“Are we there yet?”
–Every child on every car trip ever.
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Fresh off a few days camping in Killbear Provincial Park (just north of Parry Sound, Ontario), it’s not hard to draw upon quite a few parenting issues: boundary-setting; safety; and the perennial, all-time favourite? Dealing with boredom.
While boredom is endemic and particularized in its nature to the vagaries of each passing generation, the modern parent is up against an impressive source of daily engagement in their child’s life experience. The children don’t lack for entertainment. In fact, if anything, the tide has turned the other way, where children are losing the ability to countenance unmediated moments.
This is partly why I try to ensure that my son develops a taste for the bounty of the Canadian wilderness: cooking over a fire, jumping off rocks, pitching a tent, swimming under a waterfall, using a knife or a hatchet, sleeping on the earth, and figuring out how to safely and intelligently deal with the environment.
Although I accept that his initial boredom feels real, I also hope that one day he’ll have appreciation and respect for these moments. There is a life lesson in here somewhere about the importance of staying connected to those things that are very real: nourishment, drinking lots of water, exercising, constructing shelter, staying warm and protected, and having awareness of one’s environment. Good life-affirming stuff.
Frankly, I’m all too aware that for a good number of the world’s inhabitants, what I call camping is really similar to what they would term “life.” That’s part of the appreciation I aim to convey with these trips, where one clearly understands the nature of input and outcomes (i.e., if I don’t put that tarp up now, expect to be wet and uncomfortable tonight; leave that empty bag of chips on the picnic table now and don’t be surprised when my site looks like a crime scene later). These trips also allow one to better appreciate the blessings available at home with such simple pleasures as a hot shower or the comfort of a plush couch.
But I can see how the camping trip boredom factor might be amped up for the video-game-playing, Instagram-checking, Facebook-updating, mod-downloading kids of today.
It wasn’t that long ago that I myself was the complaining son, bored out of my wits on family cottage or camping trips, anxious to get home to play with my friends. But the play I was missing wasn’t basement-dwelling, eight-hour zone-out gaming sessions. It was more like ball tag, hide and seek, exploring creeks and pathways, hockey, tennis, swimming, baseball, golf, or any other number of recreational pursuits (yes, interrupted with a few hours here and there of video games, at the arcade and at home).
For long car rides, me and my sister would make up naming games from A-Z using passing scenery as our source (“A grain elevator is G, not E!! No fair!!”). The alternative was to make up Weird Al-style musical parodies of our own or listen to our folks’ bad 70’s 8’track tunes. I recall a whole lotta Juice Newton and Donna Summer one summer.
My pops would snap if we voiced more than one request to stop the car for any purpose, bodily related or otherwise. This template applied to 10-minute or 10-hour trips. The rules were pretty clear. That vein on his forehead offered ample warning of the pending explosion if we went over the limit.
The boy of mine routinely asks me at least five times per trip how long we have left. Apparently I’ve inherited that vein dealie.
What’s worse, his mother indulges the request for multiple stops along the way. This is against any fatherly code with which I am familiar, yet it persists, mostly due to my grudging and fading belief in car-trip democracy (N.B. this latter ideology is modified for family-oriented international air travel, entirely due to the higher stakes involved, such as forgotten identification /luggage/ people. It’s more like a patriarchal enlightened despotism).
Once the car trip chaos is behind you, camping is a lot of fun and a lot of hard work, especially when visiting parks with the words “bear” and “kill” in them.
These words nearly caught up to our friends camping on a site a few roads down from ours. Thankfully, they are none the worse off after watching in astonishment as a large black bear wandered through their site while they sat in front of the fire.
We heard the next episode of this production as the bear made its way towards our neck of his woods. I was just about to nod off when a woman shrieked “He’s on the site!! There’s a BEAR on the site!!! AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!”
We kept a vigil but the worst was past. No further disturbances from the wildlife until the next morning, just before we went rock-jumping, as we were treated to a lengthy post-breakfast grazing session by a stately doe.
Who’s talking of boredom anymore? Bears, deer, rock-jumping, oh my! I couldn’t have planned a better boredom-busting outcome.
We are definitely getting there.
