The Culture of Camping

When I was a kid, I spent some time in Scouts. Not the Boy Scouts – I washed out long before I reached that level – but the Cub Scouts, where almost all of my friends landed and thrived before moving on to bigger and better things. In Cub Scouts, we learned about a lot of things, but none of it really resonated with me. Still, I was on the fence in terms of whether or not I liked the experience.

And then we went camping.

I hated camping from the minute we left the city limits and headed for the wilderness. We slept on the ground (way too hard) in groups of four (not enough privacy) in tents. Why were we making our own campfires when matches and lighters were available? Why were we catching our own meals from this algae encrusted pond when we could have stopped at a grocery story on the way to this God forsaken wilderness? Throw in the farting contests – I might be the only male in the world that doesn’t find bodily functions all that humorous – and it wasn’t long before I was looking for the escape hatch on the scouting experience.

The reason that I mention this is because I fully expected the camping aspect of this journey to be the least enjoyable part of the process. You could make the point that it’s not really camping when you’re in a 40-foot RV that’s equipped with a bedroom (no hard ground), a kitchen and a refrigerator stocked with food (no fishing), a shower (no bathing in the lake), and two flat screen TV’s, and while I wouldn’t disagree with that, I still wasn’t looking forward to it.

And then I discovered The Culture of Camping.

The people that populate these campgrounds are just different. You pull into one of these places – and it doesn’t seem to matter where they are, how small or large they are, or what amenities they have –  and you immediately become part of a community. You might be a stranger when you get there, but by the time you leave you’re part of this brand new family. Camping folk are friendly, outgoing, and extremely generous. More often than not, we’ve had the fanciest, most opulent rig in the place, but that hasn’t stopped people from offering us food, wood for the campfire, or anything else these people think we might need. And once they find out that we’re incompetent rookie campers, we are immediately bombarded with helpful tips on anything from where to go to get the cheapest diesel fuel to how to take care of my feet so they won’t blister any more than they already have.

Being a world class cynic, I was initially suspicious of such congeniality. Why were these strangers inviting us to eat with them less than five minutes after meeting us? Did they want something in return? No. Turns out that there was no motive for any of this generosity, other than the fact that it seemed to be camping protocol and that everyone appeared to really enjoy any opportunity to help each other in any way that they could.

I almost never give out my personal information. There are people that I’ve known for years that don’t have my phone number, and only a limited number of people have ever even been to my house. But I’ve given my number to at least half a dozen people in these campgrounds, and I find myself actually hoping that these folks will stay in touch.

Alas, none of this has changed my views on camping. I still don’t like sleeping away from The Fortress of Solitude, and while this fabulous RV offers many of the comforts of home and is about as far away from roughing it as you can get, I know myself well enough to know that I’m never going to enjoy the camping experience.

But I love camping people.

Wednesday’s Journey: Crawfordsville to Romney

Mileage: 14.8 (Benito Santiago and Vernon Wells are the only two players in MLB history to finish their careers with 217 home runs. That means that both men circled the bases to the tune of 14.8 miles on their home run trots).

On the iPhone: The Dan LeBatard Show, Meet the Press, Uncle Kracker’s No Stranger to Shame CD