Everyone should camp once
“Idle hands are the devil's tools.”
Camping is constant work.
From the moment I open my groggy eyes, lying unrested on the hard ground and being thankful it's not raining or miserable that it is, I’m busy at work. I start a fire for warmth and to smoke out the unceasing terror of mosquitos and deer flies. Then I unload and unpack boxes and crates from the car containing cookware, dishes, groceries, and everything else we need for breakfast.
Clutching as many water bottles and pots as I can carry, I amble a hundred meters to the closest water tap. Hoping the water is running and praying there’s no boil advisory, I fill up then stumble back to the site in short strides loaded down with water-filled containers.
I set up the stove and screw in the propane tank, a modern 19th-century camping luxury that allows you to have modifiable temperature rather than broiling everything, including the hair on the backs of your hands, over an increasingly hot fire. After thirty minutes of work, I finally have everything I need to cook breakfast for my company and a cup of coffee for myself.
With breakfast done, I return to the water tap and fill a wash basin. My fingers go numb as I try to clean dishes with frigid water that is intent on ensuring gunk and grime cement itself to plates and pans. With the cleaning done, I pack everything back into its crate or cooler and, with the poise of a Tetris champion, put the puzzle pieces back together in the car, ensuring nothing is left outside that would draw bears or other scavengers to the site.
This whole cooking and cleaning routine is repeated two or three times per day, interspersed with searching the car for games, tarps, sunscreen, bug spray, toiletries, clothes, and the endless list of other things we use each day without realizing it unless you need to open a car door eighty-seven times per day to find it.
Between all of the work, so long as it’s not raining which will ruin your trip entirely unless you have one of those massive blue tarps and lots of rope and four trees positioned in a square on your campsite to string it up to, there’s time to swim, hike, play, and enjoy the beauty of the place you’re in.
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To camp is to work and to play and to never stop moving for longer than fifteen minutes at a time.
Without many of the appliances we take for granted—fridges, running water, electricity, dishwashers, and so on—everything must be done manually. Electricity is gone without. Water is fetched from a well or lake. Dishes are washed by hand. Shelter is erected, fortified, and protected by you.
But strangely, the work feels good. It gives me something important to busy myself with. And, when I pause and look around, I can soak in the calm beauty of the forest around me.
At the end of the day, after having watched the blood-orange sun drop below an alpine-lined lake, we sit around the campfire and become transfixed in tales told over flickering flames. After a day of being constantly on my feet and using my hands, it feels good to sit down.
We brought technology into our homes that gives us more free time but strips us of the deserved feeling of resting after a hard day’s work. So we sit on the couch for Netflix two hours too early with too much energy left in our tanks.
And we feel more depressed because of it.
We are built to work. Work is energizing. Work provides direction. Work gives purpose. Leisure should still be taken. But it should be taken in much smaller sessions than we’re being sold.
Time spent on the sofa locked into something mindnumbing only feels good in short stretches when we’ve earned it.
With love,
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Love this piece! And how you and Tommy are both living lives so in accordance with your philosophies. It's wild how the experience of time also changes when we untether from the devices and use our physical bodies to do basic tasks like cook, set up a tent, wash dishes, etc.
Absolutely loved this article!! It was a great reminder to me to get up and do something, anything, when boredom sets in to help keep depression at bay. I was dealing with this a while back so I adopted a cat to keep me busy and occupied. Thank you for writing this!!