Last weekend we put down the TV remotes, turned off the computers, cleaned the house and washed all the clothes, and packed up the truck with a tiny subset of our belongings.  After we went back and back and back in the house for one more thing, I began to wonder:  How much stuff do you really need to go camping?  At the same time I worried about not having enough, about really getting out in the woods and desperately needing one thing we'd left at home, about being pregnant and having to use a latrine in the dark over and over every night, about, well, I mean, about having to rough it.

Sleeping in a tent?  Eating all our meals outside?  No shower-for any of us-for a week??  How does this amount to a family vacation?  Well, I thought, with a touch of the mother-martyr, at least it will be fun for the children.

And, as you can see, they did love it.

This caused me much anxiety:

Wherever there were rocks, there were little boys climbing.  There's nothing to show you he's about 10 feet off the ground here.  Nor is his father shown, who is laughing his head off, nor am I shown, who am walking away, a nervous wreck.

Ah.  There I am.

There were hikes, there were tide pools, there were morning trips to museums, (what a bunch of smoky-smelling, dirty museum patrons we must have been), and there was always our little corner of the woods, with our picnic table, our tent, our circle of camp chairs around the fire pit.  There was no TV, no phone, no (gasp) internet access, but there was each of us, and each other, our circles overlapping more closely than they usually do.  We laughed together more easily, made decisions on what to do next more easily, paid more attention to each other, somehow, and again I began to wonder.  What was it about our everyday lives that we'd stripped away that allowed us to be together so completely like this? 

Every night Father Bird and I would sit near the dying coals of the campfire, something warm to drink in our hands. The circle of light cast by the propane lantern lit up the undersides of the leaves of the spreading sycamore tree that formed the edges of our little world, and beyond it everything was darkness.  We'd listen to the whispering and chattering of the four children in the tent, laid out in brightly-colored sleeping bags in a row.  One night the boys all lay hushed as their sister told them a story.  Another night, a sweet impromptu song about sand dunes was the last sound any of them made. After they'd settled down, we'd wash our handful of dishes and creep into the tent ourselves, to zip ourselves into sleeping bags and listen to the crickets and the pounding of the waves on the beach.

Eventually it had to end.  With a resolve to go camping more, ("Once a week," our son requested), we filled the back of the truck up with dirty, half-used camping supplies and came wearily home.  There was a general rush in the direction of the running hot water as soon as we came through the door, a frenzied putting-away and washing-up, and all of us collapsed, sunburned and satisfied, on the couches to watch TV, open laptops, and move back into everyday life.  

And I realized it hadn't been the rough experience I'd feared (It may have had something to do with the fact that there were flush toilets instead of the much less lovely pit latrines), in fact, it had been something vastly different.  This morning Father Bird left for work again, I have a regular "to do" list again, there are the usual quarrels going on over who's going to have computer time first, and I'm left pondering.  Which, really, is roughing it?

~MB~