Camping in the Age of 'Rona: The Good, The Bad & the Ugly
The other day I went camping in the Ouachita mountains up near the Cossatot River in northwestern Arkansas. The whole area is a glorious wilderness that anybody’d be happy to camp at, but The Spot is the place we’ve all been camping at for years. It has a huge clearing for several tents, a great fire pit, a swimming hole with a rope, and best of all, nary a cell phone or internet signal for at least 10 miles. If you can’t enjoy getting away at The Spot, you don’t know how to have a good time. Add in ten or so fun folks, and you have a recipe for a rollicking good time, but this year was not without a couple of challenges.
The Spot.
I’ll start with the ugly: me after six days without a shower. SIX. Spending all day in the river only does so much to cleanse the funk that comes from wilderness living. There is hair sprouting in places it has no business growing, and which I’ve spent my adult life corralling and ridding myself of. Coming down off that mountain, I was as stinky, hairy and ripe as a Sasquatch, and to my chagrin, I’d accidentally put my car A/C on recirculating for at least the first fifty miles back to Dallas. Turns out I need to get my car air filters changed out because they did NOT do the job.
If this picture was a scratch and sniff…whew!
There was the bad:
Horseflies the size of helicopters, and they were in love with one man: Dustan. Where the rest of us casually applied bug repellant, Dustan napalmed himself every couple of hours, and still they loved him. I thought the mosquitoes were pretty sparse until I came home, and every peak and valley of my body has the evidence that they were definitely flitting about.
Our shared vision: “Minks!” someone exclaimed one morning. “See the minks across the river?” We all collectively marveled at this family of Arkansas minks come to frolic and run near our camp. Thomas, who apparently has the vision of a falcon, informed us after a few minutes that we were admiring several chipmunks. Chagrin.
And the rain: we had two days of off-and-on rain, and it wasn’t a nice mountain mist. One afternoon, we huddled under our “party tent” while lightening and thunder crashed, and the sky spilled buckets of water, and the mountain puddled and ran down the hill to the river, and we were up to our ankles in mud and debris. More than a few of us slept that night in wet tents and on wet cots and put on wet clothes the next day, and my stuff still hasn’t fully dried out days later.
But there was plenty of good: time spent on the river watching the kids float by on Freakin’ Chad, Hanna’s 21st birthday boyfriend and Felicia the Flamingo, a holdover float from a couple of years ago. Speaking of a couple of years, it took approximately that long to blow her up. Some floats are worth the effort; looking at this picture, I think it was.
Felicia and the “kids”
Jason and Freakin’ Chad had a moment.
Camp humor: it’s crude humor. There were plenty of “That’s what she said” jokes as well as giggles about how to poop in the wilderness. And pooping in the wilderness is quite a treat, let me tell you. The guys have better equipment and can wander off in the woods to do their thing; they also don’t mind squatting in a downed, forked tree and riding that thing all the way to the ground when it crashes. I’m looking at you, Thomas.
Ladies, however, have a different set of equipment and a different set of standards for the more ignominious of the bodily functions. Squatting in the woods is a chore. It doesn’t make us howl like Tarzan when we do our business.
So a few years ago, Bonne came up with a solution: a bucket, a tent and Tidy Cats kitty litter. And it worked, for the most part, until the time came to dispose of all that kitty litter. And really, the only “tidy cat” in the camp after six days of no shaving and showering is the bag of litter.
No tidy cats around here…
So, Jason to the rescue: he came up with The Solution: a bucket and cedar mulch. Squat over that thing, and it’s like “your butthole is smoking a Newport,” according to him. I did a — literal — spit-take at that description, and haven’t stopped chuckling since. It is the best laugh I’ve had in months.
I’d like to formally thank Erin, Bonne and Jason for doing so much of the cooking and feeding of our happy little throng while most of us stood around waiting for the food to come off the grill. Thank you, Thomas, for the firewood and the pickin’ and grinnin’ camp singalongs. My thanks to Dustan for much of the heavy lifting and drink-fetching. Thank you to Kathyrn for all the laughs, and to Pam for your sweet words as I was ready to take off and worried about the drive home. (Which turned out to be warranted, as I was halfway home before I realized my hood was unlatched and responsible for the clattering coming from my engine!) And thank you to Hanna for her company on the drive up and “forcing” me to join her in a Fireball shot. Kennon and Cadence, you were awesome to hang out with, as always!
So that’s the good, the bad and the ugly while camping, guys. It was a GREAT trip. Another year in the bag, and we’ve hopefully many more to come.
