A Profound Level of Misery

For many of us–you, perhaps, not me–it’s that time of year to start rummaging through the attic, basement and garage to locate all of those things necessary to leave all the comforts of home to go enjoy all the discomforts Mother Nature has to offer in the great outdoors.

That’s right, you guessed it. It’s the advent of the camping season–that special time of year during which otherwise sane and responsible people with indoor plumbing, a Weber grill and decent patio furniture endeavor to forego the pleasures of such hard-earned amenities to enjoy long weekends pretending to be homeless. The difference is that while campers pay exorbitant user fees to suffer the indignities visited by public campgrounds with disturbing, life-altering toilet facilities, the actual homeless enjoy the outdoor experience under freeway overpasses for free, risking only the chance of suffering the indignities visited by the local police.

Of course, there are those more daring campers who venture into so-called wilderness areas where there are no user fees and where the toilet facilities involve a small shovel, some biodegradable toilet paper and a sturdy tree that provides both back support and camouflage.

Despite whatever Dorothy Parker might have observed about Mother Nature, my take on it has been that the great outdoors is simply something that separates buildings.

There were two distinct times in my life when the outdoors called to me, which is different from those times when nature called. I’ll recall them now for your amusement.

I was never in Scouting (my father was deeply bothered by the sight of young boys in tan shirts with insignia, epaulettes and colorful decorations that might have appeared to be campaign ribbons) but several of my friends who were Boy Scouts spent some of their weekends camping. I envied the stories they told about their wilderness experiences, most of which took place within the chain-link-fenced Cook County forest preserves that were always within earshot of highway traffic and redolent of bus fumes. When I asked my father one day if we could go camping, “you know, Dad, just the two of us,” he lowered the newspaper to his lap, peered over his half-glasses and told me that after having “camped” across northern Europe from June of 1944 until the following January when he was shot for the third time the answer was simply “no.”

Camping for him had had little to do with nature, campfire stories or s’mores and a lot to do with avoiding being the target of sniper fire.

I’m only guessing that he and his camp buddies did not spend their evenings singing the famous camp song “Kum ba yah,” or even the condensed version, “Kumbayah.”

We were city folks, by both design and default, and my father’s odes to nature were limited to watering the potted geraniums that my mother set out on the front porch each spring and playing golf on courses whose green landscapes were (are) the most ludicrous expressions of nature one might imagine. For him, venturing from the fairway to the deep rough was something akin to a wilderness experience.

All of that notwithstanding, it seems somehow important to introduce illicit drug use before we get back to the subject of camping.

I was never much of a pot smoker. In the late sixties and early seventies, for me at least, it was just something you did because it was, well, just something you did, unless you had political ambitions, in which case you used drugs that couldn’t be detected by smell.

Pot always made me kind of sleepy, slightly dizzy, as it delivered a sense of paranoia that could not be replicated. Cops and narcs, I just knew, hung out on every street corner in America and just outside the door of any apartment occupied by any male with long hair.

Also, the pot was not very good. Most of it in those days came from Mexico and smelled more of skunk than anything pleasantly herbal. It was harsh, it made you cough, and you had to smoke a lot of it to get high. Apparently its THC level, on a scale of one-to-ten hovered somewhere around negative-three. It was, however, cheap.

I once had a doctor in Los Angeles who suggested I stop smoking cigarettes. Actually, he was the seventh doctor I’d had who had suggested that very same thing. I could have changed doctors yet again, but by then I had figured out that they had all learned the same spiel in medical school so what would be the point? In those days, there weren’t patches or nicotine gum or support groups or prescription meds. You quit cold turkey or you died, not that the latter event wouldn’t happen anyway. My doctor had an alternate plan. He advised me to buy a lot of cheap pot, go on an ocean cruise and stay stoned for the entire voyage. He guaranteed me that I would never want another cigarette.

I didn’t follow his advice. (He’s dead, by the way.)

In the middle eighties I decided that camping would be a fun and affordable way for our young family to vacation. Geri was opposed to any such adventure on many levels. The kind of vacation that involved sleeping on the ground, exposure to wild animals that might want you for a midnight snack, and no access to plumbing was exactly the kind of vacation she wanted no part of.

Her idea of roughing it–an idea I’ve come to adopt–was staying in a hotel with no room service.

“But growing up in Ireland, you had no indoor plumbing,” I reasoned.

“Notice how I don’t live in Ireland anymore?” she responded.

My arguments about how cheap camping would be were negated, when, after finally convincing Geri that this would be a fun adventure, I proceeded to buy the gear we needed at a cost that was roughly equivalent to a week’s stay in a four-star hotel in Provence, France, including airfare.

After vacating the apparently toilet-free country of Ireland and moving to the United States, Geri settled with her mother, step-father and two sisters in Los Angeles where there was no shortage of indoor plumbing. As a teenager she went to scores of concerts at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and got to hear the first three songs of every act because the ambient pot smoke put her to sleep before the fourth song began.

“If we’re really going to do this camping thing,” she threatened, “then I want to smoke a joint so I can sleep through the bear attacks.”

I CALLED A FRIEND OF MINE who I knew to be an artist but who was actually a dealer.

“Larry,” I said when he answered.

“Hey, man,” Larry slurred. “What’s happening?”

“I need a dime bag, you know…”

“What’s a dime bag, man?” he slurred. We were on the telephone, no doubt tapped; we were speaking in indecipherable code.

“You know…some herb…an ounce, ten bucks.”

Larry’s demeanor turned quickly from stoned hipster to hedge fund manager.

“The stuff I’ve got,” he said with utter clarity of voice and emotion, “runs $240 an ounce.”

I bought a single joint.

Our first camping adventure was at a crowded campground near Ojai, California. After several hours of strenuous work building what would be our home for the next three days, we ate dinner and then sat around the campfire reenacting a famous scene from Blazing Saddles. Then we played with our flashlights while some neighboring campers used a chain saw to fell a tree they tried to use as firewood.

We got the kids tucked in and Geri took a single toke on a joint whose alcohol equivalent would be Everclear. She slept through the rain that pelted our tent all night and turned to snow by morning. The kids and I sat in the tent for several hours watching Geri sleep and staring at our cache of emergency rations of Spam, Vienna Sausages and sardines that none of us would ever eat.

I saw recently that REI, a company that sells outdoor gear to millionaires, claims in its current ad campaign that the “average American spends 95% of their life indoors.”

I like those odds.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska