Open Writing

Since my adventures at Wray Castle with the Boy Scouts and Bridlington with Walter Fox, camping and me have been mutually antagonistic, although camping is in my genes. It is not widely known that one of my great-grandfathers was killed at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. He was not actually involved in the battle, but was camping nearby and went over to complain about the noise.

That aside, I find it remarkable that several families of seemingly mature men and women with sufficient good sense to regard me as a friend, annually pack everything into an oversized wheelbarrow, hitch it to the family saloon, head south for the summer to go ‘under canvas’ to play Swallows and Amazons, eat their food with sand and grass accompaniments, and really believe they are having a good time.

I ask you, "How can they?" But they do, and there’s one of the mysteries that keep me guessing. Knowing how much they love their home comforts I was very surprised to discover that Americans are crazy about camping and camp outs, but I didn’t know that they handle camping much differently than their British counterparts.

The British people when camping exhibit all the flair and inventiveness that enabled them to create the largest and most successful empire the world has ever known. They move in droves – a carefully chosen word – towards the field of some farmer who might or might not remove the bull from the field he rents to them. Even if the farmer does remove the bull from the pasture, he is certain not to remove all signs that the bull has occupied it for some time, which makes the selection of a place to pitch the tent one of special interest and caution.

In spite of the legend that the by-product of generating steak, shin beef, and scrag end is good for the complexion, it does not make a person smell more endearing, and where showers are things that fall from the sky in April, the characteristic odour of bovine waste tends to cling and linger in isolating unwholesomeness.

After an interminable journey that would try the patience of whole gangs of saints, the farm located, and a safe spot free from second hand latrine pits and gurgling grease traps selected, the next job is to get the tent up, and this is when alpha males come into their own. It takes a woman to erect a deck chair without turning it into a booby trap, but it takes a man to erect a tent.

All the sticks, rods, poles, perches, bushels, and pegs have first to be set out on the ground, and when the mallet has been hunted and not located, the heaviest boot has to be forcibly removed to replace it from a fellow who is not sure that he wants his socked foot manured. Then masses of inter-related parts of poles must be matched, which is when the discouraging discovery is made that someone has rubbed off all the chalk marks that codes to make Dad's job look easy even though it isn't unless the marks are intact.

But the marks are gone and the task of matching cross ridge pole ‘A’ with cross ridge poles ‘C’ and ‘B’ is as difficult as it appears, and the man struggling with the problem is likely to be voted out of his new tee shirt that boldly declares him "The World’s Best Dad!" A gathering wind and a threatening storm does little to quell the rebellious murmuring of the Children of Israel shivering a few feet away from the fuming father, who is measuring, joining, and unjoining tent poles at a rate of knots calculated to set fire to the wooden bits.

Eventually he has a crude frame on which to hang the elephant skin to form their shelter, and has also composed the script of what he will say to the divorce lawyer if his wife utters "Do you know what you’re doing?" just one more time in that irritating cadence.

Just as it seems to be ‘every man for himself,’ bits slot in their places and teambuilding begins in earnest. Each escapee from the booby hatch takes a piece of flying canvas and they try to stretch it out to its full size by moving in different directions all at the same time. This upsets the "World’s Best Dad" to the point where he weighs the possibility of divorcing the whole tribe, but, as if by magic although really by nothing more thrilling than pure chance, the assembled stretcher-outerers get it right and the article is flat and ready to be hoisted over the slightly sagging ridge pole before being pinned securely to the ground.

In theory, this is easy. In practice it is not. The rising wind has already lifted the twins from the ground twice by getting underneath the skin and sending two corners skyward. The twins are now terrified. Normally, sixteen year olds are not afraid of nature's common marvels, but their older brother - known to himself as "The Enforcer," to his siblings as "The Weirdo," and to his parents as "Isn’t It Time He Left Home?" – has been filling their minds with ghastly tales of Twin-eating Frogopotami which live in hedgerows, and hissing through his clenched teeth in ‘that voice’ that does not register on the expired frequencies of ageing parents, such words of comfort as, "Look how close that hedge is!" and "Did you hear that? It’s the dinner call of a Twin-eating Frogopotamus, a cross between a frog and a Hippo!" and what with the long journey and their medications wearing off, they are vulnerable, and terrified.

Dad shouting against the wind at their cowering and receding forms, "They shoot deserters in the Army!" doesn’t help, and they refuse to come back to a madman and his eldritch elder son and risk being shot, so the rest of the family move around the canvas to support as many points as they can and hoist it between gusts over the poles. Once it is over and hanging down nicely, it is shifted to the halfway point ready for the edges to be pulled out and staked with satisfyingly long tent pegs that have been specially made from concrete reinforcing bar the year before last’s fiasco when the whole tent was blown out to sea, sticks, pegs and all, and never seen again.

Now, with the sides extended to appropriate positions on the darkening ground, the walls pinned down with a peg roughly inserted into each hole, and the ropes of the fly-sheet finally untangled, it is discovered that the ‘mallet’ has been lost. It is located and the victim again unwillingly forfeits his footwear to be used to drive the bars deep into the earth. They go so deep that last year one struck a seam of coal and the other struck oil!

The guy ropes are pulled out a goodly distance and secured with more reinforcing bars. The bars pegs and tropes are strategically placed so that regardless of which direction one approaches the encampment after twilight one cannot miss falling over at least one of them. With the ropes taut, the tent assumes its natural shape. It is as big as a small bungalow, especially if the small bungalow is as big as a large tent. But even then, the work is not done. His authority restored by victory, Father takes command, and orders, "Right, crew. Unload the trailer. Bedding in first, then the furniture, then the food, and then clothing and sports equipment."

The crew sensing that a winning combination of victory and rest is not far from them, jump to it, gathering stuff from the utility trailer in their clutches, to run into the tent in unkempt and irregular relays, staggering more with each yard of distance travelled in increasing fatigue and their haste to unpack and get everything in the dry before the drenching rain starts, they fall over each other no more than is absolutely necessary to put everyone in a foul mood.

Mother, who took on an air of injured innocence early on when she was first marginalised, and later on, after being silenced with a long burst of short shrift from the brute to whom she has devoted the best years of her life, her looks, and her figure, muttered a blood-fatwah never to speak to "The World’s Best Dad" again as long as she lived, suddenly realises that she is going to have to sleep in the same sleeping bag as "That Man" in half an hour and wonders if her Swiss Army Knife will cut it in two down the middle, or should she borrow the Boar War bayonet from "The Weirdo, who," she continues in her head, "takes after his father!"

Ten minutes later with the sleeping quarters assigned, all their stuff out of the trailer and into the tent, the sun gone down with a bang, and candles, lamps, and flashlights inexplicably absent without leave, she falls onto the sleeping bag, abandons her vow, kisses her husband ‘good night,’ and falls asleep in his arms, too tired to snore.

The kids are asleep where they fell ten minutes earlier, not one of them having made it to their appointed place, but sleeping sweetly on the piles of clothing and stuff that they dumped as soon as they carried it through the tent door, just as they did at home when they took their clean laundry to their bedrooms.

If there were any Twin-eating Frogopotami abroad that night, no one heard them. Truth to tell, no one heard anything until six o’clock next morning when the farmer knocked on the tent flap with his hawthorn stick, and through cupped hands announced, "You’re in the wrong field, lad. You should be in yon next door!"

That’s camping, and while some regard it as lots of fun that turns out alright in the end, to my way of thinking the carrying to and fro at the beginning, before you can actually begin your holiday proper, and the de-carrying fro and to at the end before you can start out on the long and winding road that leads to your home, make it a toil rather than a pleasure.

The better part of camping is the smell of wet grass. The bit I can take or leave is the ever-so-slightly-overcooked gas stove food, and the ubiquitous wasps. The worst of camping is suffering the curse of exuberant neighbours whose idea of camping is driving into the village, overloading on scrumpy, rolling home at two in the morning singing their version of the concert version of Les Miserablés sung sideways at top volume breaking only to let the revellers disgorge gallons of brown ale mixed with altered chow mein, following which they spend an hour in the maudlin phase of habitual drunkenness, each vowing "Never again!" at least three times each minute until they fall silent, apart, that it, from their welcome snoring, and having to look at their ashen faces next morning as they fold their tents like the Arabs, and as silently steal away.

They go home, they go straight home, they do not pass "GO," and they do not collect £200. They go home sadder and wiser to overdose on Alka Seltzer.

Besides which, holidays should be times when a person can indulge in little luxuries, such as having someone else cook breakfast, and keeping camp crafts out of the picture altogether. A week or two in a boarding house at Blackpool or Redcar does the trick. Boarding house holidays are not camping, but the benefits are significant because the landlady does all the work. This doughty lady cooks the meals, tidies the rooms, makes the beds and vicariously bears the frazzles and unpleasantries connected with running a family home.

This lifting off the shoulders of work-a-day burdens leaves holidaymakers with a hundred percent of their time not spent in the arms of Morpheus given solely to self-indulgent leisure. Not a foretaste of heaven, perhaps, but for the longsuffering and hardworking it comes close enough.

But, when it comes to camping I opine that Americans have the edge. Word association tests in Britain when the trigger word ‘camping’ is offered, always elicit the target word, ‘tent.’ That is what camping is in Britain. But in the USA, camping is a whole nother animal, and I have had my eyes opened from top to bottom!

When first I graced Uncle Samuel’s shores, I was taken aback to hear mature couples say they were going on, had been on, or were planning to go on, a ‘camping’ vacation. I could not imagine these blue-rinsed duchesses scrabbling about on duck boards in communal showering facilities where the water night be ‘hot’ or not, and ‘on’ or not, risking plantar warts, and using latrines that smelled of spent mustard gas and high octane ammonia.

However, I need not have worried. I discovered that ‘camping’ in America is really CAMPING, and not to be confused with the activities of eccentric British Bedouins who descend on rustic haunts or commercialised seasides to endure the insults of weather and Submariner’s Fever – also known as Proximity Disease - under frail and capricious constructions in the Old Country.

When the denizens of John Bull’s Other Island hit the trail to sport and play, the old saw, "You can’t take it all with you," is suspended, because Americans do take it all with them, and how! They do not hitch a utility trailer behind their vehicles and hope they have remembered everything before they head for mountains, sea shore, forest, Blue Ribbon fishing waters, or game hunting country. They climb confidently aboard castles on wheels, built of steel, timber, and chrome, and furnished more sumptuously than most hotel rooms.

These are recreation vehicles, RVs for short, and they have everything in them. Their engines would drive the Queen Mary at forty knots, the suspension floats on air, and they are replete with bathrooms, showers, bedrooms, kitchens, and double-sized push-out lounges that are gaily bedecked like Persian palaces.

Besides which, they are heated, air conditioned, overflowing with refrigerators, freezers, stabilisers, ice makers, microwaves, rotisseries, gymnasia, sleeping room for ten, with radio, satellite telephones and television sets, and are plushly carpeted wall to wall. When parked, striped awnings roll out from their sides to supply shade from the ever-present sun, and let cooling breezes fan the breezes of conversation between happy campers and anyone else who happens to wander into their vicinity.

Similar levels of luxury and comfort are provided in ‘Fifth Wheel’ camping outfits which mount on the backs of pick up trucks resting on massive articulating plates like heavy goods lorries. Apart from the folks riding in the cab of the pick up truck, they have all the appointments and conveniences of RVs. When destinations are reached, their lounges push out, showers and bathrooms work, air is filtered, cooled or heated as needed, larders and freezers carry sumptuous fare, and holidayers sleep in beds every bit as comfortable as the ones enjoyed by RVers, and the beds they left behind them at home.

The American nation is dotted with campgrounds where for a few dollars their rigs are connected to water, power, and sewage lines, and they can sleep soundly until morning comes. They do not have to solve puzzles with sticks to erect tents, or do more than carefully position their vehicles onto concrete foundations, lower their self-levelling legs, stick frozen dinners in the microwaves when they are not dining out, and then carry on camping without a care in the world. Sign me up!

Copyright © Ronnie Bray

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Other stories at:
http://www.2theheart.com/author_ronnie_bray
http://www.meridianmagazine.com/voices/011024summer.html

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