Camping

Our good friend H. has often told us that she loves camping.  So do we, but it’s been a while, so it took our trip out to Alberta and Saskatchewan to help me remember what I actually do love about camping.  We did camp in Greece and especially enjoyed the fact that some of the campgrounds we stayed in had cafes, and one even had a nice dining room overlooking the Aegean, but that was Greece and it was not Canadian camping.  Our daughter E., who has been a hard core serious hiker-camper in her day, has said that what we do is really “wussy camping”; by that she means that we load our gear in the car, drive to the campsite, and set up.  We don’t argue with her designation because, after all, that is what we tend to do.

The difference with this “wussy camping” trip is that we had to fly to Calgary to get started, so there was no throwing, or carefully stowing, our gear in the back of the Fit and driving somewhere; instead we had to pack according to Air Canada standards, which meant one suitcase for each of us, with neither weighing over 23 kg.  This was not, to my mind, an easy feat, but Lorraine took it as her assignment and accomplished it with both finesse and panache, neither of which is my strong suit in packing.  In that one camping suitcase she fit our Eureka Stormshield tent, two mummy bags, two small air mattresses, two thermarest-type mattresses, two Thermarest pillows, a wool blanket, our folding Coleman stove, a tarp, dishes and cutlery for two, our stacking cook set, and a piece of heavy duty plastic cut to fit under the tent and fly.  It was a seriously good job of packing and just enough under 25 kg to squeak through the baggage check.  There were things we needed once we landed, like the folding Canada chairs and a Styrofoam cooler, plus some odds and ends from Dollarama and the Goodwill, but then we loaded everything into our rented Versa and headed for Waterton for our first night of camping this summer.

If you read carefully you will have noted that there were two different kinds of mattresses packed into that one suitcase.  This is important.  If you don’t sleep well, then you can’t love camping, so Lorraine devised our two-tier sleeping system, with a firm thermarest-type mattress on the bottom to keep your hip and shoulder from touching the hard ground and a less firm air mattress on top to provide just enough give that the shoulder and hip mentioned above can nestle in the cushioning down as far as the thermarest.  Her key innovation was the terra cotta coloured cotton sleeves that she made to keep the two mattresses properly lined up and not sliding sideways in our tiny tent, which had little margin for sidesliding or error and seemed to be the smallest in any of the campsites we stayed in.

So one thing that I love about camping is going to sleep and waking up in a tent.  Snuggling into your sleeping bag, getting it zipped up around you, choosing which side to sleep on, and then drifting off in the mountain air is akin to bliss.  And waking up on a cool morning with sun lighting the tent, or even lying there listening to the rhythm of steady rainfall on the fly, is something wonderful that you can never experience in a house, or even an RV.

Another is the food.  I found myself (uncharacteristically) noting in my journal what we ate, in particular the evening meals.  On the one night we spent at Elkwater Lake, our supper consisted of bacon & onion omelette with tomato & cucumber salad and sourdough toast (plus a cold Kokanee that we sheltered from the Hutterite clan camped next door).  The only seasonings were salt and pepper, olive oil, and lemon juice (remember this is wussy camping), but the taste in the high clear air of the Cypress Hills was a real treat.

Lorraine said that she loves the systems you end up developing or organizing when you are camping, the small efficiencies that ensure that you can eat and sleep well, that there is dry firewood, that the tarp and chairs are well-placed, and that your site is clean enough to not attract critters.  I do too, and I also love the tallness of the trees, the bigness of the sky, the feel of the air, the way you sleep after being outside all day, and the simplicity and freedom of just being there.  And I love the glow of the tent when she has gone in to light the little LED chandelier to do a little reading before sleep while I’m sitting at the table catching up on another day in my journal and listening to the night.