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Aug. 3rd, 2014 09:35 pmApropos of absolutely nothing, I got smacked tonight with a random desire to go camping.
Now first of all, I literally can't. The lift that I use for bed transfers and toilet transfers is not portable; my wheelchair does not go off-road and anyway tends to need electricity; and so on. And second of all, real camping is full of all sorts of annoyances, bugs and spiders and Mosquitos (which my iPad insisted on capitalizing, nfi why), and grit in your food, and campfire smoke in your eyes and lungs, and poison ivy and poison oak, and rocks that you can feel through your sleeping bag, and skunks and bears, and other campers especially ones who are drinking, and ...
Yeah. It's not /real/ camping that I want. It's /idealized/ camping. Where everything is comfortable yet rustic, where you have enough quilt around you at night to stay cozy warm as you stare up at the stars, where the wildlife is either cute and close or cute and distant but never annoying or scary, where there are no signs of other people, where you don't need food except for an occasional granola bar and plenty of s'mores, where you stay up a few hours after dark to enjoy the campfire and said s'mores but then get sleepy and drift off to sleep only to awaken fully rested before dawn when the birds start to sing, where you have enough yarn with you to knit up a sweater...
Okay, maybe the last bit is just me. But anyway.
I don't know what is at the root of this, because it feels like there's a Something that I'm just not getting. A little bit is just the whole societal message of Camping Is Fun (never mind that I was never that fond of camping). More, perhaps, it's an expression of wanting independence, because "spend time isolated in the wilderness" is an extreme example of the independence /that I do not have/ and my yearning to go camping is not about putting my body in the wilderness so much as feeling capable and self sufficient.
A lot of it is that I just feel ... disconnected? Isolated? Ouf of touch? ... with nature. With the sky, with the stars, with the rhythm of sunrise and sunset. I have for a long time wanted for one thing to live in a place with visible stars (I have quite literally considered the backyard pseudocamping of sleeping out on the back porch in my chair tilted back while wrapped in a quilt, except that there is too much light pollution and anyway my tree tends to shed rather a lot) and for another to have a transparent roof (good for lightning storms and meteor showers as well as regular sky stuff, just neither practical nor possible), and I sometimes wonder how much of my sleeping problems are because of the false light of computers and iPads and electric lights disconnecting me from any natural rhythm.
(And the last bit leads me to wonder how much of the wanna-go-camping thing is just wanting to sleep easily and wake rested.)
Now first of all, I literally can't. The lift that I use for bed transfers and toilet transfers is not portable; my wheelchair does not go off-road and anyway tends to need electricity; and so on. And second of all, real camping is full of all sorts of annoyances, bugs and spiders and Mosquitos (which my iPad insisted on capitalizing, nfi why), and grit in your food, and campfire smoke in your eyes and lungs, and poison ivy and poison oak, and rocks that you can feel through your sleeping bag, and skunks and bears, and other campers especially ones who are drinking, and ...
Yeah. It's not /real/ camping that I want. It's /idealized/ camping. Where everything is comfortable yet rustic, where you have enough quilt around you at night to stay cozy warm as you stare up at the stars, where the wildlife is either cute and close or cute and distant but never annoying or scary, where there are no signs of other people, where you don't need food except for an occasional granola bar and plenty of s'mores, where you stay up a few hours after dark to enjoy the campfire and said s'mores but then get sleepy and drift off to sleep only to awaken fully rested before dawn when the birds start to sing, where you have enough yarn with you to knit up a sweater...
Okay, maybe the last bit is just me. But anyway.
I don't know what is at the root of this, because it feels like there's a Something that I'm just not getting. A little bit is just the whole societal message of Camping Is Fun (never mind that I was never that fond of camping). More, perhaps, it's an expression of wanting independence, because "spend time isolated in the wilderness" is an extreme example of the independence /that I do not have/ and my yearning to go camping is not about putting my body in the wilderness so much as feeling capable and self sufficient.
A lot of it is that I just feel ... disconnected? Isolated? Ouf of touch? ... with nature. With the sky, with the stars, with the rhythm of sunrise and sunset. I have for a long time wanted for one thing to live in a place with visible stars (I have quite literally considered the backyard pseudocamping of sleeping out on the back porch in my chair tilted back while wrapped in a quilt, except that there is too much light pollution and anyway my tree tends to shed rather a lot) and for another to have a transparent roof (good for lightning storms and meteor showers as well as regular sky stuff, just neither practical nor possible), and I sometimes wonder how much of my sleeping problems are because of the false light of computers and iPads and electric lights disconnecting me from any natural rhythm.
(And the last bit leads me to wonder how much of the wanna-go-camping thing is just wanting to sleep easily and wake rested.)