I spuddle.

This is a quick post because I have a babysitter and I should be working, as in writing the actual book, but I need to write something that is not the book first because my writing muscle is rusty and sore and weak from taking a week off, if by a “week”, I mean “two weeks”.   Or perhaps more or maybe less, I’m not good at keeping track.   Maybe my writing muscle has some kind of terrible degenerative writing muscle disease!  Maybe I should look that up!   Or maybe I should just write this damn post and shut up.    Feel free to weigh in.

I’ve been thinking about camping because we just were camping and I’m like that, i.e. capable of thinking of a thing when I’m actually doing it.   (Cool, dontcha think?) Here’s what I was thinking:   When I was a kid, I thought camping was something that it is really, really not.    I’ll admit it.   I was wrong.   Super, extra wrong.   Wrong to the wrong-squared, times a million.   And when I say “when I was a kid”, I mean “up until a few years ago when I actually went camping for the first time”.*    So really, I should change that to “for my entire life even when I was old enough to know better”, but I’m too lazy to backspace, which apparently takes up more energy than typing an extra paragraph for no reason.   Anyway,  I thought that camping was dangerous and, you know, involved the actual woods of the deep and dark variety.   And, if I’m being honest, a buck knife.    I don’t even know what a buck knife  is, or if that’s a word that I just made up, but I’m pretty sure that I strongly associated knives with camping, along with the usage of knives to perhaps skin animals, and/or hack trails through the undergrowth.   No, I’m not  kidding.   I also thought there was canoeing, cliff diving, and sing-songs around the campfire, in addition to classes to teach you how to make a wallet and quirky ploys to reunite your divorced parents.    In other words, I took every camping image I’d ever absorbed from TV or books and made the rest up.   I was a kid.  Oh, OK, also an adult.   But it is possible for a kid (and an adult) to hold two (or more) entirely conflicting stories in their head and believe both to be true, I know that it is because I did.

Then we bought a camper.   I know, I know.   “Real” camping involves a tent!    What kind of sissy expects to have “danger” and “excitement” from the confines of the Starcraft Antigua Hybrid Trailer?   Um, well, me?   I was pregnant at the time and the idea of sleeping on the ground was too much for me.   (I am sort of prissy, at the same time as being the sort of person who likes to be lost in the woods with no other people around, as long as it’s reasonably safe and I’m not likely to be killed by an axe murderer or a grizzly bear with an attitude.)   AND I have a bad back, and was under the illusion that sleeping in a camper would be better for my back, which it isn’t, if only because the mattresses are made from the cheapest available foam rubber such that they look like mattresses but really compress down to wafers when any weight is applied to them, i.e. me.    Needless to say, I now can’t feel my right lower-leg (See:  irritated disc).    (See also:  Mysterious Medical Maladies), but that’s another story for another day because this “quick post” is now anything but.

Anyway, camping.    We bought the camper.   We booked exotic-sounding campsites.   We went camping.

Shockingly, there was no need for a buck knife, except maybe for those times when we forgot a can opener and needed desperately to get into a can of Zoodles, ASAP.   In fact, the reality of “camping” is more like “parking”.    Why they don’t call it “parking”, I have no idea.   But it isn’t “camping”, really, is it?   You take your camper, replete with beds and a toilet and a stove and a sink, and you drive it to a place where you pay about $30/night or thereabouts to park in a spot of varying size (sometimes only barely bigger than the periphery of your camper itself) next to a whole bunch of other campers and occasionally also tents, depending on the campiste.   Sometimes you get to plug your camper in so you can use your microwave and sometimes, when you’re roughing it, there are some trees between you and the other campers, but not enough such that you can’t SEE them or HEAR every word that they say, just enough to remind you that you are in the woods and ergo, are “camping”!   Except it isn’t camping, is it, people?   I mean, really?    WHERE ARE THE BEARS?   This is not the deep dark woods, it’s a parking lot.    And it’s not CAMPING.  It’s PARKING!   It’s PARKING, I tell you.

Sometimes it’s parking next to a gorgeous beach or lake, but mostly, let’s face it, it’s parking.

Seriously.   Without referencing the nearest highway or shoreline, I cannot tell the difference between one provincial campsite and another, although some of them have flush toilets and showers and some of them do not.    Trees.   Dirt parking pads.   Picnic tables with concrete bases on which The Bun removed all the skin from his nose when he was two.    No wildlife.    No trails through the undergrowth.    No actual “adventure” or “danger”.   Just… parking.    After a few trips, you learn to bring along bikes for the kids to ride in circles around the driveway,  plastic toys to entertain them while you’re sitting and — let’s face it — drinking, and pretty soon your site looks like everyone else’s site and you can see why Walmart is such a successful shop.    Heaps of plastic toys, cheap folding chairs, and the occasional wading pool.   Not a single animal in sight, unless you count the requisite over-sized and under-trained large dogs that seem to be de rigeur this year as a camping accessory, but don’t get me started about THAT unless you want me to go on and on and on and on and keep you from your work that you really should be doing.

So, dogs.  And mosquitoes the size of your head, fat and drunk from sipping the heavily beer-diluted blood of your average camper.

When I was a kid, instead of going camping at these exotic (and dangerous!) campsites that my friends frequented with their families, we went to our summer cabin.   Our cabin was on an island with no services, no roads, no electricity, no plumbing, no phones, and no real access outside of a private boat.   I LOVED the cabin and still love it, but I always thought that it was the cushy alternative to camping.    Then my sister saw a cougar in the woods.   An animal!   In the woods!   Which sounds much more like camping than CAMPING, doesn’t it?   YES, IT DOES.    Not that I want to see a cougar.   I am — and this will surprise you, I’m sure — really, really scared of cougars.

I have to admit that the only reason why we camp now is because the kids love it, not having any preconceived notions of cliff-diving or cutting down trees to make shelter.   They really really love it.   Obsessively.   Which is making me start to like it more.  This last week, we even forgoed (forwent?) the woods in favour of the dreaded “RV Park” because the RV Park in question was right on the beach and next to the most awesome playground on Vancouver Island.    And the kids were thrilled.    And so we were thrilled, too.    Although a little friendly, non-scary wildlife and maybe a couple more feet between us and the next RV wouldn’t have hurt, it was made up for by the helicopter-shaped playground thing and the beach with the low-tide zone a mile wide.

*For the sake of this story, the first time doesn’t really count because the first time I went camping as an adult, we did take an actual tent into the woods near a beach that wasn’t a campsite and we did hack a site out of the woods and half-way through the night a bear did rub himself on our tent and we were scared and vowed to never camp again without, say, a buck knife handy or at least a burly friend who would be happy to wrestle the bear while we ran, crying like babies, to the safety of our car.

Filed under: Me, Myself and I, Random Story of The Day