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One seldom hears neutral opinions about camping in general and sleeping bags in particular. The people I talk to either love the whole experience or they hate it. Never yet have I heard any of my friends or acquaintances say, “Camping? Ah. It’s not bad, but I can take it or leave it.” I suppose it’s a bit too overwhelming for most people; it can easily evoke strong feelings, depending on one’s past experience. It also seems impossible to convince many childlike souls that the object of the exercise is not discomfort. Lying in a sleeping-bag, inside a tent, on a pad and pillow—all well-made—within the sound of wind among trees, nocturnal creatures going about their lives, perhaps a trickle or even a (mild) roar of water not far off, is for me an experience of luxury so exquisite as to reduce all of the feathered palaces in this world to so much lunacy. The object of the exercise, clearly, is just this feeling. For those whose first taste of camping was bitter and lasting, or who have never tasted it at all, I can therefore feel only a mild sorrow; I could never describe to them the innumerable pleasures they’re bound to miss. I came very close to being one of them, through sheer sloth. The story is not worth the telling, but it ended at age thirty-six, when I stepped out onto the ice of Canning Lake, east of Minden, Ontario, after a long winter’s hike from town along a snowmobile trail. The full realization of what I was walking on, for the very first time in my life, came to me gradually, step by step. I was more than 50 feet from shore before the meaning of the thing wholly redrew the map of my future. I have not been the same since. Out of such transforming moments are born many humbler rituals of outdoor life, and these too partake of the overall delight—for those willing to enter them in a sincere faith in their necessity (once you’re there), and a sense of oneness with countless others who know, and have known, the wild places of the world. Can it always be made physically comfortable? Of course not. But everything is relative. How many times have you paid a handsome fee to lie upon a much-used mattress, in a much-used room, or garish “suite,” only to toss and turn half the night because you were in fact surrounded by the leavings of human indifference, or the crass frippery of human greed? If you know your equipment, have chosen it wisely and placed it suitably, these feelings are improbable in a camp, since you yourself are the architect of the whole experience, and have no one else to blame if it goes sour. You’re free to renovate your sleeping arrangements whenever you wish—at three o’clock in the morning, if the urge comes over you. And there’s no bill to settle later with the front desk. A good sleeping bag is to me a portable womb, whose joys I savor even as I write this indoors—as I said to Terry recently, to his great amusement, the blanket is an obsolete technology. An example of those joys: in the woods, I had two miniature stoves, one butane and the other Sterno, for heating foods in the tent. I don’t mean that such were the manufacturers’ intentions—quite the contrary; they invariably recommend maximum ventilation, for obvious reasons. I simply mean that I was far too lazy and self-indulgent to get out of the sleeping bag, get dressed and sit on a log in the chill breeze, trying to heat a can of pea soup in defiance of every known law of thermodynamics. I would simply unzip the entrance to the sleeping compartment of the tent, open the vestibule flap—not widely, but all the way up to the peak of the roof—and proceed to procure breakfast in bed, using the Sterno, with an absolute minimum of exertion and discomfort. When I first described this to Boss, the look on his face at the words breakfast in bed was one of startled, resentful envy. |
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