The Final Frontier: Camping

Camping, even the variety undertaken by big softees like our now upstate-New York-selves, somehow feels ruggedly American. You can picture the scene: a tiny slice of frontier life, boiling coffee in billy cans over a crackling fire, chewing on dubiously char-grilled jerky like cowboys in every Western movie ever made. Give me a little Clint Eastwood or John Wayne and I’ll be out back in the wilderness, warding off bush snakes with a lasso around my knapsack and staring down coyotes. Despite my secret hankering to go on one of those city slicker cattle driving vacations, I’d be lucky to make it 24 hours. When was the last time you saw a vegetarian cowboy on the silver screen? I’d probably throw up if they skinned a snake.

The seriousness of our annual camping trip to the Adirondack wilderness, a.k.a glorious northern Lake George, is undermined by the fact we rent a motorboat to reach the campsite. And when we alight at our freshwater island paradise, priority number one is unpacking the heavily iced coolers and setting up a pop up party tent with wraparound mosquito nets. Oh, the shame. We do sleep in tents and brave the shed-like latrines, (kindly erected over fly-ridden pits by the Lake George rangers), but this is not the camping of our forefathers. It’s not even the camping of my early teens when I was bumbling about the British countryside earning my orienteering and survival wings for a Duke of Edinburgh Award. These islands, with neither deer nor dogs, don’t even have ticks.

What they do have are raccoons. Each night I’d hear the stealthy shuffling as they attempted to open coolers or snag the trash bags hanging out of reach in a tree. Their delicate dexterous fingers may be admired for the type of pilfering talent commonly found among nineteenth century grifters, but I was more impressed with their paper shredding skills. We awoke on more than one morning, the campsite looking every inch like the aftermath of a debauched frat party, even the port-a-loo partially wrapped in shredded loo paper and the firepit awash with bottles and confetti.

I proudly toured the island with the two and four year olds naming plants and trees like a pro, (rather than a recent recipient of a one hour immersion course courtesy of a helpful landscape gardener.) Unfortunately, my purpose in pointing out the poison sumac trees to be avoided at all cost seriously backfired. The four year old obsessed about it, repeatedly dragging me over to identify it by its jagged leaves and invent increasingly terrifying tales. The two year old raised the stakes by obsessing over it in his own way, reappearing at base camp with a few lightly chewed leaves in his mouth.

As with all family holidays, it takes a day or two to shift gears. Fifty weeks of the year, the lake is a tranquil scene of seasonal beauty but the first two weeks of July could be renamed Jockfest. Throaty powerboats tear up and down the lake proving their virility. Sunburned captains are too busy watching thong clad groupies in the cockpit to pay attention to smaller craft and buoys. A yellow and red powerboat moored just off our island as we sat down to dinner, its music blaring, driver decked out in bling, and his two girlfriends either suffering simultaneous seizures or engaged in a buttock-shaking competition while Rihanna sang about her love for S&M. It didn’t take long for me to climb down the rocks and hail them, or for them to pull anchor and drive off.

When another powerboat buzzed us as we gently pulled away from our stationary dock, the driver and I locked eyes before throwing up our arms like a pair of angry stag beetles. He yelled epithets about us being crazy and I gave it right back like a card-carrying New Yawker, waving around my arms to illustrate his options in, let’s see, utilizing the rest of the lake.

The homeward leg of these trips is always a classic scene of bathroom stops and proclamations of desperate thirst and hunger as though the satisfaction of one need must be wholly divorced from the other and only voiced five miles further down the road. But we’d managed without mobile phones or Target for more than four days, perfected marshmallow roasting skills and proved hunting for fairy homes and making lavender-scented fairy baths out of acorn cups was infinitely more fun than Noggin.

We arrived home to an extraordinary patio invasion of Ground Digger Wasps, only slightly bigger than green hornets at over two inches long. My husband abandoned the British Open to procure the right weaponry. Women, children, and dog were barricaded in. For now, frontier life would live on.