we have any?”
My father shook his head. “I was going to boil some more in the morning before we left for Acapulco.”
The full horror of it hit us all, but none more than Bruce. “You mean I can’t even wash off ?!”
“Oh, that’s just so gross,” emphasized Janine. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
My mother helped Bruce clean off as best he could. It wasn’t until the morning, though, until the full light of day arrived, that we were able to see just what Bruce had endured. His face was a strange hue, almost orangey-peach, like he’d used too much fake-tan cream. His hair was stiff and coarse, pre-punk, sticking out in forty different directions. Nobody used hair gel back then, but, again in reference to the nature versus nurture debate, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Bruce today is the one amongst the six of us kids who pays the most attention to his hair and overall physical appearance. He has, for a male high school teacher, an unusually keen interest in hair products and facial cleansers.
We left Mexico City later that morning, after Bruce had cleaned up and Matt had thrown up another couple of times (into a plastic bag; nobody would go within five feet of him). We were turning for home, but first we had most of North America to travel back through, only this time we were headed up the length of the west coast, to Acapulco, Mazatlán, Puerto Vallarta, San Diego, and Los Angeles, before turning back inland to go through Vegas and back up the eastern edge of the Rockies, through Montana, and finally back to Alberta. A few days later, after a visit to Acapulco to see the cliff divers (which turned out to be a colossal disappointment as the various Mexicans present refused to dive off the cliffs for us, and because our mom wouldn’t let us out of arm’s length when we wanted to look for divers), we continued back north. We decided to stop in Guadalajara, for a much-needed rest. My parents decided to open their wallets for a motel. It was almost New Year’s, and I think they thought beds and a swimming pool would help take the edge off the collective trauma of Mount Zooma. They were right . . . for the most part.
KOA, incidentally, was sold in 2001 to Interactive Corp., which also manages Ticketmaster, Expedia, and hotels.com, a fact that makes it even clearer that camping is now a radically different thing than in generations past. It’s one piece of recreation for the masses, one writer noted, which can “be bundled along with other forms of entertainment.” Online planning and preparation for camping has become the norm. The government of Alberta recently introduced a provincewide campsite reservation system that has proven enormously popular; a necessity, in fact, for securing a campsite during busy times.
Yet this, along with all the other mod cons mentioned earlier, is not camping in the way that I understand it, or want to understand it. I speak not as an experienced naturalist, but as a modern urbanite who nevertheless longs for the (admittedly occasional) genuine immersion into nature’s unfettered beauty, an immersion unpolluted by humanity’s presence, except for my own, of course. I fear my children will lose access to those places, and moreover, that they will lose access to understanding how fragile our lives are, and are meant to be, in the natural cycle. Perhaps camping, as I think of it, is not even about nature at all (at least not “nature” in the way that we commonly understand it—as something to appreciate and revel in). Perhaps it’s about trial and difficulty and resistance. Camping isn’t supposed to be easy. It’s not meant to be frictionless. Isn’t that, at some level, what we’re trying to achieve when we want to take the kids camping? I know it’s the case that when we camp, one of the objectives is to remove Jess and Grace from the convenience and fluidity of their daily lives, to the point where we need to get that fire started or we don’t eat. The removal of physical obstacles is, I would say, counter to the point of camping as a family. You want to make it hard. Some of my best camping memories involve when it was hard, such as when Cathy and I camped in northern Alberta and forgot our axe. We made fires the old native way, just laying logs in a firepit like spokes on a wheel, pushing them in as they burned. There was no other solution. Of course, this was also the camping trip in which Cathy swore that fish were attracted to mini-marshmallows, which led to a few dozen coloured blobs floating into shore as every fish in the lake assiduously turned up their gills at the little morsels.
I suppose in the end camping as a family vacation, or even as a short family activity over a weekend, is for me more about creating a set of conditions than it is about communing with nature, though I have nothing against communing with nature and will always happily accept it as a secondary benefit. After all, a thirty-foot fir tree in my backyard is more or less the same as a thirty-foot fir tree in the forests of Alberta’s wild and unpopulated eastern slopes. There is something appealing, however, about leaving the city and leaving all those people behind, but is it possible that in so doing we are in fact trying to teach our children a different lesson: that not everything gets handed to you on a silver platter . . . and that sometimes what gets handed to you is something you’re going to have to eat off a tin plate crusted over with last night’s baked beans. And that WiFi, hot showers, and central heating are wonders of modern convenience and fortunate birth circumstances, not inalienable human rights.
My friend, the poet Tim Bowling, says one of the things he most cherishes about living in Edmonton, with its harsh winters, is that he likes to be reminded every now and then that nature has the power to kill you if you make the wrong decision. That, it strikes me, is about as good a lesson as you could hope to give your family by going camping. What could be more fun than that?
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