In my youth – before I discovered challenging intellectual pursuits like General Hospital and lying on my back with my feet up on the wall talking on the telephone until I lost circulation in my ear – I spent many hours outdoors. My parents didn’t let me watch much television, so when the weather permitted (and even when it didn’t), I went outdoors. In sunny weather, I made forts and climbed trees and rode my bike and played foursquare and constructed jewelry out of the neighborhood flora; on rainy days, I strapped my Barbies to makeshift rafts made out of fallen twigs and sent them “downriver,” usually to an untimely demise in a storm drain. I liked the outdoors.

Mainly I liked the fact that the word “outdoors” contained the word “door” – specifically, a door on the other side of which I could put myself should conditions outside become too irritating or uncomfortable. If I saw a spider, or a dead animal, or an inch worm (not the tiny cute kind, but the long fat ridgy squishy kind with visible toes), I could put a door between it and myself. If it got too cold, or too hot, or too wet, or too dark, I could close out the offending elements with a door. I liked the outdoors to have close proximity to the indoors, and I liked at least one of the indoor doors to have a bathroom behind it. I never understood the people that voluntarily went on trips like Outward Bound and N.O.L.S. Why? Why would you ever do that? Did these people actually turn to their parents at the dinner table and say, “You know, instead of getting a job this summer, I’d like to plunge headlong into the wild. I’d like to inch across canyons supported only by a thin nylon rope. I’d like to eat only ground berries and bark soufflÈ until the onset of explosive diarrhea. I’d like to spend nights outdoors, protected from growling things and barking things and howling things and squeaking things and flapping things by only a thin membrane of tent. I’d like to huck a sixty-pound backpack across the state of Wyoming, I’d like to wear the same pair of underwear until it can walk on its own, I’d like to get a few blisters that have their own post office, and Mom and Dad, I’d like you to pay for it.” And did their parents actually say, “Okay, honey. Whatever you want. You start packing, and we’ll telephone Jon Krakauer so he can get started on the book outline”? I mean, I know that girls in my class only did these trips to meet boys and make out with them around the campfire, but what excuse does everyone else have?

All right, let me give you another example. Princeton had two pre-orientation programs to choose from, Outdoor Action and Urban Action. I took one look at the Outdoor Action literature and dismissed it out of hand, because while the leaflet mentioned fun stuff like hiking and canoeing and bicycling, it did not mention other amusements like indoor plumbing and refrigerated food. My mother thought aloud that I should at least try it because I might have some fun. I informed her that I viewed flushing as the ultimate high, thank you, and buried my nose in the Urban Action pamphlet. On an Urban Action trip, you see, participants helped to transform vacant lots into gardens for low-income Trenton residents; they helped Habitat For Humanity to build and repair houses; they picked up trash and they pulled up weeds. Best of all, they returned to a nice warm sleeping bag in a Princeton classroom building each night. Truth be told, I could have cared less about the helping-my- fellow-man element; I just had absolutely no interest in scarfing down Spam in the shadow of the Delaware Water Gap and then waking up the next morning to find a nest in my shoe. I mean, if living off the land had that much to recommend it, wouldn’t all of us still do that instead of living in insect-free, climate-controlled houses and apartments? Sure, I like to look at stars and collect wildflowers and all those other twee little outdoorsy things, but until they invent a battery-operated toilet, I’ll just stay at home, thanks.

I know that I seem a little obsessive about the whole going-to-the- bathroom outside thing. Well, first of all, I suffer from pee fear, so I would have to troop at least half a mile from the campsite and remove every article of clothing before feeling relaxed enough to tinkle, much less pinch a loaf, and if I sensed so much as a single mammal of any species watching, forget it. Second of all, even though I don’t have much in the way of dignity – I once dressed as Ann B. Davis for a school talent show, for god’s sake – I don’t want to get eaten by a bear while taking a crap. I don’t want to get eaten by a bear at all, really, but I want to have my pants pulled up at the very least. Third of all, at the age of ten I took a whiz in my back yard (long story – we kids had things to do, I didn’t feel like going inside, I thought it would save time), and when I reached for a leaf, I did not see the long frond
of thorns clinging to it. I won’t say anymore about that incident, but I will note in passing that human evolution has allowed us to bypass unpleasantries like poison oak, particularly in certain sensitive areas, and perhaps we should take our cue from Mother Nature and stick to porcelain receptacles.

I also don’t like to carry heavy things all that much, and from what I understand, camping involves lugging a bunch of stuff to and fro and hither and yon. Why? I have everything I need at home. I mean, I weigh 150 pounds, and just carrying myself up a mountain strikes me as plenty challenging – must I also bring a cookstove, a flashlight, a first-aid kit, matches, 14 tins of pork and beans, a tent, a ground cloth, a sleeping bag, a canteen, a poncho, a clean pair of socks, a map, a flare gun, a fishing rod, a compass, several rolls of toilet paper, a trowel, and god knows what else? It seems to me that I have all these things, as well as many other food options and clean outfits, at home – not to mention a nice soft bed with pillows and blankets and a bedside lamp. Why leave at all? And another thing – wedging all of that crap into a frame backpack doesn’t leave any room for reading materials. If I spend the day bouncing from rock to rock like an overburdened mountain goat with emphysema, I bloody well want a book of short stories to relax with when I arrive at the top. But wait – I forgot! I won’t have time to relax! After I put down my stuff, collect firewood, put up my tent (and judging from various unfortunate incidents over a lifetime of clumsiness and incompetence with things mechanical, I would have to allow at least 3 hours for this task), find rocks to weigh it down with, dig a moat around it (yes, a moat – I know nobody has ever seen a scorpion in the northeast, but I won’t take any chances), build a fire, warm up something canned and vaguely disgusting, clean everything up, wash my socks and undies in a nearby puddle, and string up my pack in a tree to discourage bears (or other humans), the sun will have
come up and I have to start the entire process in reverse. But I don’t think campers go camping to relax. I think they go camping to prove to themselves and the world that they can spend a night away from home. Fine. Go to a hotel.

I guess I just fear a lot of stuff. I don’t really fear insects, except for arachnids, but I fear getting an insect bite that will load me up with some viral disease. I fear cutting myself and getting dirt in it and getting gangrene. I fear getting lost, catching cold, walking inadvertently into the path of an arrow shot from a cross-bow bolt, winding up in Deliverance II. I don’t so much mind the getting dirty and the heavy lifting – I used to work in a stable, and once you’ve pitchforked a rain-soaked gopher carcass out of a back paddock or wrangled a fifty-pound bag of alfalfa mash into an upper hayloft, you lose a lot of your sensitivity to things like grime and back pain – but I don’t know if I see the point. I think a lot of these “outdoor types” do have something to prove. I think that, for whatever reason, they need to feel self-sufficient; they need to feel free from the so-called bonds of all the possessions that they’ve accumulated at home, and that barging through the woods once in a while makes them feel less shallow than the presence of the espresso machine on their counter might at first indicate. Of course, all of their equipment cost a fortune, but they would probably tell you that that misses the point. It just seems like a whole lot of work to pack into my “free” time – rewarding, perhaps, but not relaxing and not comfortable.

Again, I have never gone camping, and I know that some people must go just because they like it. They like to fish, they like to check out constellations, they like to remember going with Dad at age six and getting to help strike camp. But a lot of people I went to college with went on the Outdoor Action trip just to meet people, or because they thought everyone else would do it, or because it beat putting on gardening gloves and picking up needles and crack pipes (which I ended up doing one hot morning on my Urban Action “trip”). And of course the misguided post-hippie types that have listened to just a little too much Woody Guthrie do it because they think it symbolizes a rejection of materialism, and they troop from lodge to lodge in their tatty fleece and tie-dye, thrilled to have found a way to avoid bathing. Well, they can keep the gorp, because until Eddie Bauer comes out with an extension cord long enough to let me check my e-mail from the Yukon, I’ll just stay here on the couch.

Last weekend, the Biscuit and I spent a lot of time doing outdoorsy things – hiking and fishing and paddling. I sort of liked it. I almost had an aneurysm on the way up Mount Mansfield because I smoke too damn much, and I twisted my ankle and I scraped my knee and at one point I yelled at a rock. (“Fizucking rizock!”) The Biscuit taught me how to cast, something that I never got around to asking my dad to teach me, and I didn’t do horribly, except when we drifted near shore and I threw this sweet cast and snagged a stand of goldenrod on the bank of the pond and had to clamber out of the canoe and untangle it. But I had fun. We did different things than we usually do, and I liked that. But then the Biscuit suggested that at some point we take a tiny prop plane into the middle of nowhere and live off the land for a month, “just for fun.” Uhhhhh, okay, but how does that qualify as fun? If I take that much time off of work, a naked man feeding me grapes had better figure into the vacation somewhere. I pointed this out to the Biscuit, and added that I hadn’t spent a night outdoors – well, not sober – since an ill-starred Girl Scout trip in fourth grade, and I didn’t know how to build a fire unless I had a wastebasket to start it in, and I didn’t know if this whole wilderness trip sounded very practical. He said that we could start with just a weekend and see if I could stand it, and I stupidly agreed to give it a go. I had no choice – again, I’ve never tried it, so I should probably wait and see if maybe I enjoy myself. On the other hand, I should really start checking the Sharper Image catalog for portable showers.

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