Camping Season

I can’t believe how quickly this first week of July has gone by. Lately, my operational theme seems to be getting a better sense of tracking position and direction: both in physical location, and with trying to make the right thing moves in dealing with other personal issues. I rewarded myself with a GPS sports watch recently, for achieving one of my training goals. The good news is that I have a greatly improved degree of accuracy with such technology; the bad news is that I have to note the wildly fluctuating degree of error from my old sensor readings, which means now that my old speed, pace and distance records from my sensor are below what they should be in actuality. After my first upload with it, I also somehow mistakenly uploaded multiple readings of the same run (my fault). I couldn’t edit them on the site, so I was relegated today to compensate by running the extra mileage that was listed to keep at least my distance record more accurate. It was about 30 degrees that afternoon; I did it, but I suffered the consequences. I had been quite woozy and heavy on the fluid intake since I got home that day.

 I had my results from my physical back. I tested as very healthy except for those damn freakish pancreatic enzyme readings again. I feel OK, but it seems to be an issue that is still carrying on from last year. My doctor is yellow-flagging this for me and recommending another visit in a couple months.

As the week began with Canada Day on Sunday, I’m reminded that we’re entering of the latter half of the calendar year. During some of it, I spent most of my free time trying to organize paperwork, and tidy stuff up in my office. I don’t think I come close at all to taking a serious bite out of any of the projects I planned for myself. I hoped that putting some things in some sort of better order would increase both my momentum and motivation for tackling such things. I at least succeeded in taming down, and filing a couple of huge piles of paper and correspondence.

I had a lovely surprise earlier this week. A person, who I’ve missed working with for quite some time, showed up a couple times and graced us all with her presence. Any words I know are inadequate to describe her genuine kindness and soulful character. All I know is just that I wish more people were like her. Had she not come around, it would have been just a depressing day with me being sickened by the stupidity of some people before I even got to work. I couldn’t help but to enjoy the long chat we had as we caught up on things. As much as I’ve missed having her around, I’m grateful that life seems to be working out well for her at her other position. We touched briefly on the subject of camping, and I was a reminded of what I hoped to do when I joined up with my nephews later in August for a family camping trip we had planned. I was hoping to teach them a thing or two about navigating with a compass, and to perhaps beef up the lessons with an excursion of hiking and orienteering. It also prompted me to think about what my idea of an enjoyable camping trip would be.

I respect my parents’ idea of camping, and to be honest, I did enjoy the times we had when we joined other family at places like the regional and provincial parks around the lake lands when I was younger. We organized ourselves a bit for our upcoming date in August already to have the same sort of affair, I’ll be happy just to avoid having another staycation. However, as an adult, my perception about what my ideal camping environment would be like has changed a lot since those years. It’s a little more of an adventurous thing, leading one off the beaten path. It involves actually roughing it and using survival skills. To describe it better, the experience would be more like:

·         No trailer or cabin: I’d prefer being alone in a two man tent with privacy, rather than being crammed with four other people in a total sleeping (snoring, farting) space that is smaller than what the area of my bedroom in my home is now. Tenting also allows one to tuck oneself into some more secluded area, where a trailer can’t go (see next point).

·         Outside of a typical campground: the last couple of times I left town to spend the day at a regional or provincial park, it seems like I was stuck in a spot where I was surrounded by more obnoxious neighbours who were in even closer proximity to me than the ones I left in the city. This isn’t relaxing, and the extra crowding and party noise detracts from my idea of being in the great outdoors. Get a few peoples’ trailers, boats, and vehicles crammed too close together, and then I feel like I’m sitting in the middle of a walled compound. Establishing oneself around an open view of wilderness (where the local wildlife isn’t frightened away), and having a decent buffer zone for some isolation and solitude is my idea of camping.

"When using a public campground, a tuba placed on your picnic table will keep the campsites on either side vacant." ~Author Unknown

·         Cooking Gear/Food Supplies: To be limited to a simple mess kit of a spoon, fork, cup, bowl, small cooking vessel, and a mini stove that fits in a backpack (only to be used on a rainy wet day, when a proper campfire can’t be lit). I wouldn’t go so far as to rely on snaring muskrats or squirrels for sustenance. I would bring food, but my choices would be more sensible and compact. Food would be mostly dried, canned, or cured (beans, rice, lentils, couscous, trail mix, soup mix, dried fruit, granola, muesli, jerky/dried sausage, nuts, evaporated/powdered milk, bannock mix, spices, hot chocolate, tea), i.e. things that are not cooler dependant, have less packaging, make less garbage, and are easier to string up, or cache away from bears and other scavengers. Four day’s worth of such rations would easily fit in a backpack. If fishing is good, they’ll last longer yet. Thinking back to the old days and seeing three coolers worth of food (that included very perishable prepared salads and desserts), packed for one weekend of camping, which amounts to more food than I use in three weeks now, looks a little ridiculous in retrospect.

·         Having practical survival challenges: to at least try, making a fire without matches or flints, using navigation skills (with and without a compass), foraging, fishing, building a rudimentary shelter, finding and purifying drinking water, fashioning your own tools and implements, anything that involves improvisation and overcoming functional fixity.

"How is it that one match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box of matches to start a campfire?" ~Christy Whitehead

·         More exploration, less stationing oneself: some valuable things I learned how to do while growing up in Parkland region of this province where was picking mushrooms and saskatoon berries around the coulees and wooded pasture land in our area. We never thought of it as hiking and foraging, but it was. My interest in the art and skill of hiking renewed itself when I when I was trekking around the trails of the jungle laden foothills of the northern Andes in South America. I think I did that to learn how to avoid being a victim of anacondas, amoebic parasites, venomous spiders, and drug smugglers. Whether it was approaching or avoiding something, the greatest lessons came always through being mobile in the outdoors. In a designated campsite, the only challenge some people are given is being just mobile enough to park a big ass camper on a level spot with the intention to stay put, and not straying too far away from one’s beer cooler. Really, how sad is that?

·         Entertainment or ‘luxury’ items: Pen/pencil and blank journal, dynamo radio, solar powered pocket calculator (for mapping), deck of cards, a mickey of whiskey/rum, garlic and onions, binoculars, meditation cushion (doubles as a head pillow)*, chipping knife (for carving and whittling), anything thing else that is reasonably compact and doesn’t rely on gasoline, batteries, or an electrical outlet to function would also be kosher.

·         Leaving no trace of where you were: to try to keep things as pristine as you found them. I think any bit of litter tossed in natural habitats is utterly despicable. What ultimately pissed me off, and made me unwilling to camp in public campgrounds ever again was my last experience in Blackstrap Provincial Park.  I was assigned a spot where some stupid, lazy, asshole that was there before me, pitched a bunch of soiled disposable diapers into a pile amidst some shrubs in my site. It was disgusting to say the least. I notified the park authorities, but no one was sent to clean up the mess. After no help was sent after two hours, I exited the park, but not without leaving scathing feedback comments in their suggestion box first. I never returned there since.

As I age, I’m sure the idea of camping with “comforts” would be renewed again; I think it is still important though to keep oneself knowledgeable about basic survival in an emergency situation, with little to no conveniences, and practice them to keep them fresh in mind.

*-It’s stuffed with rice, which is stable and holds its (and my) form surprisingly well during a session. If worse comes to worse, I could eat the ‘pillow stuffing’ if I were lost or stranded, and really that desperate for food. Being forced to eat sweat infused rice, tinctured with some flavour of the odd blast of flatulence would no doubt count as a desperate measure.