Big Bear(ly) Camping

To me camping used to be taking your car only as far as the trail head and parking it, then - like a modern Atlas - taking the world upon your shoulders and hiking as many masochistic miles as you could into the pristine wilderness and setting up shop. You would live by your wits and what you dragged along with you. You would pump your own water, start your own fires, chase down and kill your own gazelles, buffalo, grizzly bears, etc., etc.

Things have changed. "Camping" is now an activity that takes place (and must take place) within 3.8 feet of the automobile you used to get there. "Roughing it" implies that you might have to pass three or four other campsites on your walk to the hot showers complete with private changing rooms. Your only options for food are whatever you can pack into three coolers and four grocery bags, or can bring back from the Vons two miles down the road. And whoa be it unto you if you have trouble lighting a fire, because then you are forced to hike another two or three campsites down the little asphalt road to the campground host to get pre-dried, pre-bundled, and all-but-pre-lit firewood (for a price that is indeed inflammatory).

While my pride bristles a little at this redefinition, my more logical side has less of a problem with it. As I get older I'm finding it harder to maintain the façade that I really love being eaten alive by mosquitoes, living for days on beef jerky and M&Ms, spending 45 minutes pumping 8 ounces of water, and smelling like if I'd bathed at all, it was likely at a waste treatment plant. I'm much more inclined these days to gripe and complain bitterly about my bondage to safety and security, my lost freedom and spontaneity, and my thwarted wanderlust and primordial longings. I may rant and rave in inner turmoil as the call of the wild ravages my soul, but I'm really only faking it and am actually happy for the excuse to not have to climb Kilimanjaro after not having gone to the gym in 3 months. Promise you won't tell anyone.

With that in mind, last week I took the week off of work and took the family on our first "camping" excursion since the kiddos came along. We went up to the San Bernadino Mountains to Big Bear Lake and stayed at the Serrano campground somewhat near the lakeshore. We had to hike that whole 3.8 feet from our car to get to our tent. (Truly exhausting, considering the 0.4 inch elevation gain.)



This was L and N's first real experience with a tent. To be fair, I did set it up in the backyard the day before we left to air it out because it smelled, well, ...rather like an old, well-used tent - woodsy - ruggedly outdoorsy. L preferred the term stinky. Mommy wisely had no comment at all.

Within an hour N had doused it thoroughly with the hose. ("Daddy clean!")


So on a camping trip, what's the first thing you do after setting up camp and putting all in order? You get back in the car and drive an additional 5 miles to the public beach, of course, where you can spend untold hours enjoying the pristine peace and quiet with 400 other Angelenos also up in the mountains enjoying the solitude of the wilderness.

OK, tell me it's not just me. Stacy looks very Capt. Von Trappish to me here.

After our alpine lake adventure, we returned to our campsite (#1 out of a couple hundred - we felt special). Stacy and the kids had to stay behind while I bid them a tearful farewell and made the arduous and risky walk to the campground coordinator's site. There I put all my wilderness skills and years of camping experience into play to purchase a small bundle of firewood, returning to the campsite via the same perilous path I just left. Needless to say, Stacy was a nervous wreck and was nearly consumed with worry for my safety the entire 4 minutes I was gone.

I was able to enlist far more help than I needed getting the bonfire ablaze. Soon it was an inferno and L was able to sit back and reminisce on LA smog. Dinner consisted of some hotdogs for the kids, grilled corn-on-the-cob, and a barbecued tri-tip that I hunted down and killed with my own hands at the Vons only hours earlier.

I seem to have mastered the ability to so place a hotdog on a campground fire grate as to always have it immediately roll off and fall into the cinders below. Not sometimes. Not often. Always. You'd think the laws of probability would fall in my favor occasionally. But no: Always.

With the day drawing to a close and Daddy having a well-defined sense of what must go into a campside evening, the extremely over-exhausted kids could not be allowed to go to bed before the ritual flaming of the marshmallow - also known as The Rite of Smore. L and N were both a little disgusted by my insistence that no marshmallow was worth eating that hadn't been engulfed in its own little flame for at least 10 seconds. (I firmly believe that if you can't do a decent Status of Liberty impersonation for 10 seconds with your flaming marshmallow, then it doesn't qualify to be put in your mouth.) Stacy kept muttering something about "carcinogens", but I never could catch just what.




After that it was beddy-bye. A two-man tent should be sufficient right? After all, Mommy and L are chicks! It was an interesting night. (Notice the amazing extremes I went to to avoid saying a "restful night".) L and N both displayed an uncanny ability to sleep crosswise. No matter how many times we turned them around to align them with the length of the tent (and more importantly, Mommy and Daddy), they still managed to rotate themselves around 90 degrees within 15 minutes or so. Most of the night we looked like a human tic-tac-toe game. Luckily the kids were so tired they didn't even hear the wild and terrifying wilderness sounds of KLOS 95.5FM coming from the darkness all around us!

Thus ends Day 1. I'm too tired to think about reliving Day 2 now. Tune in later!