Where to Begin?
Story and Photos by John O’Bryan
After spending five glorious days fishing in the wilds of northern Idaho, and after unpacking the contents of the camper and truck, and after the duffel bags are emptied and stowed away, I collapse exhausted on the couch. As I stare out the window in a peaceful sweaty stupor, I realize that I really, really love fishing—but I really, really hate camping.
This is not a normal thought for someone who lives in Idaho, arguably one of the most campable states in the union. Until now, I have kept my dislike of camping to myself for fear of retribution from my camping friends. Every single one of them finds an inexpressible inner joy in camping and in an effort to find that same joy, I have tried to convince myself that I love camping, too.
I’ve always wanted to be one of the cool kids, which is why an incessant monologue runs through my head, reminding me that I’m an idiot for not loving camping. “What’s not to love?” it says. “Think of the beauty, the mountains, the water, the sun. George Washington was a camper. You should be a camper too. It’s good for you. It’s peaceful. No cell phones. No internet.”
Yet no matter how much I have tried to believe, I can’t shake my unbelief, and even as that inner voice desperately cries, “Pay attention to me. Listen to me. Help me,” I push it into the farthest recesses of my mind.
In the past few months it has diminished to a gasping whisper that occasionally calls my manhood into question for not liking camping. In my mind’s eye, I stab this creature through the heart with the stir stick of my caramel macchiato, extra whip.
The problem is that the minuscule benefit I derive from sitting around a smoky campfire in the middle of nowhere, in the cold and sometimes rain, never outweighs the enormous hassle of getting to that point, at that place. It takes a full week of my life to get to where I can plop my sorry backside into a camp chair next to that roaring (and still smoky) campfire, and that’s a week of my life I will never get back.
The preparation to camp almost kills me. The week before the excursion, I spend most of my waking hours thinking about what to pack and what I’m sure to forget. The only thing that keeps me sane when preparing to camp are my lists. However, there is an inverse side to my sanity because my lists, and they are legion, are way too many and way too long.
The problem is that I don’t ever want to forget anything and believe me when I say that I have never forgotten anything, ever. My preparedness is the stuff of legend and if I had made it past Cub Scouts in the fifth grade, I’m sure my statue would be in the Boy Scouts Hall of Fame in Irving, Texas.
A tent camper.
Contemporary circling of the wagons in northern Idaho.
Glorious fishing.
In the middle of it.
Camp cuisine.
Grub.
Is anybody cold?
Staying out of the smoke.
Dead animals on the store walls.
Northern Idaho treeline.
I have a camping food list with forty items, a camping clothing list with twenty-five items, a fishing list with sixty-three items, and a camping photography list with close to twenty items. Oh, and I also have a list to check off when opening and closing the camper. It’s stressful, because if I forget something crucial like packing my Peruvian sea salt or clamping the hitch and chains to the receiver, it could ruin my year.
Then there is my actual camping list, which is a bit longer than the other lists, and during the week of preparation I will frequently look over these one hundred items that need to be checked off before I can hitch the camper to the truck, a process that has its own list. My camping list includes all the things that I will need or might need: wood for a fire, camp chairs, sleeping bags, stove, generator, cordless drill, heater, toothpicks, flares, satellite phone, signal flags, and sutures…you know, the essentials.
I also bring two or three LifeStraws in the off chance I have to hydrate by lying on my stomach in the middle of the road to suck liquid from the carbon-filter straws out of a dirty puddle of oil and mud. If the campground runs out of water, the three cases of bottled water mysteriously fall out of the back of my locked truck bed, and the thirty gallons in my camper suddenly drain out, I’m prepared.
The final list is my list of lists, which has every sub-list on it and when I complete a list, it gets a bright red check in the box. Once all lists are checked off, I can finally relax. Well, not really. Even with all the boxes checked and my camper and truck packed, I still don’t sleep well, because I worry that my lists aren’t perfect and that I might have missed putting something on one of them.
I spend two days packing the camper and truck and four hours driving. On the way, I consider the very real, the very distinct possibility that no camping spots will be left and I will have to go on an Easter Egg hunt to find a vacant spot hundreds of miles from my original destination. People in Idaho camp, and on any given weekend the exodus of large campers who bust out from urban areas looks like flight from a natural disaster.
If I’m lucky enough to find a spot, it takes two hours to set up camp, the majority of which time is spent making sure the pop-up camper has been properly popped. If it’s not, the door won’t fit and it will rock like a ship in a storm every time someone scratches a body part. There is also a real possibility that the entire thing will fall apart in the middle of the night and trap me, like the enormous plastic clam of death it is.
If you’re not familiar with a pop-up camper, it’s really a collapsible tent with a hard top and wheels. These usually hold two pull-out beds that will cave in if you forget the supports, a sink that works intermittently, and a heater that tries to suffocate you and never turns off, no matter how carefully you set the thermostat.
To set up the camper requires an advanced degree in engineering, or at the very least one must be supremely handy with tools. The key thing about raising the top is to remove the clamps that hold it down. Failure to do this will result in catastrophic failure and bent structural pieces that cannot be bent back into shape except by removing the parts and having a blacksmith heat and reshape them. Ask me how I know this.
The second most important thing is to make sure the camper is precisely level. If it is not exactly level, to within a thousandth of an inch, the door won’t fit, the zippers won’t zip, and the velcro won’t cro, which will leave huge gaps in the canvas walls where insects and small rodents can get in. You will become acutely aware of this at 2 am, when visitors start removing the camp food residue from your face.
Once everything is set up, I spend two to five glorious days fishing.
I don’t sleep all that well, though. The bed in the camper is quite comfortable but as I’ve gotten older, I wake more often in the night, especially when I’m camping and forget to dehydrate myself several hours before bedtime. I find that nighttime visits to the pit toilet aren’t as exciting as they used to be.
On the upside, once the door to the pit of despair slams and locks and the echoing silence envelops me, I realize I am warm for the first time all night, which makes me smile a bit. I then realize that the pit room is a cinderblock cell with no visible means of heat and it suddenly dawns on me why it’s so sickly warm: fermentation generates heat…and gas. Suddenly, the warmth makes me run cold.
I may or may not have deep-seated germ issues, but the amount of state-provided, gossamer-thin toilet paper that I use to cover every square inch of the seat in multiple layers is a thing of beauty. To me, it looks like a mummy’s tomb. Even so, the moment I sit, my mind conjures up horrid images of beasts out of Dante’s Inferno. Convinced that something alive in the pit is sure to grab the low-hanging fruit, I become so tense that I give up and make the frigid walk back to the camper.
For me, food while camping is also an issue. Every one of my friends talks about how good all the food tastes when they’re camping. They love nothing more than to sit around the campfire in the open air eating whatever they’ve cooked. I don’t cook. I boiled my first eggs at the ripe age of fifty-five by following instructions on YouTube. It wasn’t that much fun, it didn’t taste as good as when my wife makes them, and I never did it again.
When I’m hungry, I don’t want to cook, I want to eat. While it might be exciting to sit around the campfire eating a hardboiled egg, eating Captain Crunch for breakfast, lunch, and dinner is just as appealing to me, although I can do that in the comfort of my dining room.
On the day of my departure from a camping trip, I spend at least three hours putting everything back into the truck and it never fits the same way it did when I loaded it at home. There is a little-known law of physics that says once an object is unpacked, after more than ten minutes out of its case or canvas bag it becomes twice as big as it was, and is impossible to return to its earlier state without help from large men burlier than I.
The camper takes another hour to lower and to stow all the various pieces that are needed to keep the thing alive…if it lowers at all. By this time, a niggling thought has been reminding me for days of all the stories on Facebook groups about people who, having set up their campers perfectly, are then unable to get the camper top to descend and snuggly re-clamp to the base. This leaves the camper in the fully extended position, in the middle of nowhere, with no way to lower it.
You have three choices at this point: cut the supports with a chain saw, tow it home in the up position, or leave it where it is with the pink slip taped to the outside and a note telling people they can have it if they want it. I guess burning it to the ground is an option too, but not as environmentally friendly.
The drive home takes the same four hours but feels like five. At home, I spend the rest of the day and part of another unpacking the truck, which is stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey, in no way resembling the neatly packed mid-sized truck I started the week with.
Maybe camping would appeal to me more if I lived in the city or in an apartment, or in a planned housing development, but I live on a few acres on the outskirts of Moscow and when I sit on my back deck with the aspens gently quaking in the breeze, it feels like I’m camping. On my deck I have a small propane “campfire” that I can turn on and off with the twist of the wrist and when I’m tired of the great outdoors, I can enjoy all the amenities of the great indoors.
When I’m done being outside there is also nothing for me to unpack. I just slide back the sliding door and walk into a pristine environment where not a duffle bag or smoky piece of clothing is to be seen.
In an effort to change my ways, I have looked for items to make camping more fun and enjoyable. I often wander through the world’s largest camping store—the one with all the taxidermied animals—in search of the special thing that will turn me into someone who loves camping. Given my pit toilet issues, the cassette toilet has always held an allure for me. I stare at it on the shelf all shiny and new, wondering if this plastic bit of goodness might be the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
But in the moment that I reach for it, a mist comes over me, and I imagine it sitting in the back of my truck, sloshing uncontrollably as I drive down a bumpy road. I know I could never clean it out and so it would turn into a two-hundred-dollar, one-time-use item that I abandon on the side of the road before heading home.
A few aisles over, next to a huge tank filled with sad-looking fish, I find a flat iron griddle that I’m sure will make me love camping. The hundreds of dead animals stare unblinkingly at me as I put it into my cart. Even though I hate cooking, visions of fresh pancakes and eggs sizzling nicely on the griddle as the sun comes up over the mountain fill my mind.
I take a few steps towards the register and then freeze in my tracks when I realize that buying the griddle will increase the items on my camping list by five: griddle top, griddle legs, propane tank, propane hose, spatula. What’s more, items on my food list will rise by seven: oil, eggs, milk, butter, syrup, and pancake mix. The depressed fish gape at me as I quietly take the thing out of my shopping cart and exit the building.
The problem I have, and it’s a real problem, is that I really, really love to fly fish and the closest free stone, blue-ribbon river to where I live is almost three hours away. Unless I want to get up at 3 am and return at midnight, fishing requires camping. My lifelong dream was to have my wife learn to love fly fishing as much as I do, but she crushed that dream years ago.
I actually purchased the camper in hopes that, with a dry place to read and drink her tea, she might at least be willing to camp with me while I fish. It turns out she isn’t all that crazy about using the pit toilet either, and even though her thoughts about the thing aren’t as vivid as mine, no coaxing on my part will get her to camp.
Recently, I realized that this left me with no good options and, in my despair, I sold the camper. I now sleep in my truck when I fish. My wife stays home and plays pickleball. Problem solved. I still hate camping, but I don’t call what I’m doing now camping. Since I only bring my fishing gear, a few boxes of Captain Crunch cereal, enough fake milk and bottled water to last the trip, and since I spend my nights sleeping on the side of the road, I’m really just a temporarily homeless person who loves to fish.
I have no more lists, no more weeks of worry, and no more packing. If I forget something, I just do without it until I get home. The only echo to my old ways is a LifeStraw hidden under the back seat of the truck. I may be dumb but I ain’t stupid.
John O'Bryan Writes 