It's great to
get away from the city, to spend some time in the wide-open spaces where the air is fresh
and the sky is blue and the silence is not nearly as noisy.
It's great to get away from all the big city frustrations: crime ... traffic ... reality
TV....
There are so many relaxing things to do in the mountains: fishing in a mountain stream,
hiking up a mountain trail, playing Scrabble with mountain goat.....
Why would anybody want to go camping in the woods? Everything out there will either eat
you, bite you, or give you a rash.
I used to
really enjoy camping, spending a night under the stars close to nature. Then one night
nature crawled into my sleeping bag.
There's
something to be said for spending a night under the stars and listening to the sounds of
the great outdoors: the chirping of the crickets ... the croaking of the frogs ... the
burping of the campers.....
This year I am prepared to go camping. I just invested $200 in a hydraulic mosquito
swatter.
But camping is
great for children. Every child needs to go camping, to be someplace completely away from
it all where he can unwind and run and play and catch tarantulas.
Catching tarantulas is tricky, though, because you never find a tarantula when you're
looking for one. You can only find a tarantula when you're not even thinking about
tarantulas and one suddenly appears on your foot.
Tarantulas are almost always caught by people who just wet their pants.
I'm not the type who likes to rough it in the great outdoors. I'm waiting for someone to
invent a microwave campfire.
The latest thing for campers: a pup tent with a satellite dish.
It's just thing for people who want to get away from it all and can't find a forest wired
for cable.
Everything is relative. You take one guy sitting in the dirt wearing old clothes and
singing to himself -- in the city, he's a wino. In the country, he's a camper.
When I'm out camping I have a problem. I can't go to sleep next to a rushing stream.
Sounds too much like my wife gargling.
As a child I spent my summers at Camp Calamine -- the camp with a rash of
activities.
We went camping last year, and hanging around our campsite was an old owl that kept going,
"Hooo... Hooo..." Every night it was "Hooo... Hooo..." Well, I
managed to ignore it, but he kept it up: "Hooo... Hooo..."
Then, as we were leaving and just as I was getting into the car, another owl flew up and
said, "Hoooo." The first owl says, "Forget it, they won't tell ya
nothin'!"
I'll tell ya, I've always been in favor of buying generic, but that's the last time I sit
around a campfire boning marshmallows!
Well, that's it for the camping season. I put away all my camping equipment for next year:
the portable radio, the portable television, the portable refrigerator.....
The vibrator sleeping bag....
