Healing Power of Camping

This spring break I traded mojitos for Swiss Miss, wet tee shirt contest for get-sand-out-of-my-clothes challenges, and one night stands for a fully-clothed spooning session necessary to protect my friends and myself from below-freezing temperatures. There was a beach, but not the type you’d have sex on. This spring break I went wilderness camping with two friends at the Otis Pike Fire Island High Dune Wilderness Area, in an effort to temporarily escape the concrete and concrete schedules that currently structure our lives. But for me, the camping trip was also a personal throwback to a childhood that “valued outdoor education,” so to speak.

My dad has always been the rugged type, but not in the REI-clad, bivvy-packing sort of way (“Joe Campers,” as he used to call guys like that). My dad camps with a sort of escapist obsession, hitting the road despite the state of his external frame backpack, his finances, or his human relationships (or, frequently, because of the state of them).

When I was five, my father got into a car accident and seriously injured his neck, forcing him to give up his job as a carpenter. With unemployment came debt and free time, both of which led him to spend every free second travelling the coastline and wilderness areas of California. He used to say that only in nature did he feel at peace, and so my early elementary school years were dedicated to day trips and camping expeditions to every nearby state and federal park.

Our favorites were Manchester State Beach and Point Reyes. Long weekends merited a trip to the Lost Coast in Humboldt County, and during breaks we would make our way down to Navajo Nation, Zion, and Joshua Tree. The Pacific Coast Highway was our religion, and the silence that governed our drives an implied adherence. My dad would only break the quiet with random memorized bits of historical knowledge about past Native American tribes and ecological novelties he remembered from reading plaques a previous time through the area and observations about the weather.

When we set up camp in frequently uncharted territory is when things got magical though. I grew up wandering aimlessly on rocky river beds, and trudging through the sand on driftwood-strewn beaches. My father used to call me “Pokey” because my slow poke tendencies led me to trail a bit behind him on hikes, transfixed on the entangling roots and decaying leaves beneath my bright maroon hiking boots (a birthday present one year—my coolest childhood possession).

My wanders provided fodder for my already wild imagination, if not fostering a complete ignorance of time orientation. I took a dead butterfly to be a sacred sign from my ancient ancestors, sitting on a decaying log, stroking its wing over and over until it dissolved in my hand. I counted the number of pebbles I ate, in hopes that one day they would magically turn me into a fairy (and no, I don’t know if they’re still in my digestive system). After being warned by my father about the undertow, I spent hours standing on the edge of the beach, imagining an elaborate scenario of being pulled out into the ocean and claiming my rightful place as queen of the Mer Kingdom. I also developed a symbolic system of morality by imagining the power balances between the plants in different ecosystems: I hypothesized ivy to be a dangerous and powerful conqueror, swallowing fences whole, while the gentle, but courageous, ferns fought on behalf of the soil and its inhabitants.

But the wilderness was both scary enabler and sole refuge to a first grader who could not develop the attention span to complete more than three addition problems in a row, but could spend hours intimately studying the ridges and indentations in a piece of obsidian. The more we camped, the more I didn’t understand the need for friends, when there were perfectly good rolly pollies to play with. I dreaded lining up for 8 a.m. assembly as much as I longed to hit the road on another adventure with my father. Nature was just easier.

I was an awful liar and a blabbermouth, so at the end of each trip, every tale of my father’s irresponsibility would come out to my mother: flyaway tents, wild boars, thunderstorms, and trespassing (my dad justifying, “Nahh, it’s not closed. I came same time last year and it wasn’t closed. It’s fine,” before picking me up and climbing over a gate). I’d attempt to sleep peacefully, while I listened to my mother scream at him, “All she ate for two days was Cheez-Its?!” “I can’t believe you let her get a tick! I told you to keep her away from bushes!” and my dad’s weak responses,“She said she wanted Cheez-Its so I got her Cheez-Its.” “I don’t know, Lynne, she wandered off! What was I supposed to do?” and the self-assured “I’m trying to raise her to not be a tenderfoot. She’s learning life skills.”

I spent the remainder of elementary school in my dreamlike state, observing life go by from the fringes of the socialization process. But middle school was a wake-up call, and it came in the form of blaring bells that indicated first period, recess, lunch, and dismissal. Since then, I’ve developed a grudging respect for the necessity of alarm clocks and speed reading, and come to understand the perils of spacing off during lecture and over-wandering between classes. But I can never really quell my internal first grader, the one that would remain unresponsive to a solid five minutes of “Earth to Devin” on repetition while she stared at a moth.

When I called up my dad and mentioned I was planning on going camping, his elusive enthusiasm begin to shine through as he made a case for Otis Pike. In the following days he would call me randomly to lecture about choosing an ideal site to protect against the wind, and advice about cooking with a propane stove. The last time I talked to him, he said: “The thing is, in life, you have to worry about time, but when you camp, you don’t have to worry about time. It’s really liberating, you know, not having to worry about time.”

I laughed. “Yeah, I know, Dad.”

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