“Pardon?!” Startled, she dropped her glass, which shattered on the kitchen floor.
“I said I’m having an affair,” I repeated.
Her shoulders slumped in relief. “Thank goodness,” she gasped. “I thought you said you wanted to go camping.”
Well, yes, I do, but it seemed prudent to keep that little secret to myself. There are some paths you don’t want to go down if you want the relationship to survive. Paths like the one that leads to a campground.
I bring this up now because, in a year in which so many other vacation options have been swept off the table, camping is enjoying a surge in popularity. Or, to be precise, camping preparations have surged. It’s still mid-June, so people have yet to try out the gear — sleeping bags, portable stoves, coolers — that has been flying off store shelves like toilet paper was in March. Few of the 50,000 people who crashed the B.C. Parks reservation site the moment it opened in May have actually tried to light their first rain-soaked campfire. The green light to travel the province has yet to be given.
In other words, they still think it’s going to be fun. No, I want to warn them, it’s not. Camping is like running a marathon, where (and here I speak theoretically) the pleasure comes once it’s over and the pain has gone.
The only person I knew who adored camping while camping was my dad, who had spent five years sleeping under canvas during the war, and who therefore deemed any excursion not interrupted by the Luftwaffe to be a roaring success.
Bugs, biblical rain, Woodstock-quality mud, snot-freezing cold, trench foot, flaming napalm marshmallows that burn through tarpaulins, food that was either burnt to a crisp, raw or forgotten with the canoe paddles at home — none of this bothered him.
His generation was self-reliant, comfortable under the stars and wouldn’t starve to death if the grocery store ran out of food. “Very good ‘cowboy’ manner,” summarized a German intelligence assessment of Canadian soldiers in 1944, lamenting their superiority at fieldcraft.
We’re a different breed today. Canada is an overwhelmingly urban country, with more than a third of the population living in just three cities — Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. When we talk about “camping,” it’s an — ahem — big-tent word that takes in everything from luxury glamping at Rathtrevor Beach, getting moose-fighting drunk at a bush party (“hold my beer, I can take ’im”) and RVing in a Walmart parking lot.
Hike into the true, untamed wilderness and you’ll find most of the adventurers (in a normal year) come from another country altogether: Germany, the U.S., Japan, Germany, Holland, Germany, Germany and Germany.
Modern Canadians prefer a different type of hinterland, one that requires them to bring a credit card. Their idea of camping involves government-groomed roads, assigned campsites, running water, store-bought firewood, pit toilets that smell like something died in them, portable music players, rechargeable blenders, barbecues the size of your first apartment and a population density that would make Dr. Bonnie just give up and hit the bottle.
There’s irony there. Even when seeking solitude, we tend to huddle together. Once, while paddling the Bowron Lakes, my companions and I ended up sharing a campsite with another party who, despite having most of the central Interior at their disposal, set up so close to us that I tripped over their tent peg in the middle of the night. In the morning, one of that tent’s occupants, an American woman, said: “I heard a bear last night, but I couldn’t find my gun.” This raised a series of questions: 1) How did she get her Glock into Canada? 2) What did she expect it would do to a grizzly? 3) What kind of bear takes the Lord’s name in vain when it trips over your tent peg?
On the other hand, a foray into the forest might be just what we need, given all the angst of the past few locked-down months, our homes getting more and more cramped the longer we shelter in place.
“It would be great to get away from it all,” I argued.
“Will you be there?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s not really getting away from it all, is it?”
Had to admit, she had a point.
