City Mouse In The Country

Jules called me last Friday.
“What are you doing next weekend?”
“I might have to work, but if I don’t, nothing. Why?”
“We’re going camping. You should come.”
Huh. Here’s the thing about me. I have NEVER gone camping. I don’t go anywhere that I can’t wear heels. But I’ve been thinking that I need to make some major changes in my life. So maybe it’s time to try something new.
“Sure. If l don’t have to work, I’ll come. But I don’t have camping stuff. I’m not really a nature girl.”
“Don’t worry about it. We got you. Do you have a sleeping bag?”
“I DO! From sleepovers in middle school.”
“Then you’re fine. Bring that. We’ve got everything else. It’ll be fun. Just come.”
So Friday morning, I packed myself up, grabbed my sleeping bag and went to work. Jules and her boyfriend picked me up after work and we set off to the wilderness.
First stop: Jules’ mom’s house to pick up some more stuff, including her older brother. He looked at my feet. “Are you wearing heels?”
Shit. I had never taken off my heels from work. I had shed the blazer and was running around in a t-shirt and jeans but I had forgotten to replace my heels with the sneakers I bought my freshman year of college and that still look new, that’s how infrequently I wear them. I went back to the car and changed my shoes. I felt short. I’m used to seeing the world about two inches higher. I felt like Camping Barbie, like my feet should be permanently molded into that high-heel shape so when you wear sneakers, you look stupid.
“Hey, look, it’s Camping Lindsay!” Obviously, I wasn’t the only one who had that thought.
We packed up the cars and set off. It took us less than two minutes to get going the wrong way. We’re all city people. We’re not so good with streets that aren’t numbered.
We find ourselves driving through pouring rain. This is not looking good. It’s getting so bad that visibility is starting to not be so great. The other car we’re caravanning with is thinking maybe we should pull over and let the storm pass. “It’s clear over there,” Sculls, Jules’ boyfriend, says, pointing to the left. “Too bad we’re driving over this way,” he says, pointing to the right of the car, where the clouds are black and streaming down to the ground. I don’t know much about nature, but I do know this: when you see clouds that touch the horizon, it’s pouring. I’m starting to wonder why I thought I needed to try something new.
We get to the camp ground in a light drizzle that stopped by the time we finished with registration. They hand us contracts to sign. The contracts basically sign away our lives. “We’ve got one more thing for you all to sign,” the 15-year-old charged with our safety told us.
“Five bucks says we have to sign it in blood,” I said.
Contracts and lives all signed away, we head up to our campsites. They’re on top of a hill. We have to haul all our stuff up and down. It’s just like the city. Our campsite’s a walkup.
We get ourselves set up and I get to see what camping is really about: drinking. We drank a case between four of us by the time the other people in our group got off work and got up here. By this time, it was dark. Setting up tents in the dark, not as easy as setting up tents while it’s light out, but we got the job done. To celebrate: more drinking.
We drink so much that we forget to be good campers. We just fall asleep. We wake up in the morning when it starts pouring on all of our tents. We wait for the rain to stop (a fierce but quick moving storm that’s over in 45 minutes) before we venture outside and realize just how citified we are.
The night before we put a tarp up just in case of bad weather. We strung it up carefully and put a poll in the middle so that even the tallest among us could walk under it. And it worked. The ground under the tarp was dry as a bone.
Unfortunately, nothing was actually under the tarp. Everything we left out at night, the food, the clothes, the napkins, even the damn matches, was on a picnic table right next to the tarp. And everything was soaked. We’re idiots.
We spent the rest of the morning trying to salvage things and throwing out the really damaged stuff. By that time, it was time to go rafting. I’ve never been rafting before. I was told I couldn’t wear heels. I had to wear swimmy shoes instead.
We were running so late and it was overcast and grey so it took us about an hour on the river before I realized I left the sunscreen in the car. We got back to the campsite drunk and tired and as red as lobsters. There was only one thing to do to combat that. We drank some more.
The next morning we packed up our camp site and dragged everything back down to the cars. We sat around after the cars were packed, shooting the shit and playing catch and Frisbee. Oh yeah, and drinking. We didn’t want to have to haul that beer back to the city.
It was finally time to go. We drove back down the mountain and headed towards electricity and running water and civilization in general. I loved camping. I had a great time and I would do it again in a second, even as I sit here, home from work for the day because I am so sunburned I can’t wear anything other than a thin cotton nightgown.
That being said, I can’t wait to slip my feet into a pair of two-and-a-half inch stilettos.