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.

A Review of the Eaux Claires Music Festival

For eight hours on Saturday, I wandered around a field and listened to music performed by old friends and other musicians I’ve heard so many times they feel like old friends. On Sunday, I spent about eight hours wandering social media, searching for confirmation that my experience Saturday was as notable and unique as it felt.

Two things. One, it was. Many a Tweet and Facebook post and big city newspaper confirmed that the Eaux Claires Music Festival was a success, both on a technical, music line-up and fest organization level, and on a deeper community vibe level. Second, as far as reviewers go, I’m probably not the guy to trust. I’m biased beyond recognition, and I have little to compare to. As I kid, I saw Kenny Rogers at a State Fair. And Weird Al Yankovic. Last year I attended Rock Fest to see Cheap Trick, Live, and Aerosmith. And that is the full extent of my professional outdoor music experience.

I only attended one day of Eaux Claires, because weekends when grandma and grandpa take the kids require a broad assortment of unencumbered activities. Friday, my wife and I read on the porch and went out to dinner. Midafternoon Saturday, though, we took a hike down a wooded trail and attended the big shh-bang. Social media and the big city newspapers can fill in the specifics. The weather was warm and the food lines were long. There were art installations and multiple stages. I had a walking taco and some cheese curds. They were delicious.

Sufjan Stevens, photo by Joel Rasmussen

But there was something deeper at work last weekend. Mike Perry, author and narrator of the festival, blamed it on the rivers. Justin Vernon cited friendship, dozens of Twitter users noted the reverential nature of the crowd all weekend and assumed it was the setting, or the music, or that everyone was stoned. But there definitely was something. The Indigo Girls were a unique inclusion in the line-up, but they brought a sense of generational connection. Sufjan Stevens told the crowd that he doesn’t play festivals because of his agoraphobia, his fear of large crowds, which is actually another reason I only attended one day. But when the crowd joined in singing at the end of “Casimir Pulaski Day,” and I felt the pull of tears at the back of my throat at the grandeur of the moment, and the song finished and Mr. Stevens said, “That was amazing,” he felt that something deeper too.

Indigo Girls, photo by Arwen Rasmussen

We Chippewa Valley folk tend to be very impressed with ourselves. It is a criticism lobbed at our media and our artists and it is something I have felt. Our city puts a park on a river, someone comes along and starts hosting concerts there, and you would think we invented the whole idea of outdoor music. We train some great bands at our schools, some of those band members go off to make careers in music,  maybe win some Grammys and come back to host notable music festivals, and everyone starts looking to the water, or the weather, or, who knows, gravitational vortexes to explain how we could be so lucky, or so special. A few years ago, when I advised Student Council at Memorial High School and we produced a talent show, a group of high school guys covered a Killers’ song, and I stood in the back of the darkened theater and knew, fundamentally and forever, that the performance was one of the greatest I would witness.

But, come on. It was a high school cover band.

What my wife looks like at a music festival

I can’t say if Eaux Claires was different, or why. Authenticity is nothing that can be measured, heart and passion are elements that are hard to account for. It is entirely possible that I loved the festival because just about all of my current and former friends were there, and all day was like a huge reunion without the judgment and crappy buffet. Maybe I would have been just as impressed with Pitchfork. Maybe that walking taco was a dinner so sublime that it will go unrecognized as the pinnacle of the experience. At the end of his set, Justin Vernon seemed to get choked up, and much of the crowd with him. Why the hell would he, and I, and we, go through all that work if we didn’t impress ourselves with the product?

The internet probably doesn’t need more people raving about Eaux Claires. Thirty-six hours after “Skinny Love,” all the gushing is becoming cliché. But just in case the festival was something worth gushing about, I need to join in. I had a really great day.

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.

A Teacher's Defense of Summer Vacation

Or, Santa Can't Possibly Still Get Excited for EVERY Christmas

Some nights when I was a kid, my father would come home from work and tell my brother and me he had a surprise waiting for us in the pockets of his suit jacket. We dug through until we found the candy or little toys he had procured during his long sales trips or in between the endless meetings that occupied his life. On many nights, treats or not, I remember him being worn and depleted from dealing with challenging bosses and difficult customers. Satisfaction with his role as a provider for our family was supposed to compensate for those nights, and for the countless hours he spent doing things he didn't much care for to be a successful businessman. I'm not sure that it always did.

Summer, 2012

At one point in his career, he had a unique opportunity. Due to some diligent saving, after leaving one job that had become too distasteful, he was able to take six months off. He reveled in that time, doing what he wanted with his days. He grew a beard. That stretch was a milestone in his life. He still refers to "those six months I took off" as a cherished memory, a financial challenge, or whatever description fits into the conversation we are having.

I am a public school teacher, and in June, when I stare down three months off every year, and my father asks me what I have planned for the summer, I feel incredible guilt. It’s not induced by him. He is wonderfully supportive and proud of me and my career, and it’s certainly not because I think I don’t deserve the summer break. Summer is part of the teaching package I signed up for, a non-salary benefit offered and accepted when I completed my student teaching and started planning my lessons. It just feels like he maybe deserves a break a little more than I do.

Summer vacation is a relic, something that made sense when all kids were farm kids. It was defensible through those great eras of the traditional American family, the 50’s and 60’s, when gangs of kids were released into their neighborhoods, unfettered until sundown, to organize their own games of baseball and bike helmetless through their pastoral youths. Now we know summer devastates the progress made during the prior school year. Kids can only travel to the ends of their yards before the real and imagined dangers of modern life conspire to snatch them, and pairs of working parents pay mightily for someone else to organize their children’s baseball games.

Summer, 2013

And for us teachers, summer has become a public relations disaster, a gut punch in all the fights over standards and unions and salaries. Taken individually, most people like the teachers in their communities. Taken as a whole, there is a whole mass of people who have something terribly precious that many others would love to have – three months off. And teachers have yet to come up with a good justification for the traditional summer break.

We lamely claim that we actually work all summer, and we do. We have district meetings and curriculum writing, we plan lessons and take classes. But our summer work is not a daily, repetitive endeavor relieved only by the late afternoon clock and the weekend. We are not napping on the couch all summer, but the kind of "work" we do during those months looks pretty sweet from a cubicle desk.

We also like to point out that our salaries reflect the time off, and that is also true. With a few degrees and a professional licensure, I don't make anywhere close to what I could in the private sector, or to what my dad makes. But since I’m not on food stamps, my financial sacrifices are not evident to most.

Summer, 2014

Teachers defend summer by pointing out that teaching is a tough job, and we deserve time off. That’s true, too. There is plenty of misperception over just how difficult it is to be a successful teacher in the modern era. But lots of people, lots and lots of people, have tough jobs and don’t get that much time off.

Above all that, the biggest problem with teachers and summer is none of us seem to appreciate it, certainly not with the profundity that non-teachers would, should they find themselves with that much time off. At the start of the tenth summer of my career, I am excited and relieved, but not like I was a decade ago. For my first few years teaching, I rode the school calendar roller coaster along with my students, counting class periods to the frantic and giddy end of the year. This year, that emotion is largely gone. The exuberance never arrived. Another ten years in, summer will just be part of the routine. I imagine people who teach skydiving start to lose the thrill of skydiving after doing it year upon year. Santa must still appreciate the jubilation of all his present recipients, but at some point the routines of his chosen career must have tempered his own elation over his job. And this, I think, is what causes much of the angst over summer vacation - we stupid teachers don't even seem to appreciate the huge gift we get every summer.

Early Summer, 2015

There isn’t a defense of summer that will make non-teachers feel any better about my time off.  It is what it is. If I had signed up to be a snow plow driver, I would expect to work long hours when it snows, and spend a lot of time waiting around when it doesn't. If I worked as wedding planner, I would expect to give up all my summer weekends, and have a lot of time to chill during the winter. I signed up to be a teacher, who, around here, gets summers off. Maybe that could be changed; maybe it couldn't. If it did change, maybe I would keep this job; maybe I wouldn’t.

If I could, I would share some of my time off with others who deserve it, like my dad. But things don't work that way. So I will definitely try to give my summer the deference and respect it deserves, which is the deference and respect that someone who doesn't teach would offer. Maybe that will help.

A Preschool Commencement, or Why Certificates Aren't So Bad

This afternoon, something momentous happened. You all, you four and five year olds, many with faces already sullied with cake frosting and outfits chosen haphazardly by your frantic parents or by your colorblind selves, reached the first milestone in life accompanied by a certificate. Hundreds more certificates will eventually join the one from preschool in a manila folder in your parents’ basement. Much in your life will be recognized by a piece of paper that looks slightly fancier than any other piece of paper, as if your accomplishments are as fragile and cheap as that which is purchased by the ream and cut into scratch paper quarters when one side is used up. Perhaps your swimming lesson certificates and perfect attendance certificates and most improved player or kicker or runner or singer or dancer certificates will meet such a fate, but not your preschool certificate. That one will be worth holding on to, should you ever need to remember your preschool teacher’s name.

A preschooler, with certificate

Forgive me if I sound cynical. There are those who make fun of preschool graduation, saying this event does not deserve recognition. Is tying your shoes a less significant feat than conquering differential calculus? Not to you. Are the social pressures of the preschool classroom, when Maddie won’t play with you even though you told her to three times, and when Mason grabbed the dump truck when he could clearly see that you also wanted the dump truck, any less difficult to navigate than the cliques that await you in high school? I’ve seen the tears Maddie and Mason caused, and they are just as real as those that accompany getting stood up for prom. You probably will not remember the trials and pain that accompanied your preschool career. But that does not mean they did not exist.

Another preschooler,
with certificate

Maybe those who feel you do not deserve a certificate and a picnic and a little mock mortarboard hat have a point. Maybe your accomplishments are too mundane to warrant recognition. Those people probably feel the same way about the participation ribbons, runner-up trophies, and sportsmanship medals that will one day adorn your bedroom shelves. Recognizing everyone tarnishes the value of the first place award. Recognizing everyone fosters mediocrity and denies students, athletes, and competitors lessons on the importance of hard work. Awarding participation over achievement is the reason we have so many pudgy C-students distending their parents’ couch cushions with hours upon hours of television and selfish, slovenly napping.

The actual ribbon

To those people, and to you, recent preschool graduates, I have a story. After my family moved to a new city in 4^th grade, without the social connections that keep ten-year-olds active and fit, I turned into one of those pudgy kids. Tortilla chips and microwave Cheez-Whiz were my recreational equipment. And then in high school, after five years of pathetic self-esteem and social isolation, I joined the track team. I was terrible. I wheezed like an old man and sweated like a toilet tank on a hot day. And then, one meet, the second guy in the second-ranked relay team was sick, and I was asked to run. My team compensated for my pathetic performance, and I earned an eighth place ribbon. I was more proud of that than almost anything else I had done.

So, new kindergartners, the future class of 2028, I urge you to ignore those that would deny you this celebration. We all want and expect recognition. No one complains about compulsory yearly raises, obligatory birthday gifts, or thank yous from the boss for simply meeting expectations. No one feels his or her efforts belittled by a pat on the back. So, with that certificate, you join the ranks of humanity, all of whom expect compensation for their work and appreciative gestures from their spouses and families when they clean the garage or paint the deck or go to the gym, not like a champion, but just once. Just because many, most, even all will do what you just did, you still accomplished something, with finger paint and Elmer’s glue and snack time graham crackers.

Certificates still mean something with misspelled names

Try to not ruin that certificate with your greasy hands, even though you will receive plenty more. It may be your first of many, but the spot it holds at the bottom of the pile, in the back of that manila folder, is a place purchased with tears, and laughter, and stories about farm animals, and hazy memories, and glitter. Oh, so much glitter.

Congratulations. Now let’s go. It’s bedtime.