What I Learned from My First Real Camping Trip

Three days in the woods gave me a whole new perspective

“Please come camping with us. I know you will love it.”

My sister-in-law, Viv, has been saying this to me for the past two years. I’ve hemmed and hawed. I’ve been legitimately busy. I’ve avoided the topic.

But this year, I had to face the music. I could see that this was genuinely important to Viv and to my 4-year-old nephew, Felix, who loves nature as much as I do, so I finally gave in and agreed to go with them for a 3-day trip.

Why all the delay? Believe it or not, I don’t like camping. I am happy to spend all day outside — and the next, and the next, and the next. But at night, I want to crawl into my cozy, warm bed. I get too cold sleeping outside.

Also…tents trigger my claustrophobia.

But as I get older, I think it’s more and more important to stretch out of our comfort zones. I don’t want to become calcified. Set in my ways. Overly fixated on familiarity.

I know from experience the scariest, most uncomfortable things I do are the things that make me grow the most.

So off we went, out to my favorite river area just 35 miles away. And I was right — I learned a lot from the trip. Those three short days genuinely changed me.

We started our first day by caravaning out to one of my favorite trails that winds along the river. The bathroom housed a yellowjacket nest, so we all had to pee in the bushes.

Ever the model of competence, I backed my bare ass into some thorny bracken and if that wasn’t enough, I realized (too late, of course) that I was standing on a bed of cheatgrass, the spiky heads of which attached themselves to my underwear as I pulled my pants up.

My brother, Levi, good-naturedly teased me the entire way to the end of the trail, as I literally dug my hand into my pants again and again to pick out those wretched little spikes that were digging into my ass.

Thankfully, when we reached the end of the trail, I forgot all about my cheatgrassed-ass. That particular spot is like a fairy wonderland. There are ferns and vines everywhere. The water is clear and reflects the greens, blues, and reds of the vegetation and stones around and beneath it. It’s shaded by the tall pines and when the wind blows, little seed pods skitter down around you like “summer snow,” as Felix called it.

Viv and I talked about my sister’s upcoming move while Levi played with Felix. In light of losing my deep connections with her kids, I confessed that I was thinking about adoption…maybe…I don’t know…possibly.

I told her I was so scared about it all. Adopting will not assuage the pain of no longer being a huge part of my nieces’ and nephews’ lives. And it definitely will not heal the heartache of losing Alex — a child who somehow feels like my own. Will I ever be able to look at another child and love it as much? Won’t everything else feel like a poor substitute?

And who’s to say I’ll love the kid, at all? How do you know? What if you end up with a kid you just don’t get along with? That can happen, right?

And then, of course, there’s the biggest issue of all — that I’m not convinced I would be a very good mother.

One thing I love about Viv is that she tells it like it is.

“I couldn’t have adopted,” she confessed. “I knew I needed to have my own so if it turned out to be much worse than I’d imagined, there would be no possible way for me to give them back, so to speak. And you know what?” she went on, while adjusting 11-month-old Mabel, who was breastfeeding, “I’m not even sure we did the right thing. I love the kids, but there are days when I hate this. When I just don’t know if I was meant to be a mom.”

Viv joked that it was probably the last thing I wanted to hear, but honestly, it was exactly what I needed to hear. I was comforted by the fact that such an amazing mother is on the fence about parenthood even as she’s in it. I so appreciate people who can share that level of honesty with others. Especially when it comes to parenthood.

Then we sat in silence for a long time, watching Felix throw handfuls of dirt into the river over and over again, the “summer snow” raining down around us.

One of my biggest aversions to camping was trying to sleep in a tent. I get such claustrophobia in enclosed spaces. I was very nervous about it.

My brother and his wife brought their 6-person tent since they’d grown out of it after Mabel’s birth last autumn. They lent me their giant, full-sized inflatable mattress that almost filled the entire tent.

And when it was time to turn in, Viv said, “Come into our tent if you freak out. Don’t even hesitate.” Then she added, “Oh, and I set up a string of fairy lights in your tent, so you’ll have some light in there which might help you feel more comfortable.”

I gave her an extra huge hug. It occurred to me how lucky I was to have them in my life, especially right now when I feel like I’m losing some of the people I love the most.

And guess what? I actually slept for two 2-hour stretches during the night and wasn’t too cold.

Although the mattress did slowly deflate during the night and I woke up in the middle of a rubber canyon filled with blankets. You can’t win ’em all…

“You know you get a merit badge for all these accomplishments,” my brother said the next morning, around the campfire. “Getting cheatgrass in your underwear. Your first camp dinner. Sleeping in the tent.”

This became a running joke for us. Any time I expressed doubt about whether or not I wanted to do something, Levi would cajole, “There’s a merit badge in it for you…”

But at some point, I realized it was more than a joke. Levi was trying so damn hard to make me like camping and to do everything and anything that would make me feel comfortable.

At some point, Viv even admitted to this. “We just want a camping buddy so badly and it would be so perfect if it was you. You love nature as much as Felix does and I want the kids to be close to their family. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure you have fun.”

I was so touched by that, especially in light of the juxtaposition of the situation with my sister. It’s so hard not just to know she is moving so far away, but that she doesn’t seem to care what happens to the family connections once she’s gone. There’s been no plan to make sure we all get a chance to spend a little more time together before the big move, no mention of how we’ll navigate the next few years (and beyond?) so far apart…

I remember sitting in my chair that afternoon, staring up at the sky, all those pine trees making a beautiful pattern against the blue and feeling both bereft and hopeful, angry and grateful at the same time. The world felt so full of unnecessary pain and loss and yet also brimming with beauty and love.

By the second day, when Viv and I ran back to town for more ice, I turned my phone back on to check if either of my parents had left an emergency message. There was nothing. I almost logged in to check my email and social media and then immediately put my phone back into my bag.

The stillness and isolation of camping had really opened my eyes to how much needless screen time I pack into a day. And for what? I didn’t feel like I was missing a damn thing out there in the woods.

I sat with my family and talked. And sometimes we sat and didn’t talk. Or we walked. Or we ate. That’s it. And it was perfect.

We went to a lake on the second afternoon and I sported my hairy legs out there on the beach for everyone to see. It was another strange moment in that day when I felt confronted by the “real world.”

I was convinced everyone was staring. Judging me. Thinking I looked sloppy or unfeminine (which is not something I want to care about, by the way).

But I did my best to suck it up and just be there in all my hairy glory.

My brother said, “It’s really not a big deal. I can barely tell.” I am pretty sure he was lying (it’s not hard to miss all this dark hair on these pale legs). But I appreciated that he simply supported what I was doing and didn’t give me a lecture on why it was a pointless experiment in feminism, which most of the women in my life have done.

Felix looked at my legs many times during that afternoon, and I wondered what he thought, since he was so familiar with his mother’s smoothly shaved legs. But he never said anything, nor appeared to really care.

In the car, on our way back to the campsite, he let out a big sigh and said, “I love camping with you, Auntie. We’re like two little wolves out in the wild.”

What can I say about this experience that would truly illustrate what it meant to me?

Sure, there’s a huge part of me that thinks camping is way more trouble than it’s worth. Why not just pack up a cooler and a backpack and go on a day trip?

And then there’s the part of me that feels totally in her element sitting out under a full moon by a fire and knowing I’m going to be sleeping in the tent just behind me. That’s where we belong. I believe we have a cellular memory of that on some level and maybe that’s why so many people love camping.

But what I valued the most was the way it totally and completely removed me from the world in a way that I really needed. I needed to be away from what’s trending on Twitter. I needed to be away from the news. I needed to be away from emails and comments. I needed to be away from obsessing about my projects, my writing, my goals, my worries.

I needed to be in a place that recognized me as the wild animal that I am.

It was hard to come home. I mean, sure, I really, really wanted to take a shower and I was dying for a real toilet (though I assure you, I never again got cheatgrass in my underwear). But still, something about being home felt oddly unappealing to me.

I realized I get too stuck in my ways. I get too lost in other people’s voices and opinions. I lose time doing stupid, meaningless things.

I want something different. I want to be with people. I want to challenge myself to step outside my carefully controlled world. I want to stop and notice the seed pods showering down from above, illuminated in the streaming summer sunlight.

There is so much more to life than the world we have built for ourselves. And we’re missing it.

I don’t want to miss it anymore.

© Yael Wolfe 2020

Encouraging the wildness within: