A quote: “We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.” ~~ Robert Louis Stevenson
I’ll start with a story …
***************************
The 1990s, the week before school was out for the summer. All my friends were excitedly sharing the exotic locales where their families would go on vacation. Pam’s family was doing three weeks traveling through France, Rick’s was staying in Florence, Italy, while Patty topped them with a four-week Mediterranean cruise.
I got the pity stare because they knew my family.
It wasn’t just the frugality – I mean I had four other siblings and hauling this bunch to pebbly beaches of southern France wasn’t in the budget.
Mom and dad had other plans.
It wasn’t easy in a culture of credit, tech and loads of leisure time to remember how people without any of it lived. Our family summers were about wilderness. As far back as I could remember, it was everything about living off the land – hunting, fishing, making/breaking campsites, navigation by stars – think Scouting on steroids. I loved it, I hated it. I didn’t realize my parents had a handle on a future I could never imagine.
As my grandchildren come up from the lake with a good catch for dinner, I whisper a prayer for the places I never visited with my friends. Places not there anymore.
***************************
Now, it’s your turn.
.
.
.
.
.
. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Trogluddite says: I love these vignettes. Is there a book coming out some time soon?
Cameron says: Nah. We just do these for fun. And I like your user name. Good play on words.
Cameron says: The picture fell out of an album and I was stunned by what I saw. To anyone else, this was a nice campsite early in the morning. Look at it and you can almost hear the birds in the trees.
What it is to me was the start of a long journey. I’d decided that I was going to take a gap year and do something fun with high school being over. My parents weren’t thrilled with it but I persuaded them after showing all the research I’d done.
What you are seeing is the southern end of the Appalachian Trail. Dad and I camped out there the night before I left with a few friends.
I found a few other pictures that I’d forgotten. They were taken in each state of the trail and they marked a particular point in the hike. You can see the smiles and forget just how tired and sore we were at that time.
And then I found the shot in Maine that was taken four months later. It was three days before I found that dad had died. He left me a note saying “I’m proud of you. Wish I’d done this myself.”
The minute I saw them, I knew these campers were complete tenderfoots, without even a proper guide. For starters, they’d pitched their tents right beside the river. Right now it looked nice and peaceful, not to mention an easy distance to draw water for washing and other activities. But it would take only one hard rain upstream to turn that pleasant watercourse into a raging torrent that would sweep away their encampment, and quite possibly the campers with it.
Things only got worse when I approached the campers. Not only were they unwilling to move to a safer campsite away from the river; they hadn’t even given anyone their route. They didn’t want to be tied down to a planned itinerary, because they might find something more interesting on the way that they wanted to explore. They waved their phones at me, saying they could call for help if anything went wrong. I couldn’t get them to understand how spotty cell coverage could be out here, or how even satphone coverage wasn’t 100% guaranteed.
I may have made a little impression on them when I pointed out that I was one of the people who’d probably be searching for them if something went wrong. But it wasn’t enough to motivate them to make any changes, and I didn’t have a ranger’s authority to compel them.
In the end, there was nothing to do but move on and hope for the best. All the same, I kept an eye out for any reports of trouble for the next several days, even after I’d headed home and back to work.
They got lucky, but every year I see more young people out here who act like a wilderness hike is no different from an afternoon walk in the city park. It’s only a matter of time before someone’s going to get a harsh lesson in just how dangerous this land can be for the unprepared. Even experts have gotten hurt when they became overconfident in their skills.
4 Comments