Thoreau was right

Chrissa and I went camping the other day with a couple of friends. Well ... actually, I went camping and Chrissa came along to cook s'mores and then went home to sleep in our bed. I love camping. There's nothing better than peeing under the stars, as God intended. It ended up being pretty cold, but once I stuffed some clothes in my sleeping bag to insulate myself--and wrapped the bag around my face just right--I slept like a baby.

Before Chrissa left for the night we sat by the campfire with our friends, Jen and Scott. The idea was to tell scary ghost stories but we ended up talking politics -- which is also scary. We didn't come up with anything revolutionary. In fact, the entire debate convinced me of two things:

1) I don't know as much about politics as I'd like to admit.
2) I don't care as much about politics as I'd like to admit.

When I got up in the morning there was condensation all over the tent. I didn't want to move and let the cold air into my sleeping bag so I got dressed in the bag: worming my way into two pairs of sweat pants and slipping a shirt on. That's another one of my favorite parts about camping, though. It makes the experience real somehow.

All my life, when I became distracted or worried, the best thing to do was to go back behind my house into the undeveloped land between our neighborhood and the mountain range. As a kid, my friends called it "the hollow," since it was a boggy, low-level area. I would usually pack a lunch and throw a book in my backpack, then hike through the hollow and up to this outcropping of rock from which I could see thirty miles in every direction. I would read my book and eat my lunch then come back down a couple hours later, revitalized. Another time, Dan and I were so hard-pressed to break away that we went camping in the middle of winter up on the side of the mountain. We didn't even care that a mountain lion had been spotted in the area and had been attacking people's pets. It made the whole thing a little more adventurous.

I think that being in nature convinces you that your civilized, systematic, orderly life is not so important: that it's unnatural to affix your life to a watch. Big problems don't seem so big. Small problems are non-existent.

I think that's why, when I think about where I would go if I could travel to the past, I think about pre-European America or ancient Scotland: somewhere rustic and untamed. It's not that those places didn't have problems ... it's just that worrying about a crop yield or succesful hunt is a more substantial problem than worrying about a tax return.