Our last night in Mexico City was full of anticipation, for a variety of reasons, I think. One was the cliff divers. The other was the ocean and beachcombing, which we were all looking forward to after three weeks of driving through the desert. The sense of moment was also pitched because the day we left Mexico City meant it was the day we turned around. Even as kids I think we understood that we were on a very peculiar grand adventure and that as of the next day we’d be heading for home.
We wanted to make the most of our last night in the tent city and we played hard, exploring far and wide throughout the vast grounds. Late that night, before the water got shut off, Matt decided he was thirsty as we ran back to our tent. He put his lips to the nearest tap and took a drink, despite his brothers telling him not to. “You’re not supposed to, Matt,” we said. “You’ll get Mount Zooma’s revenge.”
We didn’t know the term, and had only heard our parents use it in relation to warnings not to drink water that hadn’t been boiled first. I can’t speak for my siblings, but I had no idea what the term referred to, other than that it meant bad things. Matt ignored us, we kept playing, and he didn’t seem the worse for it.
In the canvas cave at bedtime, my parents laid their own sleeping bags out in their room; the second, larger, room was held as the “living room”; the third room was where the kids slept. Our sleeping bags were laid out in a row, six of them, like coffins at a mass funeral. We crawled in as Dad shone the flashlight at us. He said good-night, and then said what he always said before he left us alone. “No horsing around. It’s time for bed.” We horsed around for a while and then fell asleep, but it wasn’t long before the inevitable came. Matt was in his sleeping bag between Bruce and Conor, and when Mount Zooma exploded, the eruption forever changed the lives of the people in that tent, of those who escaped and those who didn’t. Matt threw up as he woke up and instinctively turned to one side. It was fate, that was all. Conor or Bruce. One clean, one forever scarred. Who says life isn’t random?
Matt turned Bruce’s way.
Unluckily, Bruce tends to sleep on his back, face up. Well, he used to. I don’t know what position he sleeps in today. Or if he sleeps at all. And though Matt was at least a foot shorter than Bruce, somehow he’d managed to arrange himself such that their heads were side by side. A further piece of ill fate was that Bruce also tended to snore a bit, even as a young teenager, and consequently he usually had his mouth open.
Who knows what Bruce was dreaming about at that moment, but he was violently yanked from sleep. Everybody in the tent was up in a flash, listening to Bruce choke and swallow and cough, and to Matt moan. The rest of us were horrified, laughing at first, but then so truly sympathetic to the awful thing that had just happened to Bruce (and Matt was none too happy, either), that we didn’t laugh at Bruce or tease him or taunt him until well into the next day. We couldn’t really see much, either, because it was dark, after all, and we were camping in a tourist holding compound without any of the necessities for sustaining human life. Dad and Mom came scurrying into our room of the tent, with Dad jiggling his big flashlight. He trained it on Bruce and Matt, and we saw in stark relief what had just happened. Bruce looked like a wax figure left in a steam room.
The nature versus nurture debate has long raged in psychological circles, and I’m not here to come down on one side or the other, but you can’t tell me something like that doesn’t somehow shape a person. Bruce grew up to be a high school teacher, and to all outward appearances seems a normal and balanced person, but, let’s face it, the jury’s still out, and if he dropped off the edge tomorrow into a life of crime and addiction, I know what I’m blaming.
My mother sprang into action, immediately trotting out her greatest gift, her empathy. She tried to make Bruce feel better and attended to Matt.
“Gerry,” she said to my father. “Look at this. Oh my God. Poor things. Go get some water so we can at least clean Bruce off, and they can all get back to sleep.”
My dad stood there, looked at his watch.
My mom looked back to him. “What?”
“It’s two in the morning.”
“So . . .”
“No water. It’s shut off.”
“But don’t we have any?”
My father shook his head. “I was going to boil some more in the morning before we left for Acapulco.”
The full horror of it hit us all, but none more than Bruce. “You mean I can’t even wash off ?!”
“Oh, that’s just so gross,” emphasized Janine. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
My mother helped Bruce clean off as best he could. It wasn’t until the morning, though, until the full light of day arrived, that we were able to see just what Bruce had endured. His face was a strange hue, almost orangey-peach, like he’d used too much fake-tan cream. His hair was stiff and coarse, pre-punk, sticking out in forty different directions. Nobody used hair gel back then, but, again in reference to the nature versus nurture debate, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Bruce today is the one amongst the six of us kids who pays the most attention to his hair and overall physical appearance. He has, for a male high school teacher, an unusually keen interest in hair products and facial cleansers.
We left Mexico City later that morning, after Bruce had cleaned up and Matt had thrown up another couple of times (into a plastic bag; nobody would go within five feet of him). We were turning for home, but first we had most of North America to travel back through, only this time we were headed up the length of the west coast, to Acapulco, Mazatlán, Puerto Vallarta, San Diego, and Los Angeles, before turning back inland to go through Vegas and back up the eastern edge of the Rockies, through Montana, and finally back to Alberta. A few days later, after a visit to Acapulco to see the cliff divers (which turned out to be a colossal disappointment as the various Mexicans present refused to dive off the cliffs for us, and because our mom wouldn’t let us out of arm’s length when we wanted to look for divers), we continued back north. We decided to stop in Guadalajara, for a much-needed rest. My parents decided to open their wallets for a motel. It was almost New Year’s, and I think they thought beds and a swimming pool would help take the edge off the collective trauma of Mount Zooma. They were right . . . for the most part.
KOA, incidentally, was sold in 2001 to Interactive Corp., which also manages Ticketmaster, Expedia, and hotels.com, a fact that makes it even clearer that camping is now a radically different thing than in generations past. It’s one piece of recreation for the masses, one writer noted, which can “be bundled along with other forms of entertainment.” Online planning and preparation for camping has become the norm. The government of Alberta recently introduced a provincewide campsite reservation system that has proven enormously popular; a necessity, in fact, for securing a campsite during busy times.
Yet this, along with all the other mod cons mentioned earlier, is not camping in the way that I understand it, or want to understand it. I speak not as an experienced naturalist, but as a modern urbanite who nevertheless longs for the (admittedly occasional) genuine immersion into nature’s unfettered beauty, an immersion unpolluted by humanity’s presence, except for my own, of course. I fear my children will lose access to those places, and moreover, that they will lose access to understanding how fragile our lives are, and are meant to be, in the natural cycle. Perhaps camping, as I think of it, is not even about nature at all (at least not “nature” in the way that we commonly understand it—as something to appreciate and revel in). Perhaps it’s about trial and difficulty and resistance. Camping isn’t supposed to be easy. It’s not meant to be frictionless. Isn’t that, at some level, what we’re trying to achieve when we want to take the kids camping? I know it’s the case that when we camp, one of the objectives is to remove Jess and Grace from the convenience and fluidity of their daily lives, to the point where we need to get that fire started or we don’t eat. The removal of physical obstacles is, I would say, counter to the point of camping as a family. You want to make it hard. Some of my best camping memories involve when it was