Why Do People Camp?

Textbook beanbag toss

“What do you think family camping will be like in twenty years?” my cousin asked. We sat in the middle of the road on folding camp chairs, because that was the only place we could find some shade. Camping weekend is always either too hot or too cold. This was a hot year, and the family all loitered around like polar bears in a southern state zoo, moving only when cars needed to creep down the street or when it was our turn to play beanbags.

“I assume the earth will be a burnt-out wasteland by then,” I replied.

“Right,” said my cousin. “So we’ll be camping because we have to. We’ll be refugees from the water wars.”

“Omigod, water wars sound great right about now,” said my wife.

“Well,” said my cousin. “It won’t be that type of water war. Not armies with squirt guns, but actual fighting over water.”

“Oh no,” said my wife.

Tornado Warning, Men's Bathroom

Fourteen hours prior to this conversation, at 11:30 PM, all twenty-five us, plus dozens of other strangers, stood in the men’s bathroom to wait out a tornado warning. The dogs’ barking echoed around the concrete room while my family finished up snacks rescued from the campfire circle. Someone had brought a cooler into a shower stall and handed out beers, and we all tried to summon some weather radar on our phones. “I don’t have any signal. Do you have any signal?” “I don’t think it looks that bad.” “Really? That dark red spot is coming right for us.” My son stood next to me and cried quietly, revealing the fear we all had, to some degree, somewhere deep down. What happens if that dark red spot really does wipe everything out? Where will we sleep tonight? What will we eat tomorrow? My daughter picked her sleepy head off my shoulder every few minutes to share the other emotion we all felt. She had no fear, only frustration. “When can we go back to the camper? I’m tired.”

The storm, like every other one that has crept ominously over the horizon during a family camping weekend, full of paparazzi lightning and locomotive rumbles, failed to live up to our worst fears. Instead of leaving us truly homeless, not just the voluntary homelessness of a camping trip, it soaked all of our crap and made us track wet sand into our tents, pop-ups, and vehicles the rest of the weekend. And it made the following day armpit, dog’s breath, giant sweat stain hot and humid, but we took care of that after the teams finished their beanbag games and we all went down to the beach and played Frisbee in the cool lake.

Quinn on the beach (it's a giraffe)

I don’t understand camping, especially around where I live. Houses aren’t cheap, and we spend a lot of time keeping them clean and making them nice and comfortable, but then we spend a bunch more money on trailers and tents and camp stoves and campsite fees to get away from our homes on the weekends. Sleeping in the forest is nice, but everyone on my side of the state has a good handful of trees growing in our yards, where they’re not “nature,” they’re just a pain the butt because of all the raking and pruning. There’s something traditional and satisfying and primal about sitting around a fire and telling old stories, but those aluminum fire pits cost less than hundred bucks, so now you can commune with your hunter-gatherer ancestors in your driveway and still sleep in your own bed. And they make s’more flavored everything, so even those aren’t that special anymore, either.

I’m sure this is obvious to everyone else, but the point of camping has to be voluntary isolation. Families have to spend time together, make meals together, play a few lawn games, get too competitive, then smooth things over afterward. Kids can’t escape to friends’ houses down the street, mom and dad can’t fall into television or laptop hypnosis. Everyone has to work together to set up camp, then take it down together a few days later.

The past few years more and more of the family have come out to start camping on Thursday night. By Sunday, everyone is pretty ready to pack up and get home. On the cold years, we all are sick of wishing we had remembered sweatshirts, and on the hot years, we are tired of sticking to our t-shirts and our chairs. But on Sunday morning, if anyone was hung-over, or if anyone had any sort of spat with anyone else, or if anyone didn’t get enough sleep because the campground red squirrel hopped from site to site at six in the morning and chirped almost as loud as the tornado sirens Friday night, no one could tell. We all pitched in to take down the camp kitchen and the big party tent and clean up the lawn games, all smiles and big hugs and promises to see each other soon, our isolation broken, our journey out of woods almost as welcome as our journey in.

Practice, Practice, Practice

This piece is up over on Volume One's website as part of their huge "Music Capital of the North" issue, but here you get bonus multimedia content. I've lost track of my piano teacher over the years, but once again, a big thanks to her. Playing the piano has been a huge source of comfort and pride for many years now.

Every Good Boy Does Fine

This is how my wife and I torture our son.

I took piano lessons the old fashioned way, in my teacher's dim basement. With sheet music tucked under my arm I biked to her house, then let myself in through her garage door. I sat on a floral couch in the unofficial waiting area farther down the wood-paneled room while the kid before me finished up. It was my teacher’s personal space, with a bar and family photos, and I felt like I was trespassing until my turn to sit at the piano arrived. Our lessons were a flight of mnemonic devices for remembering notes and “One-ee-and-ahs” until the music was so familiar that I can sit down, 20 years later, at any piano anywhere and play “The Pink Panther Theme,” or “Linus and Lucy,” or, if you give me a minute, Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor.

My son’s lessons look a little different. While I was convinced I was the only unfortunate child forced to bear the agony of piano lessons on beautiful summer days, Gordon takes lessons in an old dentist’s office, where he is joined by kids of all ages popping in and out of converted exam rooms for instruction in all sorts of instruments. The building throbs with a constant symphony of growth and learning, violins from one end of the hall, piano and guitar from the other, and in the middle, an earnest young girl whose weekly progress on Annie’s “Tomorrow” is as measured as a staff on a page.

My piano teacher certainly looked the part. She was a middle-aged woman back then, with big glasses and conservative clothes, with impeccable posture and pristine handwriting that still decorates the piano music Gordon now uses. His teacher is not Mr. or Mrs. anything, it’s just Paul, and before Gordon started taking lessons, he and I visited YouTube to watch footage of his new teacher play in several of his different bands.

I liked my piano teacher, she did a fabulous job teaching me the piano, but, man, I wish I had Paul for a teacher. Sometimes he and Gordon jam for part of the lesson, or through the door I hear Paul pull out his guitar to accompany Gordon’s hesitant, one-handed, novice songs.

Of course, Gordon is as unexcited for piano lessons as I was. On the ride there, he often explains that he has a hard time deciding which is his least favorite day of the week, Sunday – because we make him collect all the garbage, unload the dishwasher, and take a shower – or Tuesday, because we make him go to piano lessons.

Here you can see the anguish on his face.

I accuse him of being overdramatic and comment that what he actually needs is acting lessons, but I understand. At his age, the pride inspired by playing a piece well never compensates for the frustration of learning new songs and watching his fingers refuse to cooperate and fail to produce the sounds he expects. The parts of his brain that handle those connections have yet to develop. For now he just needs to trust me that progress will occur until one day it will all have been worth it. And absent that trust, he still has to do what I say, at least for a few more years.

This past spring Gordon participated in the first concert of his life. When the recital sign-up sheet went up earlier in the year, he declined because he felt he was too young and too nervous, but then he changed his mind. Perhaps one of those brain synapses sprang into existence on some random late winter day, or maybe Paul was more persuasive than me.

On the day of the performance, Gordon was nervous and antsy all morning. While we waited for the program to start, he couldn’t sit still and bounced around the school’s little theater until I threatened to rescind my offer to go out for pizza after the show finished. The rows of chairs filled with the other students, some accompanied by several degrees of relatives, others by just Mom and Dad. The performers were of all different ages, playing all different instruments.

When it was my son’s turn, he walked fast to the front of the room and rushed to introduce himself and played his song, which required both hands, just about flawlessly. His smile and bow told me that he knew he had done well, and he noticed that his was one of the harder songs in the recital, even though several of the other kids were older than him.

He is still a long ways from grasping the idea of hard work as investment, or recognizing the unnoticeable, glacial progress that will accompany his lessons as long as I make him go. But his apparent pride as he sat back down must have made his piano lesson Tuesdays better than his Sundays, at least for a little while.

His performance is on YouTube now. Maybe someday his students, or his fans, will look him up, and maybe they will get excited about learning the piano, too.

Acute Sports Deficiency Syndrome

Uh-oh. Snow's gone, sun's out. That means people are going to want to play sports with me. My kids, relatives, backyard football, charity runs, it is all starting again. But there's a problem.

This is another piece from back in the Volume One archives that, like a frog frozen in the mud, is finding new life amidst the rising temperatures. Don't pity me. I've learned to cope. Pity the other sports idiots who still struggle with these issues.

Please Don't Pass Me the Ball

I am dumb at sports. If our society determined overall intelligence using kinesthetic sense and, by extension, mechanical aptitude instead of language and mathematics, I would be living in a special home with several other sports-challenged gentlemen. A college student with a Social Work major would show up a few times a week to take us to a baseball field and watch as we flailed around and attempted to kick field goals with our Nerf frisbees. My housemates and I would get ice cream afterwards just for trying.

Standing around was the part of kickball I was best at

My golf game is an excellent indicator of my competition IQ. I took Parks and Rec golf lessons at twelve years old, and I did not even succeed in learning the names of the clubs. I listened intently to the instructor, often with my hand on my chin, squinting, trying my hardest to make it look like I had any idea what he was talking about.  Then I would walk up to the T-box, pull out my won wood, place my feet shoulder-width apart, bend my knees, swing, keep my eye on the ball, follow through, and hit that little sucker fifteen feet straight to my left, often breaking another kid’s nose.  1992 was a banner year for facial reconstructive surgery in the Chippewa Valley.

I still try to golf, and although there has been a tiny amount of improvement, I am still dumb at golf.  There is no way for me to translate what I understand I am supposed to do to actual body motion.  I just walk up to the ball, have a violent golf spasm, and hope it goes well.  My father-in-law joins me every few T-times, and he tries to help.  He is a retired middle school biology teacher, so he has a mountain of experience in helping mindless human beings learn new things, and preventing them from eating whatever is being dissected.  He watches my swing and makes very insightful comments on wrist-breaking and hip rotation, and then I walk up to the ball again and have approximately the same violent golf spasm, sending the ball to approximately the same spot, thirty yards to the right of fairway behind a large tree. There is always a tree.  My father-in-law usually offers some genuine yet somehow not reassuring comment about consistency.

 I am #44, the kid who looks like he's wearing eye makeup.

I have tried all the sports, and I am dumb at all of them. In youth league soccer, I would run after the ball, then fall, either out of exhaustion or because I tripped, and then become engrossed in the grass, often weaving several strands together into a sturdy grass rope. I produced impressive grass ropes in youth baseball, too, but not because I found myself on the ground. Right field was so boring, I just sat down. Middle school basketball was rough, probably because Ian and I went to Burger King and ate a mountain of french fries before each practice, then wondered why the sport was so difficult. In two years I scored only two points, because on the last game of the second season, our team was ahead by a ton, so everyone passed the ball to me until I made a basket, which, I believe, is also how Michael Jordan was able to achieve greatness. I played bar league volleyball for several years, and every success there came from finding the weak link on the opposing team and serving to him or her relentlessly, like a huge jerk. I got pretty good at pitching in an adult kickball league after several seasons. That pride was squashed under an attempt to slide into third one game. I sat on my foot and bent it in half, which was not bad enough to earn an actual sports injury. It just forced me to use crutches, and when everyone asked what happened, my response was “soft tissue injury,” which is sports code for “wuss.”

Washers: The Type of Sport I Can Handle

And now summer is coming, and my sporting disability is once again an issue, because everyone is dusting off their bocce ball mallets and trying to find enough people for a racquetball team. And now I have a son who loves sports. While I write this, he is shooting socks at a laundry basket. Some of them even go in, and he does not require seven other boys passing him the socks over and over until statistics dictate that he makes one. For him, I will keep trying my best.  If you see me on the golf course, cover your nose.  If we meet on the soccer pitch or the baseball field, I would be happy to weave you some grass. And no matter what the competition, prepare yourself. I have a pretty impressive sports spasm.

At least there's no bugs! Right?

Beautiful winter from my driveway

It's -2 again here in Wisconsin, Boston has been snowed right off the map, and April is still really far away. But you know what? Literally nothing has bit me in months. How great is that?

Just in case you're having trouble seeing the snow cloud silver lining, here's something I wrote for Volume One a few years ago. The house I live in now does not feature these hellish demon bugs, but there's another timely connection in here - I discuss city ordinances pertinent to nature, and Eau Claire just allowed backyard beekeeping. Go nature!

Centipedes Attack!

Unfortunately, it seems I have arrived at the time in my life when I must get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.  It’s not so bad, really – I experience a small amount of voyeuristic glee in witnessing which of the neighbors’ lights are still on at 3 AM, and the innocent joy of returning to my warm comforter after a chilly trip downstairs is quite pleasant.  But then spring hit, and our bugs started to return.

We live in a charming little 1950’s home on the East Hill, and amongst the various crap lodes that the previous owner left for us, we inherited an infestation of a creature called scutigera coleoptrata, or house centipedes.  If you are not currently wincing in disgust because you are familiar with this gaggingly terrifying little nugget of natural wonder, please, please google “house centipede” right now.  See what I mean? 

Now imagine all those legs on the back of your neck

Now imagine it’s 3:17 AM, you are standing (or sitting) in the bathroom, and one of these little bastards comes tearing out from under the bath mat at about 70 miles per hour.  I normally dodge backwards, hitting the door and slamming it into the wall.  Next I clamor for a tissue or some toilet paper with which to dispatch the fellow.  Then I’m plunged into a vortex of middle-school phy-ed class shame as I repeatedly jab at the thing, but, being completely incapable of “leading” it, miss numerous times.  When I finally succeed, I squash the hell out of it, but before I toss the paper wad and corpse into the toilet, I always have to look.  Usually its legs are still twitching.  Then, as the adrenaline wears off over the next few hours, I lay in bed, unblinking, until I cry myself to sleep.

My first instinct was to declare total war on these insects, and I solicited friends and the mighty internet for help.  At that point, the plan was a mix of glue traps and flamethrowers.  But, one of my amigos explained to me while we were comparing house centipede stories that these things actually hunt and eat other bugs.  Apparently, they’re not after my family at all.  Apparently, the one time that a particular monstrous one got a hold of handgun, it wasn’t shooting at me.  It was shooting at some spiders behind me.

So now I’m stuck.  Do I let the really big gross bugs live because they help control the more numerous yet smaller gross bugs?  We do get quite a few spiders around our house, little cream-colored things with bulbous rear ends.  And one summer we did experience plague-level black flies in our basement, big slimy ones with red eyes and skull earrings.  How many spiders in corners of the ceiling equals the ickiness of one giant centipede?  I assume there is some formula for this that I learned in high school biology but have since forgotten.

Not my cat, but a cat, for scale

I am not sharing our dark little insect secret to ensure that you never, ever come over to visit.  Thinking about my little arthropod houseguests has been an important reminder for me about welcoming the “natural” back into our lives.  No doubt, a lot of people nationally and in this area are trying to add more nature to their communities, but it’s rarely that happy, clean nature we associate with trees in the median of the redone Hastings Way.  Nature is gritty, stinky, and has lots of legs.  For example, I’ve been pretty anti-backyard chickens since the debate began on that issue around here.  But, when you think about it, for all the good things they can provide (eggs, nuggets, whatever), a little smell and some clucking may not be so bad.  It’s, well, natural.  It’s the same with my resistance to expanding our garden and my insistence on regular lawn fertilizing.  I like green space, and trees, and plants, like I think a lot of us upper-midwesterners do.  But if we are going to get serious about this green living sustainable gobbly-gook, it’s not always going to happen in clean, symmetrical, pleasantly-scented rows.  Sometimes we are going to have to look the other way as the giant house centipedes steal some Oreos and slink back down to the basement.

This outlook may be put to the test fairly soon.  Whether we are discussing backyard chickens, the impending death of a huge portion of our local trees at the mandibles of the Emerald Ash Borer (seriously, what is it with these bugs?!?), larger swaths of community agriculture, or increased parkland, I believe we have to be open minded, even if the proposal doesn’t jive with our watered-down, wussified version of “nature.”  As applied to my centipedes, I guess this means I give them a free pass, at least until there’s lots of spiders because they’ve stopped doing their jobs, or one comes anywhere near my foot.  Then it’s time for a squishing’.

For Real, I Did That

You can guess, just by looking at me, that I can eat a breathtaking amount of food when I am unleashed on a Chinese buffet. You would be right. You can also guess that I have put together some pretty impressive lap times on every version of Mario Kart, played two entire seasons of middle school basketball with only one basket, and transposed and memorized the lyrics to the Ewok song at the end of Return of the Jedi. Those are easy observations. Sherlock, you are not.

But there are a few surprises hidden under this balding, white-dude exterior. For example, I skydived one time. Really. Here's a video. And an article I wrote about the experience for Volume One. So there.

Airborne

Photo by Nick Meyer

Several weeks ago, I, like any responsible, recently employed homeowner, applied for life insurance. I sat in my agent’s office, filled out the paper work, and I thought I was doing pretty well. With no medications or family history of heart disease, I thought I was on track for some strikingly low premiums. Then, buried between questions about tobacco use and prior surgeries, I found the question that ruined the healthy, sane, and wildly insurable image I was trying to construct. “Have you ever, or do you plan to ever, hang-glide, para-sail, rock climb, scuba dive, skydive, or hot air balloon?” I looked at my agent and said, “You bet.” The gravity of my upcoming skydive sank in for the first time. He just shook his head, probably because that meant we needed to fill out more paperwork.

I could not sleep the night before my skydive. I was not necessarily scared. I just could not picture what it would be like. My only experiences with 10,000 feet had been in the sterile stomachs of commercial airplanes. I could not anticipate how it would feel to fall out of an airplane and, five minutes later, gently hit the ground. I was reassured by the conversations I had with people who had previously plummeted to the ground. Ken Szymanski, a fellow Volume One contributor, had learned to skydive for a bachelor party and had completed a solo jump. Megan Zabel, another Volume One regular, had jumped in New Zealand, and she had given me her videotape of the flight. Even with these successful experiences in my mind, all I could think of was a conversation my brother and I had with a mutual friend who had completed a jump. He said that everyone has a different moment where the reality of what you are doing sets in and the rush of fear or adrenaline or shock hits. I could not picture what my moment would be like.

On a brilliant Saturday evening in August, my brother Joel and I, flanked by V1 editor Nick Meyer, my wife, and a few supportive friends, drove to the Indianhead Sport Parachute Club located on Lake Wissota. The entire outfit, including the planes, fields, and buildings, is owned by Robert Stumm, a successful businessman and serious skydiving enthusiast. I had spoken with Mr. Stumm on several occasions prior to our jump day. I knew he and several members of the club were award-winning skydivers with impressive lists of qualifications and certifications. I knew he alone jumps over 700 times a year, and I knew the fourteen person staff of ISPC has completed a combined total of over 53,000 jumps. I did the math. That equals 600 million feet, which is about halfway to the moon. I knew these people were insanely qualified and experienced professionals. But the culture of ISPC, was, like my moment, something else I could not have anticpated.

The clubhouse is a big room filled with TVs, old couches and recliners, and a constant parade of people packing parachutes and gearing up for jumps. Based on the seriousness of the activity, I had expected a no-nonsense facility and solemn, serious people. Instead, we were greeted with Miller High Life signs, a rambunctious black lab puppy, and people hanging out and eating bratwurst. After checking in, Mary, one of ISPC’s more experienced skydivers, found waiver forms for us under some bags of chips on the counter. She took us to the back room and showed us a video that discussed the risks associated with skydiving. The narrator of the video was a middle-aged gentleman with a beard at least down to the middle of his chest who quoted skydiving statistic from 1988. I looked at my brother, and I could tell we were thinking the same thing. What kind of place is this?

After we watched a dozen or so skydivers land, and talked with the members of the club and several first-time jumpers, we realized that it was the perfect atmosphere for skydiving. These people are not jumping out of planes with novices because it is their job. They are doing it because they genuinely enjoy it. Personally, I would much rather plummet to the earth attached to someone who was having fun instead of someone who was only there to pay the cable bill.

My brother and I would be completing a tandem jump, which is the easiest of the jumps offered by ISPC. We would be strapped to a professional by a harness. This person worries about getting out of the plane, positioning during free-fall, steering, and landing. The training for the tandem jump only takes about an hour, and most of this training consists of your instructor highlighting all of the safety features of the parachute and harness. ISPC also offers static line training, which takes considerably longer, but ultimately prepares you to jump by yourself. If you are especially taken by skydiving, ISPC will also teach you how to pack your chute, earn certification, and become a professional skydiver.

Joel and I met the person we would each be attached to as we fell – Margaret. Margaret was awesome. She was relaxed yet professional as she explained how we should lean when we exited the plane and where our feet should be when we were free-falling. She was wearing Teva sandals, which was weirdly refreshing. Skydiving can not be that horrible if you can do it wearing sandals. We also met the rest of the colorful cast of ISPC, including Ronnie, a tall guy with a stupefying amount of energy, Jamie, a female who looked younger that I am, and the president of the club and the photographer, Todd, among numerous others. Ronnie gave perhaps the best description of skydivers. “We are a different group, a unique breed. But if it’s your first time at a new drop zone, you are automatically part of the group.”

Joel's jump; photo by Nick Meyer

As the sun began setting, it was time to jump. Joel went first. We all stood in the field and craned our necks to watch him float in. He landed, speechless with disheveled hair. It was my turn. I climbed into the plane with Margaret and Todd. We flew for about twenty minutes. I was Margaret’s tenth tandem jump of the day, and I asked her if it ever got old. “It can get a little tiring, but I love it. Everyone reacts so differently, and it’s fun to watch.” As we neared 10,000 feet, she strapped us together. Then the door opened, and I discovered what my moment was. As I stared out the side of the plane, the jolt of fear and adrenaline and shock hit me. Margaret’s confidence kept me from hesitating as we stepped onto the little platform, paused, and fell.

When asked why someone would want to skydive, Bob Stumm said, “You will never have a boring weekend again.” As Margaret and I floated to the ground, I understood what he meant. The rush was indescribable. I do not think it has fully sunk in, even days after the jump. I was nervous, but Ronnie was exactly right. “Everyone comes in nervous, but everyone leaves saying, ‘We’ll be back.’”

(Actual jump is at 7:00)

As Joel and I watched skydivers come in before our jump, he made an interesting observation. “We use all this technology to overcome nature and go higher that we were ever meant to go, and then let nature and gravity take over again.” There are dozens of reasons to skydive, from overcoming fears to unparalleled adrenaline to a metaphorical return to earth. Find your reason, grit your teeth, and jump out of the plane.