I had a short list of last-minute things to get at the makolet before our camping trip. Canned beans. Hotdog buns. Shelf-stable milk. At the checkout counter, I was spotted by a friend.
“Where are you going?” she asked me, taking in my faded T-shirt and sneakers.
“Camping!” I chirped.
Her jaw dropped. “Camping?” she echoed. “I’m from the Five Towns. We don’t do camping.”
Listen, and I’m from Brooklyn, but don’t knock camping until you’ve tried it. (That is what I didn’t tell her, because I never think of responses in the moment.) There is a tired, dirty, relaxed sort of happiness that fills the car on the way back home that is singularly unique to the camping-out experience. Emphasis on the dirty, and the tired, because you will never be quite as dirty or as tired as you will be after a night or two on an air mattress that slowly but surely loses the last of its air just as you drift off into a mosquito-infused sleep in a eight-person tent that fits eight people if each of the eight people also fit into a playmobile doll house in a tent set on the bank of a river or the edge of the woods.
I realize that the above extremely long sentence sounds contradictory, and that’s because it is, but it’s all true. It’s also worth it.
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