, we viewed this new activity as a form of work as well as social and technological deprivation.  It was three against one and ultimately, my mother would lose.

Now strangely, here I stood as an adult in my own living room, crying over the camper I was selling. My camper. Crying.

But really, what’s not to love!? Here it is in a great little RV park in Lincoln City, Oregon, the last time we took it out together as a family with our own kids in August of 2010.  

This turnabout of core life interests and beliefs surprised even me.  Even as I gush the words, “RV park,” I feel a strange disorienting affection for the way the asphalt pads are laid out, the tidy bathrooms and cheery community centers.  Mind you, I still practiced my self-righteous loathing of true RV’ers.  I fancied us somewhere between Sierra Club backpackers and those who’d sold their souls to take a stadium of home comforts with them on the road.

Regardless, that I would transition so dramatically over the course of twenty years to become a champion of the benefits of camping, this will go down on my Life’s Little Surprises list for sure.

I nosily wiped my eyes and nose, and through the picture window watched our little Jayco Jay Series 1007 camper slowly slide down the driveway behind the new owner's gray Ford pickup. It moved the way I knew well, made a familiar wiggle and ca-chunglk sound when it bounced from the driveway to the street and then it was gone. I watched an inappropriately long time, straining voyeur-like, until it truly disappeared from sight. 

Wondering if I was overreacting, I checked in with the hubs. “I’m sad,” said my stoic, engineer-husband, standing next to me. Yes, this was a hard thing.

Why camping then? Why not just watch movies, go on walks, eat out, make dinner? Crafts, games, volunteering? I guess because in many ways, camping takes pretty much all of those amazing things and makes you work just a little harder for them.  You also are forced to do them together, outside (Mom is crying happy tears right now, I can just hear it).

There is also an element of shared work that seems almost impossible to find in any other city life-setting. Even those of us compelled to give our kids chores will admit we work mostly isolated from each other. Clean your room, vacuum the floor, mow the lawn. Alone.

How did I get from camping newbie to activist? That is for next weekend, Part 2. For now, this is the photo of a family that spent a week in a camper, together. Somehow, the joy of our lives wasn’t diminished by lack of comfort. I am convinced in many ways, it enhanced it.