Judy P's Tickle Trunk

You can’t judge a person on how he spends his leisure time. Some people crave the bustle of crowds in foreign cities. Others prefer the safety and comfort of their own backyards. If I were given the choice between staring at a reality show about the stark squalor of hoarders and of watching a red kite dance spritefully against a bright blue sky, I would surely choose the latter every time. Indeed, most of my favourite leisure activities take place out of doors, camping being not the least amongst them.

For the past three summers I have camped at Five Islands Provincial Park while attending the Not Since Moses race. ( http://www.notsincemoses.com/ )  This year I set up early and got to enjoy the pleasure of my own company for a full twenty-four hours before my friend Lynn joined me.

A badly bitten knee.

You might wonder why I enjoy solo camping as it is not without its risks. You could well imagine an ambulance full of paramedics raising a cloud of dust as they race up a gravel road and, like keystones cops, roaring to a stop by a campsite and filing out one after the other and, with a staccato gait, marching down to the scene of a collapsed tent. Their eyes would pop, and their jaws would drop in unison as they survey the scene that for which a rescue maneuver would be way beyond their scope. Indeed it would take the jigger line untangling skills of my Grammy Parsons combined with a Rubik’s cube expert to disentangle this disheveled woman from the discombobulation of tent poles, bungee cords, and pegged lines. It would be easier to unsnarl the Christmas lights of Martha May Whovier after they had been hastily stuffed in an Eversweet butter box. And what diagnosis should cause this poor woman’s face to be such an alarming shade of crimson? Could it be a combination of sunburn (forgot to pack the Ombrelle again), a scalding from the steam of a pot that deosn’t pour well (last time she down-sizes her camping kitchen kit and leaves the proper kettle at home), or the rosy blooms of a million fly-bites?

You could probably just as easily imagine her rolling up in the fetal position, covered in Lyme bearing ticks, in the tall grass behind the public outhouse where she collapses in despair after she drops her car keys down the outhouse hole when startled by an eight-year old boy lifting the latch, which she now knows is broken. The boy is equally surprised as he gazes upon the raw beauty of a middle-aged woman with her leisure wear stretchy pants and her step-ins fallen about her mosquito bitten ankles. And why is she twitching like that you might ask. Could it be a neurological disorder (now known as ‘the camping quivers’) brought on by the gassing off of all the waterproofing and the plastic air mattresses baking in the two hundred degree tent interior? 

Is it a tent or is it an oven?

Which begs the question, does a tent really qualify as a shelter? One’s skin is thicker than the nylon which professes to protect one from the elements. Perhaps it can only be considered a shelter for the first year, before the waterproof coating wears off from flapping in the sea-breezes, before the poles sag and break, and the seams start to leak, the zippers break, and the screens become ripped by the hot dog fork one forgot and left hanging from one’s belt loop. Did I say anything about yet about mildew, or earwigs in tent poles? I digress.

Well, if you envisioned all of those things, you would be wrong. Not dead wrong, of course; the annoyances and inconveniences of camping are always there, but are never enough to discourage me from going back, year after year. The things which bother me the most are not what you would think. For example, it took all of my zen training to over-ride my post-menopausal lack of filter and keep myself from marching over to self-righteously reprimand my neighbours when they were getting on my last good nerve.  The First couple next to me appeared only to know two words, LUCY and HERE, which they shouted at a hundred decibels every two minutes to call in their pit bull/doberman/rottweiler mix of a crackie-dog which, despite park regulations,  they defiantly kept off leash. More distant neighbours woke me early every morning from my delicious slumber as they slammed car doors and gunned their engine to crunch over the gravel road as they drove to the real bathrooms up the hill, thus avoiding the walk of shame to the outhouses. The next set of neighbours were somewhat quarrelsome and dithered over the tent locations until the young mother announced “I have a teething baby” which sent them quickly to set up at the other end of their adjoined lots. They parked in the middle of the road and scattered gear all around right next to the sign which said “No Parking on Roadway” (which some kids later changed, while stifling giggles, to “No Parking on Broadway”). They left it there at our inconvenience for the better part of the afternoon, when I gave the driver a dirty look that could have made Buddha himself cringe, and he announced to anyone who had not yet tuned him out “I have to move the car, this is a roadway you know!” We later heard him proclaim to his friends that his life’s philosophy is “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than ask for permission.”

  But I shouldn’t complain. After all, what did they see when they looked across at me, their neighbour?  A solitary old woman who spent most of the day barricaded behind her screen in a recliner, scribbling away in a notebook, coming out only to scavenge left-over wood from abandoned campsites and to photograph weeds and bugs.

 Yes, camping did have its hazards. The biggest risk was of dying; not by the attack of a blood-thirsty coyote or a Freddy Krueger, but of fright on being awakened from a sound sleep by a robust slap on the ass. Turned out to be my LED disk light slipping its knot and falling flat from the tent peak but it took a few minutes after my heart started beating again and I had the pillow removed from my gullet where it lodged when I gasped, to find that out! The only other camp risk I can think of was forgetting how to converse with humans after spending so much time alone. I was a babbling idiot, trying to tell all my stories at once, by the time Lynn joined me on the second day.

Maybe the greatest pitfall of camping is the risk of enjoying myself so much that I am unable to return to the civilized life of work and motherhood. I wish I was back at Five Islands Provincial Park now as I recall a perfect day: being awakened at the break of day by the songs of a dozen varieties of birds but not having to get up until I felt well rested and rolling over to have another nap before the sun comes up.  Then later to wipe the dew from a camp chair and sit there and feel the fresh sea air on my face as I enjoy the tang of Lynn’s raspberry and pink grapefruit salad after I warm my hands around a cup of strong hot coffee.  In the afternoon the warm, sweet clover-scented breeze on my bare arms would become hot and I’d seek the shade of the tent vestibule , where I lay back in my zero-gravity recliner and write and doze and watch the boats come and go on the Bay of Fundy. 

Sunset over the mud flats at Five Islands Provincial Park

Later still, we sit around a crackling campfire and watch the sun set over the mudflats of an extremely low tide, where a few hours ago, the ocean used to be.

I really do need to get outside from time to time to remind myself that there are many, no less significant creatures on the planet, from the fruit-fly to the hawk. In the end, the benefits of camping far outweigh the risks and, despite my manufactured plastic paraphernalia and my supermarket food, I can, at least for a couple of days, pretend that I am one with nature.

One of the many beautiful views at the Five Islands Provincial Park campground.

 Step-ins: Don’t know why, but this is what Pilley’s Islanders called panties. The emphasis was on the “ins” and it was pronounced “Ste-peens”.

Zero-gravity recliner: a  lawn chair that has comfort comparable to a Lazyboy chair when fully reclined. Likely invented by some pot-smoking designer who feels that we should all be a little more laid back

Crackie-dog: a small dog of mixed unknown breeds

(c) Judy Parsons 2011