By Gwen S. Clarke
Not an oxymoron—like “giant shrimp”, “alone together” or “random order”—armchair camping gains more appeal, the older one gets.
In truth, reading about camping has charms that eclipse the experience itself, even the kind with comfortable beds and running water.
Take the case of the book that resulted from television journalist Mike Leonard’s month-long, three-generational odyssey of family togetherness and discovery. Sandwiched age-wise between his parents, who have devoted more than 60 years to refining their marriage to its essence, and his three grown children—plus a daughter-in-law, Leonard’s anecdotal and thoughtful flash-backs help the reader forget, from time to time, the challenges of maneuvering two motorized behemoths from Arizona to the east coast and back home to Chicago.
Even 11 years since reading The Ride of our Lives, I remain haunted by one particularly thorn-sharp observation by Leonard’s father. After touring the serene park-like setting of Sharpsburg, Maryland’s Civil War battlefield site and then revisiting their former neighborhood in New Jersey with its devastated, crime-ridden streets, the wise family patriarch muses: “How can they spend all that money to preserve Antietam, a place where people died, then turn a place where people live into a battlefield?” Indeed.
Armchair camping (again in a self-contained motor home) from Idaho to Alaska with author Sue Henry’s single woman, Jessie, and her lead sled dog in Dead North, was the perfect counterbalance after all that Leonard togetherness. By my lights, it’s all about tranquillity (even considering that Dead North is a murder mystery, tranquillity is relative, here).
Our working-life weekend get-aways, south to the Florida Keys or north to Disney’s Fort Wilderness in our own motor home were fun, a change of pace, but never delivered us far from other people’s industrious doings. The single road that threads through the chain of coral Key islands keeps traffic constantly in ear-shot, and though it’s churlish to complain, visits to Disney World don’t exactly lend themselves to peaceful contemplation, either.
Once we started flying to the Rocky Mountains or the Pacific Northwest, renting a motor home for several weeks at a time and leaving civilization behind us, we knew we’d found our thing. Granted, wilderness camping isn’t for everyone, but after I’d discovered a night sky undimmed by light pollution, total silence interrupted only by the sound of a nearby stream, and the relaxation that comes from re-arranging the rocks in said stream for maximum “babble”, I knew it was what my soul craved.
Full disclosure: there were a few memorable interruptions in the ear-ringing quiet. One was outside Pagosa Springs, Colorado. Frozen-footed, I was wading the requisite stream beside our campsite, in water so clear that I could see striations of turquoise in the rocks I was babbling. I became aware of distant whines , pauses, changes of tenor, and more whines.
I was hearing the sound of big rigs gearing down from the 10,856’ elevation of Wolf Creek Pass, far above me. They down-shifted, shifted, and shifted some more—the sound carrying long miles through the mountain air. That era’s popular song by C.W. McCall about a runaway truck across the Great Divide with “400 heads of Rhode Island Reds” says it all. It’s on U-Tube: Wolf Creek Pass—check it out.
Another intrusion into our serenity happened high on Arizona’s Mogollon (surprisingly pronounced Muggy-on) Rim. The sunset’s glory was jarred by a squeal-squeak like air escaping from the stretched neck of a balloon, only magnified. Some stealthy detective work led us to a magnificent elk, his harem, and the shattering of a long-held image. Ignoble and ignominious are apt descriptions; it was NOT a bugle.
Once we retired to our secluded cleavage in the bosom of the Blue Ridge, a move toward camping eventually arose, but considering that outside lights and noises can’t find their way in, and I am surrounded by streams to babble, it died for the lack of a second.
