by Bethany Vanderzand

Created on: April 30, 2008

To most overwight, middle-class, westernized Americans, sleeping in a tent is as rough as life gets. No indoor plumbing, no posture pedic matress, no cable television, no central air conditioning. The truth is, we're so familiar with and dependent upon all of the modern luxuries of our daily lives that we don't know how to survive without them. We have fast food, motor vehicles, video games, cell phones, internet, microwave ovens, air purifiers, Charming Ultra, heated pools, Lay Z-Boy recliners. Let's face it; we're pampered and spoiled. So it comes as no surprise that some of us consider RVing "roughing it", let alone actually setting up a tent in the middle of the forest, building a fire out of sticks and leaves, and shitting in a hole in the ground. So the term "roughing it" is pretty relative. To some, it may be leaving behind the hair drier and DVD player to stay in a log cabin for a weekend at the Smokey Oaks resort; to others, it may be pitching a tent in the mud and roasting hotdogs over a dieing fire; to others still, it may be sleeping naked in a tree and catching squirrels with their teeth. "Roughing it" really depends on what comforts you're willing to go without, and for some of us, that isn't much at all.

People go camping to take a vacation, to get away from work and take it easy. We don't want to be tired, hungry, dirty, and achy, sleeping on the cold, hard, ground, wiping our butts with maple leaves, and being eaten alive by mosquitos. However, there are some of us who are far more adventurous than others, and don't mind being one with nature and escaping technology and unnecessary, palatial comforts.

I took a trip to the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas last summer for the annual National Rainbow Gathering. It was a community of thousands of people who had abandoned their cars on the road and trekked five miles into the forest with their camping supplies to live off of the land and the company of others. The sky dumped rain on us for a week, and all of the trails we had made turned to thick, muddy, clay. We bathed in the river, "went" in trenches in the ground, and ate whatever rations we had brought with us. I came home with mud caked on all of my belongings, chiggers bites on my legs, ticks in my back, sunbaked skin, and a freed spirit.

My mother, on the other hand, likes to park her fifty-foot camper on a lot in a state park up north, with public restrooms, lake shore with designated buoyed-off swimming area, volley-ball court, boating docks, and an ice cream parlor down the road.

To each, his own.

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