The Once and Future Camper

By Mark Kendall

I am still haunted by thoughts of my first trip to the Grand Canyon, during which I’m fairly certain I killed at least one member of an unidentified bird species by margarine overdose.

Spawned from a non-camping family, I fell in with a woodsy crowd during my college years. We were on a snowy springtime trip to the South Rim for which I was woefully unprepared. But I had improvised with MacGyver-like aplomb, placing plastic bags snugly over the socks in my tennis shoes in lieu of boots and wrapping a T-shirt on my head in place of wool cap.

My real “aha” moment, however, came when we returned to our campsite from the grocery store. Surveying the snow piled on the ground—“nature’s icebox,” I called it—I decided that we needn’t bother stowing our perishables in the cooler. Of course, animals made quick work of our chow. Most disturbing was the sight of a sizeable margarine tub largely drained of its contents, its bird-pecked top riddled with more holes than a shot-down World War II bomber.
Still, I kept at the whole camping thing, like that maniacal bird pecking away at Parkay, and wound up trudging along, year after year, on a series of backpacking trips in California and the West. I’m just not entirely sure why.

These trips were largely exercises in self-torture that invariably got off to a bad start. We had this penchant for driving all night to our destination, getting an hour or two of uncomfortable car-sleep in some trailhead parking lot, then arising to face the hike. That first day on the trail, with packs at their heaviest, it wasn’t unusual for us to misread the topo map and turn down the wrong path. Nothing quite shreds a group’s morale like starting an uphill hike in negative territory.

Evenings in bear country brought what was, in retrospect, our oddest ritual as we tried to hoist our sacks of food from high tree limbs out of ursine reach. Picture a bunch of flashlight-wielding guys lobbing rocks tied to ropes over branches while shouting “watch out!” Amazingly, nobody got conked on the head. Or maybe I did and don’t remember, which might explain why I kept going on these trips.

And then there was the matter of hygiene. I never got used to the grimy feeling of backpacking day after day in the heat—new sweat atop old—without being able to take a shower.

This is not to say everything about these trips stunk. There was camaraderie around the campfire, reading aloud bizarre tales from strange little ’zines or carrying on surprisingly raucous games of that old-school capitalist card game, Pit. Between hikes, I found time for moments of solitude under a tree, spent in slumber or paging through a dog-eared copy of Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart. Best of all was our capstone ritual: going out for pizza and beer when the trip was over.

As the years wore on, our competency rose and mini-disasters became fewer. Or were we just getting soft, losing our nerve? Trips became increasingly car-based, and the menu shifted from freeze-dried to pan-fried. I remember my secret elation one summer, when it was determined that our planned multi-day death march through Eastern Utah would be impractical because of a heat wave and the resulting impossibility of carrying enough water. We wound up spending a good chunk of that trip hanging out at an air-conditioned Wendy’s in Moab. Now that was paradise.

Then everybody started having babies, which squelched whatever trail-blazing zeal the group had left. Our adventure level hit rock-bottom a few years back when we set out for a mild car-camping trip at a favorite weekend spot, the seaside Montaña de Oro campground near San Luis Obispo. But none of us had bothered to make camp reservations—it wasn’t necessary back in our heyday—and the closest we came to experiencing the outdoors was hanging out in the Jacuzzi of a cheap motel in Morro Bay.

You may be left with the sense that my nature days have reached the end of their trail, and I would agree, with as much relief as wistfulness, save for one complication. Nearing five years old, my son lately has been asking me about camping, for real. I’m just not sure how much longer my simulated tent experience—pulling a blanket over our heads, using my cell phone for a flashlight and telling bear stories before bed—is going to cut it.