The weather finally has turned favorable for all sorts of outdoor activities, such as hiking, swimming, biking, blowing off M80s in the middle of the night, tearing up the asphalt on low traffic streets and roads with rubber-burning, squealing tires, and camping.
I enjoy the beauty of the great outdoors by viewing it through a large, plate glass window with a local brewmaster’s product in hand. No, that’s not entirely true because I write this bit of educational material sitting in an outdoor lounge chair on my screened-in patio. Still, it allows me to enjoy the great outdoors without all the flies, wasps, pterodactyls, mosquitoes, drones, komodo dragons, and other forms insect life that call the environment home and are intent on making my body fluids part of their daily sustenance.
On a trip to Florida with family and friends some years back, we decided to find some Nature, which existed mostly outside our station wagon, and visit the Everglades. The Everglades have been designated a national park, a preserved natural environment where tourists can visit and be eaten by alligators. Our communing with Nature there lasted for, maybe, 15 minutes, which included 14 minutes combined to enter and make an exit the park. I drove us in and stopped at a scenic location where airboat rides were offered. Before all of us made an exit from the car, we were attacked by hundreds of large black mosquitoes, evidently high on crack. We fought them off with karate chops, jack handles, and other weaponized common objects, jumped back in the car and sped away to a safer area, some where in Iowa. It was most likely a good thing, because who knows what manner of swamp denizen might have been waiting to snack on us if we hung out? I would have liked to blame the brutal attack on Ron DeSantis, governor of Aurora, but he wasn’t around then.
Long before I learned that camping was Nature’s way of telling me to get a room, camp outs with the Boy Scouts pretty much cured me of the desire to camp which you may have gathered from some of my previous columns in The Voice. Invariably, I finished these camp outs half-frozen, soaking wet, or diseased, most often with varying degrees of all three.
We adventurous boys spent nights in the woods getting bitten and scratched going on snipe hunts or trying to find an outhouse, or days getting dirty and wet on the banks of a creek trying to catch the elusive gefilte fish or find an outhouse. To obtain one merit badge (I think it was the “If You Don’t Die, Hooray! Merit Badge,”) we teamed up in pairs to spend a day and night in the woods, building our own shelters and finding edibles to sustain us. Our only equipment besides what we were wearing was our mess kits, canteens, flashlights, scout knives, a hatchet, and a compass.
My cohort and I did a great job of building a lean-to sturdy enough to trip Godzilla. Eating was another story. Because of our comprehensive Boy Scout outdoor training, we knew not to eat anything marked with a skull and crossbones, so we collected a bunch of bull grass (whatever that was) to boil for soup, which required a fire to boil it. After the usual stick-rubbing thing went nowhere, my companion pulled out a smuggled book of matches and we had our fire. The soup wasn’t fit for human consumption, but could possible serve as a substitute for creosote, so we planned to just wither away from malnutrition and get some rest.
There was only one night of the entire camp out week when it rained and it was our merit badge night. We had done such a good job of constructing our lean-to’s leaf-and-stick roof, no rain dribbled through. We had done such a good job of squirming around in our sleeping bags, we knocked out the leaves and sticks by our feet, and osmosis wicked the cold rainwater from our feet up to our necks and we were soon soaked and shivering. The light of dawn found us together with every other kid who’d attempted to earn the death-defying merit badge, congregated in our wet underwear near picnic tables, counting heads to see if anyone had become bear fodder overnight, or had been consumed by lethal parasites from eating woodland food provided through the benevolence of Mother Nature.
In addition to learning that the pages of my Official Boy Scout Handbook could be used to start a fire, and for any thoughts I may have of future communing with Nature, I learned that bears are Nature’s way of saying, “Get your sissy, middle class, suburban, butt outta here!”