Almost There. Curtis Gillespie

were attracted to mini-marshmallows, which led to a few dozen coloured blobs floating into shore as every fish in the lake assiduously turned up their gills at the little morsels.

      I suppose in the end camping as a family vacation, or even as a short family activity over a weekend, is for me more about creating a set of conditions than it is about communing with nature, though I have nothing against communing with nature and will always happily accept it as a secondary benefit. After all, a thirty-foot fir tree in my backyard is more or less the same as a thirty-foot fir tree in the forests of Alberta’s wild and unpopulated eastern slopes. There is something appealing, however, about leaving the city and leaving all those people behind, but is it possible that in so doing we are in fact trying to teach our children a different lesson: that not everything gets handed to you on a silver platter . . . and that sometimes what gets handed to you is something you’re going to have to eat off a tin plate crusted over with last night’s baked beans. And that WiFi, hot showers, and central heating are wonders of modern convenience and fortunate birth circumstances, not inalienable human rights.

      My friend, the poet Tim Bowling, says one of the things he most cherishes about living in Edmonton, with its harsh winters, is that he likes to be reminded every now and then that nature has the power to kill you if you make the wrong decision. That, it strikes me, is about as good a lesson as you could hope to give your family by going camping. What could be more fun than that?

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