MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Summer 2020

15 “ Why am I here? ” I’ve asked myself this question on camping trips more than a few times. It is difficult to adequately describe to a non-camper the feeling of waking up in the dead of night believing you’ve just had a nightmare about being cold and wet—only to realize your tent floor is leaking during a downpour. After some minutes of panic and struggle, you must let go of that all-powerful urge for basic human comfort. It won’t happen tonight. There’s no immediate exit out of this, no entertainment but your thoughts and no saviour but sunrise. With camping season threatened or curtailed by the pandemic, I find myself thinking about past trips—back when I had no idea how good I had it. I relive not just the good times but also the “bad” times, like the tent- flooding incident, which happened when I was solo-backpacking in Killarney Provincial Park. I realize now that, in a world full of more varieties of hardship than I can imagine, shivering in a tent for a night isn’t true suffering. In the moment, it sure felt like it. The midnight downpour combined with the leaky tent floor threatened everything in my immediate world, particularly the peace, love and understanding I venture into the wilderness for. Now I see it and other minor mishaps as valuable experiences in retrospect because their memory serves to sharpen my appreciation of camping when it’s good, and much else besides. My first “Why am I here?” moment came fairly early. At 13 years old I was on a canoe trip on the upper Missinaibi River in north-central Ontario with my father, my uncle and his friends. I was lying awake at around midnight in a two-man tent in a clammy sleeping bag while my father beside me (and everyone else in nearby tents) snored loudly—louder even than the rain, which had been falling all day. We were camped near the end of the slow, twisty section of the river through Peterbell Swamp, apparently in the middle of a mosquito population bomb. With no one my age to talk to, no girls, no candy and no boombox, this trip wasn’t turning out to be very cool. And at the end of a long day of paddling, our only campsite option proved dismal: sunken, fantastically buggy and closed in tightly by an endless Mirkwood of boreal forest. Compounding my unhappiness was the song I’d heard on the radio in my father’s Toyota Tercel SR5 just before we started our trip, now playing constantly in my head: “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” from the Footloose soundtrack. (Though when I re-listen today I have to admit DenieceWilliams’ vocal performance is masterly in the outro when she breaks soprano.) Lying awake worrying about bears while mosquitoes attacked me in the damp tent and “Let’s Hear it for the Boy” on repeat—not quite Apocalypse Now , but my own sort of hell on a river nonetheless. Only after you’ve been miserable in a tent are you fully appreciative of sleeping well in one. It’s a good feeling to lie secure in your nylon lifepod, reading by flashlight while the bugs whine in vain just outside your genius- engineered tent mesh. And it matters not if the weather threatens, because you planned ahead and weighted down your rainfly with about 300 pounds of rocks. A mid-latitude cyclone could rip through your campsite for all you care. The universe is reduced to you and the surrounding night, and some kind of elusive earth-plus-one harmony hovers closer than ever. So why does camping matter? Why should we do it? If you want to know, paddle hard, alone or with family or friends—as soon as health regulations allow—to a wilderness island in any publicly available northern Ontario lake. Pitch your tent under a stand of white pine. If you listen carefully to the forest as you settle into sleep, you’ll know your answer. –Ned Morgan, Editor WHY CAMPING? “Not quite Apocalypse Now …” SCOTT CAMERON NEDITORIAL