After four August nights in a tent in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I can say that the spartan way of overnighting away from city amenities has many virtues, but the sigh of relief after getting home can almost bring tears of domestic contentment: unpacking, luxuriating in one’s own shower and the convenience of running water at a sink and nearby flush toilet, absence of biting insects, no worries about micro-bears (raccoons) or full-size bears, and the delight of one’s familiar bed or a favorite reading chair. These things rise to the height of great satisfaction, somehow magnified from the significance they held before setting off northward.
The meaning of these creature comforts is like the Joni Mitchell lyric, “…you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” At the conclusion of the camping trip there is a mix of sadness to part from the forest, lake, river, and its creatures on land, air, and water. But the end of the small adventure also brings huge pleasure in returning to the many elements of soft living that form one’s everyday environment. A few illustrations from these few days of mobile living from car and tent will show what needs getting used to.
- What to do when something has broken, is lost, or was overlooked while packing and was left behind. A favorite motto for hikers in Latin goes, “Omnia Mea Mecum Porto” [all that is mine I carry with me] and refers to the self-contained, self-sufficient nature of the experience of taking care of most needs by using a few well chosen items packed. When back at home, if something is wanted but is not at hand, there is probably somewhere within a few minutes car journey where the thing can be had. Out in the woods, desert, or riverbank, though, things work differently: either you do without, make do with what you do have handy, or invent some kind of work-around by using sticks and stones and anything carried along.
- How best to answer the call of nature or to slake your thirst. Since a source of safe drinking water is not readily at hand, while camping it is important to pay attention to water containers being topped up between supply sources. That way, relieving your thirst is simply a matter of sipping or gulping from a canteen or another container. Compared to the range of cold drinks in one’s refrigerator, or the ease of boiling a kettle of water to make a hot drink in one’s kitchen, the range of liquids for thirst-slaking is much restricted. As for the call of nature, as it is with paying attention to water source, it is equally important to be mindful of toilet locations, lest the only option is to make one’s own mini-latrine 100' from the trail, either digging a small trench or not, depending on the nature of that call of nature. Clearly, the convenience of flushing a porcelain convenience contrasts greatly to the trail or woods experience away from an established camp ground.
- Carrying everything along imposes an unlaziness; setting up a convenient camp at each site may come to be automatic, but always does take effort. Unlike the sedentary life of accumulated food, clothing for all seasons and weather, supplies and tools for most any occasion, the universe of stuff is limited when backpacking or even in the case of tenting with the storage capacity of a personal car nearby. Each time a campsite is collapsed and packed up for the next location, the entire inventory has to be gathered up and organized in some practical way to make set-up at the new site as frictionless as possible. Backpackers often move along a linear route, rather than circling back to the base camp. So the rhythm of set-up and take-down becomes almost second nature, requiring little conscious attention. But compared to the ease of home life (rolling from bed, stopping at bathroom before heading into the kitchen to break one’s fast or consult the Internet), the routines of mobile life on a trail or at a rustic camping location do require more effort.
- Try writing a letter. While at home or office, at any time you wish to compose a letter by pen (or digitally plugged in), it is relatively easy to sit at a table in a suitably quiet or noisy place, depending on the place where one’s muse is happiest. But when untethered from plug-in electricity and a controlled environment for heating or cooling, free from flying or creeping insects, and sheltered from wind and precipitation then the act of writing a letter by hand suddenly becomes challenging: rounding up paper, pen, stamp, envelope, and address of recipient, establishing some sort of firm surface to support the sheet of paper, probably limited to daylight hours free from rain, sleet, or snow, and then perhaps discovering that when all the conditions are conducive to writing, the will to set forth the text may have faded away! Looking at history and around today’s world in many places, too, somehow people do write letters in challenging physical circumstances and settings. So managing to fill a page or two in conversational writing is not impossible once accustomed to the way to accomplish it. But facing the hurdles on a short period of a few days in the field does seem to feel much harder than doing so back within the confines of the home or workplace environment.
To quote another popular culture reference, this time Dorothy at the ending to The Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home.” After being away from routines and ruts of comfortable habits at home, during the first few minutes or hours the old street and house momentarily seem strange or belonging to somebody else; for a fleeting instant it is possible to glimpse a first impression, as if coming to that place for the first time. It is something like the perception that visitors might feel when encountering your place. But all too soon, one seamlessly fits into the old ways again. After all there is nothing sweeter about taking a trip than arriving back at the place it began.
