If you know me you know I’m big into camping, but I have a hard time explaining why, even to myself. But I can tell you I am a better man because of it.
Before I got married, I never really camped. I saw camping as a significant step backwards in the quality of life that I worked so hard to achieve.
So when my wife and I were planning our first vacations together as a couple, camping wasn’t even on the menu; in fact, she had had such bad experiences as a child that she said, verbatim, “I’ll do anything with you but camp.”
And I said that’s fine because I hate camping too.
Six months later we had a brand new travel trailer, and my research into this strange art of intentional, periodic homelessness was just beginning.
That’s what camping is, isn’t it: spending a fortune to live like the homeless?
But there are nuances: not all “camping” is “camping.” If you go to a state park campground, you’ll see many RVs with their huge slide-outs and air conditioned living rooms with massaging, heated recliners facing huge HDTVs, and right next to them a young family with nothing but a Honda Civic, a tent, and a fire.
Most campers get along regardless, because they share a common activity, but not all campers share a common pursuit.
Some campers are there to relax, to vacation. They see camping as a better alternative to a condo or hotel room. These are typically the big RV folks.
Other campers are there to connect with nature, to hike, to get some of the outdoors on them. These are the pop-up and tent folks.
This latter group is the group I fall into the majority of the time (my wife and I sold that big travel trailer after a year learning it wasn’t really what we wanted).
This primitive style of camping is an escape into a world where you are not in your element; you don’t have control of the temperature, the weather, or your schedule.
I think that life in America is often seen as a ladder of success with pleasure and luxury at the top and “roughing it” at the bottom. In that perspective, camping is virtually homelessness.
But if life is a ladder, then what’s really going on is the bottom rung is meaninglessness and the top rung is meaning. Pleasure and comfort are after-thoughts.
This meaning-based view of life is common for the existentialist philosophers in American history, like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson (did they always go by all three names?).
Thoreau once moved out into the woods, into a shack with no amenities, to live off the land and “suck the marrow out of life” (read his book Walden for the full story).
We are all like rocks skipping across the surface of life, trying desperately to slow down and enjoy it and relax, but as soon as we do, we slip below the surface and forget what we were made to do.
We were all made to skip, to run, to work, to build, to create, to love, to laugh, and to cry—together. To struggle with the world and make something of it. To build a homestead and leave our mark on the canvas.
The man who bears the name of the people of God got his name one night as he wrestled with God in a river.
Every time I setup our tent city, I take my time, and I never really finish. Always tweaking, rearranging, tying down, and drying out, but every time I get done, I step back and feel a sense of awe, like an old homesteader in the American west.
And then, every time we pack up to leave, I am more excited to be home and truly feel the blessing of “home” than ever before, and I am thankful for the little things—something different each time.
I carry more detailed memories of camping trips that were difficult than I’ll ever have of TV shows or movies, as great as those are. Especially of camping trips where nothing seemed to go my way.
That’s a lesson in itself.
What is the marrow of life? Well, that’s what I write a lot about, and it’s something you only know when you see it.
But I can tell you one thing: it ain’t on TV or sitting in a massaging recliner.