In Everyday, Normal Life Standard Time, I am watching the clock, willing it to go slower, bemoaning the racing countdown because there are so many things I have to and want to accomplish in a day. Everyday, the minute-hand hits Time to Pick Up the Kids O’Clock and I shake my fist at the sky, having only accomplished 70% of my list for that day. Between writing, voiceover, on-camera acting, prepping for my class, rehearsals, script-reading, gardening, house shit, cooking, baking, cleaning, volunteering, reading one million articles and essays a day, talking to my mom for the 12th time on the phone, there is just never enough time!!!!!
In Camping Standard Time, the whole day stretches ahead of you. A big, open canvas of nothingness.
…It’s hell!!!!!!!!
I have made it to thirty-*inaudible muffled sound* years old without having camped in the wilderness in part on purpose, and in part because no one has ever demanded I join them. Tyler loves camping and for years I have harangued him to plan a camping trip so we could “experience” it as a family. I’m all about experiences!!!!! His friends, Joe and Molly, who don’t have kids, undertook the deranged task of coordinating a camping trip with us and our 4 and 6 year olds. Friends without kids tend to disappear a bit for awhile, but Joe and Molly have really hung in there, taking our kids to salons for manicure dates, to board game stores for miniature game painting (?), coming over just to play or hang out, etc. It’s generous! It’s kind! How did I repay them? With my BAD CAMPIN’ ATTITUDE!!!!!
I woke up on the second day after sleeping perhaps 34 cumulative minutes on the cold ground (sorry, let me clarify - atop two blankets and two towels and in a sleeping bag. So, on the cold ground. (I brought my friend’s blow-up mattress but didn’t discover the battery charged inflator until the second night.)) I peered over at my weirdly blissful-looking husband at 6:43am and yell-whispered “Tyler? I’m sorry. But we are GOING. HOME. TONIGHT.”
He rolled his eyes and said NO and then both children jumped up on us because we were all 4 sleeping together in a 3-person tent and they yelled NO WE LOVE IT HERE!!!!! I gritted my teeth and headed off to the only toilet around, which was a porcelain outline for a 20-foot hole into the earth, spiders and innumerable other disgusting bugs flitting around it. I carried 4 squares of toilet paper in my sweatpants pocket, already counting the hours til I could be near my TV again.
By 9:30am I was staring at my dwindling phone battery, wondering how we would possibly fill the next 12 hours, and what TV I could be watching instead of “going for a hike.”
Over breakfast, after they gently asked how I slept, it took everything in me not to yell I HATE THIS!!!!!!!! So I simply yelled “TERRIBLY! WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS?!” Then I grabbed Joe by the shoulders and stared into his eyes.
“Joe? I AM FUN, YOU JUST DON’T KNOW IT because you keep putting me in situations where I AM NOT FUN.”
95% of what he and Tyler do together is play 4-6 hour long German agrarian board games (look it up…or don’t?), which I couldn’t be less interested in. OR they paint miniature board game pieces. Which I also couldn’t be less interested in. Or they go outside together to sleep in places without TV, which is also, I learned this weekend, not of interest.
“GO SKIING WITH ME. GO SWIMMING WITH ME. GO TO A MUSEUM WITH ME. A RESTAURANT. A CITY!!!! I AM FUN THERE!!!!!! I COME ALIVE! EVERYONE CAN ATTEST TO IT!”
But they don’t know that because they’re always doing NOT FUN STUFF AROUND ME, so I seem like an enormous curmudgeon in contrast. Not how I like to be perceived!
On night two, after reading two books to them by flashlight, I pointed the torchlight on my kids’ faces and was shocked to see the absolute preponderance of filth scattered across their cheeks and foreheads, and then I gasped in shock when I looked close up at their hands. They had not been near a sink in 24 hours, and we’d all forgotten to bring soap (did you know you have to pack your entire house up to go camping? And if you forget like, any one thing, the experience is really weird and bad?) I begged Zoe not to suck her thumb to sleep that night, knowing she wouldn’t comply, and broadly contemplated what diseases could befall her, worst-case scenario. Malaria???
On a quickly deflating queen blow-up mattress that night, I flew in the air everytime Tyler turned over, or slowly slid into the valley in the middle, my shoulder touching the menacing ground. Wind swirled around the tent, sending the vinyl flaps screaming into the night. Even our dog couldn’t get comfortable, her little nails imprinting air pockets that ricochet’d outwards all over the inflatable mattress a million times an hour, bubbling us all upward and outward and downward again, towards the miserable, sandy, stupid, dirty ground.
I like choosing to remain unshowered, I do not like being DIRTY. There’s a palpable dfference. I do not like peeing into a HOLE 20 feet in the GROUND. I do not like picking up my child’s feces with a SINGLE SQUARE OF BOUNTY because they refuse to sit atop said disgusting toilet. I obviously did nothing but pee in that toilet and wouldn’t even if I were there for 14 nights. Even for 1,001 one nights!!! Think of me as the Scheherazade of intestinal discomfort!!!!!
I like TV!!!! Every time I passed the TV when I was packing for this weekend I said in my head, “Oh, TV, I’m going to miss you, TV.” And guess what, I did!!!!!!!
Both nights, I had seemingly endless nightmares of being a refugee. This is how people LIVE, people all over the world are cruelly born into the wrong place at the wrong time, and must live with no floor and no roof and here we are, with both on a lovely plot of quiet land in California, and we are CHOOSING to spend our precious sleeping hours wearing HATS?????
We had a delicious breakfast of pancakes and scrambled eggs and read a book around a campfire. The s’mores were delicious. Sitting in a hot spring for a few minutes was fun. I’m happy to do all that shit but at the end of the day, you’re supposed to go HOME.
We got home at 1pm on Sunday. Three hours later, Tyler and I were still criss-crossing each other in the house, still unpacking, not having paused even a moment to rest. When we left the campsite, Rowan was depressed. I gave him a hug. “You can come back with your daddy whenever you want. But I am never, ever doing this again.”
“Okay,” he brightened. “We’ll go and we’ll eat all the s’mores we want.”
“You can do that at home,” I reasoned.
“Oh yeah…we have a fireplace,” he mused.
“We sure do,” I said, staring at the inch of grime under his nail bed, counting how many hours it had been since he last brushed his teeth. 64 hours.
Sixty. Four. Hours.
I tried to picture my dad at a campsite, and the image just refused to come. I imagined him wrinkling his nose at the tent, or the sprinkle of water from a spigot up the road, or, god forbid, the “toilet.” Oo-hoo, he would exclaim. No way, kid. DISEASES LIE IN WAIT HERE, I could envision him offering. A Personal Injury Defense Lawyer Goes Camping…could there be a more dichotomous proposition?
I called my mom when I got back to cell reception and told her, laughing, of the unspeakable horrors. “We never even went outside when I was little!” I hollered. “I don’t even think we ever went to A BOTANICAL garden, much less a FIELD.”
“Of course we didn’t!” she hollered back. “THERE IS NOTHING TO DO THERE.”
I think this is the most hilarious story ever… I give you lots of credit for even going!! Though my son can be very convincing with that sad boy face when he wants something. Ha Ha. His Dad went camping once…… and never again. I’d go again and again!
Truest words from you once again! Living in Utah, I live amongst tons of people who love camping. I’ve gone only 2 successful times in the 14 years I’ve lived here. One of those times was with my toddler. We failed two other times with her and left in the middle of the night. My husband packed everything up while I sat and huddled my child warm in the car cursing the fact that people CHOOSE to do this.