by Charles Bobbitt

Created on: September 03, 2008

If your purpose in camping is to learn to appreciate and respect Nature and not just enjoy it, leave the RV behind. It is love with a hitch. It gives the shallow pleasures of a dalliance, but not the deep intimacy of true love. Tent camping is a lifetime commitment. RV camping is a one-night stand.

Allow me, if you will, to present the morning after.

You wake up with the dawn, your mind still reeling from the passion of the night before. You are enticed out of your portable bed by the rosy glow of the sky coyly peeking through the curtains. You make up your mind to take a serene walk through the woods and commune with Nature on this clear, cool summer morning. You mark your progress through the silvery dew of Nature's velvet meadow by the damp, dark wake trailing behind. You hear the morning birds serenading you to the accompaniment of a gurgling brook. The first flush of love.

So far, so good.

You stop to take it in. Your heart yearns to absorb every detail the scene around you the glimpse of a squirrel, the sound of the woodpecker on a hollow tree, the furzy smell of the evergreens. You beg to see beyond the surface, to stare deeply, lovingly into the fresh, pure face of Nature.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, like dew rising from the grass, shy Nature begins to lift her veil. Your heart pounds with expectation. The sun, gathering its courage, will soon make an appearance over the tips of the trees. In the glow his face, Nature's hidden fruits will be revealed, stretched out naked before you.

As you hold your breath in anxious expectation, your attention gets diverted. Itching ankles alert you that the mosquitoes have not yet gone to bed. A few wasted swats later, your try to refocus for this, the moment of ultimate passion when you and Nature will at last unite.

But it is hopeless.

The spell has been broken. You suddenly realize that the silent rapture in which you imagined yourself waiting is not silent at all. It is, in fact, rather noisy. The mosquitoes have migrated upwards, and are now buzzing around your ears; the duet of the lark and brook has been overpowered by a chorus of cicadas that could rival a Wagnerian opera for volume and dissonance; that fool of a woodpecker is still beating his brains out on the hollow tree; and something apparently very large (a bear?) is noisily shuffling through the dead leaves just out of view.

Before you can come to grips with the possible horrors intimated by the beast in the woods, your mind shifts downward to your lower extremities.

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