Suddenly It’s Camping Now?

You can’t read a travel or adventure blog without tripping over camping. Frustrated by lockdowns and seeking socially-distant alternatives to vacations and getaways, people are hitting the road and sleeping in vans, campers and tents. What was once reserved for grade-school scout troops or extreme backpackers has suddenly become the go-to American pastime.

For those who don’t want to travel with a small building (as Bill Bryson once wrote) a whole subset of recreation called VanLife has emerged. Remote workers and digital nomads are reconditioning vans, SUV’s and even compact sedans into makeshift campers in order to travel, seek adventure and even to live a minimalist life permanently on the road.

If that sounds inconvenient to some, it’s nothing but enticing to me.

It may just be one of my habitual escape fantasies, because I haven’t actually camped in over three decades. And the last time I experienced anything that remotely  resembled “camping out” was 20 years ago—and then it was “by accident.”

But in the middle of the holiday season, still dealing with pandemic pandemonium, when people and things are still locked down and no one is really resisting, when the entire country is at each others’ throats over politics, I can’t seem to escape the very notion. Thoughts and memories and fantasies have drifted unbidden into my idle minutes and taken up a persistent residence, challenging every vision I was carefully constructing for my future,

I’ve tried to dismiss them as romanticized notions but they refuse to remain discarded, they won’t stay in their lane. Every time I think about living out my dreams and passions–the way so many relentless emails, blogs, vlogs, videos, e-books and virtual zoom classes have instructed me to—I just can’t help it. Images of sleeping in a tent or van under the stars on a late summer night with the serenade of a billion crickets intrude upon me and unearth a long-abandoned desire.

And at once I’m right there, alone by a campfire I’ve created and nurtured, with that impossibly intoxicating fragrance of wood being consumed by flame, gazing up at a million galaxy roadways. Or, maybe not so alone, perhaps with new-found road friends or suitable companions sharing a laugh and a glass of wine. But more often than not it’s a stubbornly solo image.

“The cure for loneliness is solitude,” wrote poet Marianne Moore, and while I haven’t quite figured out how that works. I sense it as a truth in my heart.

But am I, in fact, overlooking reality? Haven’t I outgrown the idea of camping out? Am I really up to sleeping in a sleeping bag and cooking in a makeshift camp kitchen? Aren’t I too old to be wrangling with tents and tarps? Too out of shape to be gathering water and firewood? Or answering the call of nature in primitive outhouses? And carting food and supplies in, trash out?

And yet, and yet…in the years since I gave it all up and opted for the comfort of rented hotel rooms and indoor plumbing, something amazing has happened. The world of camping aged with me–in the way fine wine ages–and now it’s caught up to my fantasies. Glamping, #VanLife, RVs, insulated sleeping pads, tent heaters, high-tech conveniences—It’s all so different now.

The technology is, too. Portable wi-fi in the remotest corners of civilization, digital nomads, nature-obsessed eco-adventurers, lifestyle renegades. How could I not be one of them when that dream has been shadowing me my entire life?

And then there’s current reality: the crushing isolation of the quarantines and pandemic restrictions. A world of people grown distant, sleepwalking through daily routines and settling for an Uber-Eats and late-night snack on the couch in front of the latest Netflix sensation.

So, is it really that outlandish, in the Third Act of my life, at a time when everything has been shaken off its trajectory, that I would seek to overcome the challenges of aging and the limitations of a life grown too small and dare to dream big once again?

To see myself in a dry desert-wash in the cool of darkness with the fragrance of fresh sage and the call of coyotes? Or sleeping in a sultry upstate park under old pines or a midland meadow where I might hear the cry of loons on a lake, the throaty bass grunt of bullfrogs, the hush of wind through tall branches, the whisper of a whippoorwill at dawn?

I have done all that and the memories feel like invitations, now.

But to return to a dream like that at this stage is a burden, a great responsibility to face the obstacles and take on a struggle with the many internalized voices saying “Don’t be ridiculous. Give it up and settle down.”

But to follow that command, to give it up so late in the game, to pretend those dreams don’t matter after everything I’ve already survived seems a disservice to whatever guiding force has been leading me all these years. It feels too much like a betrayal of the hope that I believe in and an affront to whatever divine life has decided to believe in me.

Maybe it’s become too late not to do it. Or at least to not give it a try.