Jackie Wells-Fauth
I have never made a secret of the fact that I don’t care for camping. Despite the growing number of campgrounds in the world, I will still be bucking the trend and avoiding the great outdoors.
As a child, I was shielded from camping. My parents, being sane and sensible, didn’t take us out onto the prairie and set up a tent. They had an annoying thing about picnics—complete with bugs, but there was no overnight wildlife endurance test and I will be forever grateful for this. It started my life off right.
I never gave it any thought, either, until the Girl Scout troop I belonged to took us on a camping trip. When I say that the campground was primitive, I mean it lacked cabins, roads, bug spray and toilets. On the first night of the campout, I left my feeble little tent in the middle of the night. Looking up, I saw canvas bags tied into the trees.
“What’s in those,” I asked the leader.
“Our food,” was her sleepy reply.
“Why is it up there? What if I wanted a snack?” I really didn’t get it.
“It’s up there so it doesn’t attract wolves or bears or something,” she replied. “What are you doing up?”
“I need to use the bathroom, where is it?”
“Just go over and squat among those bushes over there,” she replied, pointing some distance. “And watch out for snakes.” Snakes????!!!!
I spent the rest of the night huddled in a tent, that suddenly seemed very flimsy and smacked everything that moved, including my tentmate, with my shoe, praying that the sudden movement didn’t cause me to lose control of my very full bladder!
Naturally, when I grew up, I looked for a mate who felt the same way about camping that I did. We were neglectful parents. We didn’t take our children out into the wild and force them to comingle with bears and bobcats and alligators. (Okay, I know we don’t have alligators around here, but it sounds dramatic.)
I remember a night when we bought a little bundle of wood for a big bundle of cash and decided to camp with our small children, just using the pickup we were traveling in. We didn’t plan for this excursion, and if I recall, we couldn’t get a fire lit (Roy wasn’t in Boy Scouts at all) and we ended up eating at a McDonald’s a few miles from the camp. Thankfully, they didn’t hang our food in the trees!
Tracie was small enough that we had a portable bed for her, but Stefanie, who was the right length, refused to sleep in the pickup cab. That meant, I was stuck, huddled up with my feet caught in the door compartment on one end, while I was nose-to-wheel with the steering wheel on the other. I spent the night listening to the couple next door have a major squabble and got up in the morning with a crick in my neck and a huge chip on my shoulder.
With all of these experiences, it seems inevitable that every family reunion centers around camping. Now, camping for most is not what it was in MY day. Now, they have huge pickups hauling campers which are equipped with everything but a Jacuzzi and a butler to make and serve the meals!
I still don’t want to camp. If I vacation, I sleep in reasonably comfortable beds, enclosed within four solid walls. I have all of my meals prepared and served to me. And my idea of roughing it is if the bed is queen-sized instead of king!
So when we have family reunions—and I like to attend—I have but one question: Where is the nearest Holiday Inn? Take that, all you ugly snakes out there!
