toilets, and check-ins with map distribution? Are we telling our children that this is nature? The only real difference between that type of camping and staying at home is a worse sleep and no cable TV. It might just be better to watch the Nature Channel on TV with the kids and a bowl of popcorn.
I jest. But only partly, because we do continue to cherish and demand our conveniences and gadgets, and this is, obviously and disturbingly, more the case with today’s children than with previous generations (not that they are to blame since it’s us, their parents, who are their prime facilitators in this regard). Still, the trend towards convenience in camping was established long before the Internet, long before the cellphone, before television even (for many of my younger readers, this period—Before Television—is what your teachers mean when they talk about “pre-history”). In the 1920s, Denver’s Overland Park was among the first campgrounds in the US to focus on a range of civilizing services; the Overland became the model for the KOA, which, to anyone who camped in the seventies, was as pervasive as tight jeans and bad haircuts. KOA was the Starbucks of campgrounds. This was part of its appeal to parents, my own included, who had enough to worry about without fretting over the unknown campgrounds they were taking themselves, and us, into. This would explain, I suppose, why we drove four thousand kilometres—one way—to stay in a KOA campground in Mexico City. KOA ruled the campground world at the time; it started with but a single campground in 1961 and by 1979 it had 829 campgrounds across North America. KOA had individual owner/operators, supposedly to put a personal touch on the service, though in our case, in Mexico City, it led to “personal touches” we could have done without.
The oil crisis may have been ongoing at the time, but I can safely say that none of us children were aware of it. It’s possible my parents took note of these world events, and it’s also possible they relayed them, but for that to have made an impact on us would have meant listening to them. Certainly I do not recall ever being unable to gas up during any of our stops, and once we hit Mexico City just before Christmas, you’d have been hard pressed to say the oil crisis was putting the squeeze on vehicle usage. Quite the opposite. We’d never seen traffic like it. Driving from the middle of Mexico City, from Chapultepec Park, say, to our KOA campground fifteen miles outside the city centre, seemed to take almost as long as it had to drive from Calgary to Mexico City. The snaking endless line of cars, six lanes regularly converging into three, the choking pollution caught in Mexico City’s unlucky inversion basin, the sheer number of people—we’d never seen anything on this scale. We’d also never camped outside a city of twelve million people. At times the KOA felt as crowded as walking through the city itself. Row after row of tents. It was a tented village, though this was hardly a negative thing. Some of the memories of playing in that campground are stronger than the time we actually spent in Mexico City.
That KOA campground no longer exists, or at least it’s no longer in the hands of the KOA. Whoever owns it now has, I’m sure, or I hope, relaxed the draconian laws of the place. They shut down things early. They closed bathrooms at ten o’clock at night. They shut off the water taps at 10:05. They turned off the electricity at 10:10. They closed the office and went home at 10:15. They locked the gate so no one could break in . . . but no one could get out, either. Basically, it was a jail without the humane conditions. Not that we especially noticed at first, as long as you weren’t thirsty or had to go to the bathroom late at night. They said it was a safety issue, which was fair enough, given that we were in a huge city in a third-world country and had gringo written all over our pasty faces. Only as our time there progressed did it start to feel oppressive. Still, we reasoned, we were nearly through with Mexico City, and from there it was off to the coast, to Acapulco, to see the cliff divers. Us boys were beside ourselves with excitement. Okay, Mexico City was one of the world’s great cities, a place with lampposts older than our country, the repository of an entire civilization. That was interesting, vaguely, but an hour away there were cliff divers!
Our last night in Mexico City was full of anticipation, for a variety of reasons, I think. One was the cliff divers. The other was the ocean and beachcombing, which we were all looking forward to after three weeks of driving through the desert. The sense of moment was also pitched because the day we left Mexico City meant it was the day we turned around. Even as kids I think we understood that we were on a very peculiar grand adventure and that as of the next day we’d be heading for home.
We wanted to make the most of our last night in the tent city and we played hard, exploring far and wide throughout the vast grounds. Late that night, before the water got shut off, Matt decided he was thirsty as we ran back to our tent. He put his lips to the nearest tap and took a drink, despite his brothers telling him not to. “You’re not supposed to, Matt,” we said. “You’ll get Mount Zooma’s revenge.”
We didn’t know the term, and had only heard our parents use it in relation to warnings not to drink water that hadn’t been boiled first. I can’t speak for my siblings, but I had no idea what the term referred to, other than that it meant bad things. Matt ignored us, we kept playing, and he didn’t seem the worse for it.
In the canvas cave at bedtime, my parents laid their own sleeping bags out in their room; the second, larger, room was held as the “living room”; the third room was where the kids slept. Our sleeping bags were laid out in a row, six of them, like coffins at a mass funeral. We crawled in as Dad shone the flashlight at us. He said good-night, and then said what he always said before he left us alone. “No horsing around. It’s time for bed.” We horsed around for a while and then fell asleep, but it wasn’t long before the inevitable came. Matt was in his sleeping bag between Bruce and Conor, and when Mount Zooma exploded, the eruption forever changed the lives of the people in that tent, of those who escaped and those who didn’t. Matt threw up as he woke up and instinctively turned to one side. It was fate, that was all. Conor or Bruce. One clean, one forever scarred. Who says life isn’t random?
Matt turned Bruce’s way.
Unluckily, Bruce tends to sleep on his back, face up. Well, he used to. I don’t know what position he sleeps in today. Or if he sleeps at all. And though Matt was at least a foot shorter than Bruce, somehow he’d managed to arrange himself such that their heads were side by side. A further piece of ill fate was that Bruce also tended to snore a bit, even as a young teenager, and consequently he usually had his mouth open.
Who knows what Bruce was dreaming about at that moment, but he was violently yanked from sleep. Everybody in the tent was up in a flash, listening to Bruce choke and swallow and cough, and to Matt moan. The rest of us were horrified, laughing at first, but then so truly sympathetic to the awful thing that had just happened to Bruce (and Matt was none too happy, either), that we didn’t laugh at Bruce or tease him or taunt him until well into the next day. We couldn’t really see much, either, because it was dark, after all, and we were camping in a tourist holding compound without any of the necessities for sustaining human life. Dad and Mom came scurrying into our room of the tent, with Dad jiggling his big flashlight. He trained it on Bruce and Matt, and we saw in stark relief what had just happened. Bruce looked like a wax figure left in a steam room.
The nature versus nurture debate has long raged in psychological circles, and I’m not here to come down on one side or the other, but you can’t tell me something like that doesn’t somehow shape a person. Bruce grew up to be a high school teacher, and to all outward appearances seems a normal and balanced person, but, let’s face it, the jury’s still out, and if he dropped off the edge tomorrow into a life of crime and addiction, I know what I’m blaming.
My mother sprang into action, immediately trotting out her greatest gift, her empathy. She tried to make Bruce feel better and attended to Matt.
“Gerry,” she said to my father. “Look at this. Oh my God. Poor things. Go get some water so we can at least clean Bruce off, and they can all get back to sleep.”
My dad stood there, looked at his watch.
My mom looked back to
