Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

I’m not a camper. When I seek out adventures, travel, access to the great outdoors, I want it bookended in a climate-controlled, screened-window room, in which I can lay my weary bones on a bed with a mattress and clean sheets, extra pillows. I want the capacity to flush. I want warm tasty food and the promise of hot coffee. Nature can stay outdoors, where it belongs. I am an indoor cat.

For the last 7 years, I have stretched myself to be an outdoor cat, for the benefit of my son and all his classmates. I’m the parent chaperone on field trips and, as of 4th grade, overnight excursions. Just me, a few other scraggly parents, and gaggles of children. I sleep with the girls; my son is with someone else’s Dad someplace across the campground. At least I’m with the giggly, talkative, darling girls, and not privy to the shenanigans of young boys, with potty humor and shared potties for carelessly-aimed pee. The lodging is rustic – cabins, bunk beds, communal meals in a dining hall abuzz with the loud roar of 150 or so ravenous children. It goes without saying that these overnights are part of the state mandatory environmental education requirement. When was this implemented? And what about kids who live in places where you can’t really stay in a cabin in February without having to shovel it out first? Do the kids in the upper Michigan peninsula take night hikes in parkas and snow pants that swish audibly as the wearer moves rigidly through the frozen night?

I clearly don’t know what school curricula in the tundra require, but here in the foggy, cold, rainy, gray Pacific Northwest, the state wants kids to learn about environmental practices like sustainability and ecosystems and the schools don’t want to teach it. Instead, they subcontract this out to environmental education camps, staffed by nature-boys and -girls who know everything there is to know about composting and marine wildlife and the comfort and care of reptiles, but see no obligation to provide anything as luxurious as comfort to the human creatures in their midst.

Don’t get me wrong. Kids love spaghetti and tacos, bacon and hash browns. Somebody somewhere must love big vats of school-bus yellow scrambled “eggs” – as they are served at least one morning per overnight trip, yet they resemble only vaguely what comes out of my environmentally-friendly non-stick Green Pan. I love to eat at a table with 11 children whose table manners may or may not include chewing with their mouths open, placing elbows on the table, pouring liquids both in and out of their plastic cups, eating spaghetti and hash browns with their fingers, loading heaps and heaps of food on to their plates then looking up glass-eyed at the end of the meal when the nature-boy or -girl is ready to have the kids pile up all their wasted food so it can be weighed and we can determine, as a group, the actual poundage of wasted food. For shame, for shame, nature-boy or -girl reminds the group. You should only take as much as you know you can eat. It’s this generation’s adaptation of the clean-plate-club nonsense that led most current baby boomers to have no idea the internal signals a body provides when it is sated.

I love these trips. Having just one child, a boy, I forget all that the genus “school-age children” contains. I see my participation as one part making sure my child has a good time and gets any ounces of parental comfort he might need despite being away from home, one part helping all the other kids have a familiar face to help them with the cold hard fact that they are miles and miles and ideological planets away from home, one part drill sergeant to keep the out-of-line antics to a minimum, and 97 parts audience to the greatest show on earth. Ringling Brothers have nothing on what pure joy it is to be in the circus of the outdoor classroom, let alone the tingly anticipation of watching the death-defying tightrope walk between charming and atrocious, clingy and dismissive, loving and nasty, mature and child-like of girls in their jammies, stacked two-by-two in the cabin ecosystem: bunk beds, mounds of muddy used clothing, puddles of water from rain-soaked boots tramped in with no psychic separation between indoor and outdoor worlds, hair pins and scrunchies and stuffed animals and flashlights and books and, in this last trip, with all 6th graders, menstrual pads and tampons. The tides of laughter and story-telling and mild prickly agitation at the way one girl’s habits annoy the others wax and wane. High tide is after lights out, and the girls are still talking, still putting words to the incomprehensible need to keep making connections, to fight the pull of sleep despite the over-tired bodies and overstimulated minds and the unyielding cabin mattresses and the over-warm sleeping bags and the wool hats they keep on because when the cabin isn’t overwarm and slightly overripe, it is prey to arctic gales.

I too was on an unyielding cabin mattress, on a bottom bunk, in a room set off from the main cabin but with no door, so no privacy nor actual separation. The nighttime noise of 11 girls is surprisingly loud – snoring, murmuring, talking, farting, rolling over and over, the early morning sound of a girl from a top bunk crashing into the mound of uncontained personal items from her downstairs neighbor. I cannot get comfortable, no matter what I try. My body shape does not conform to the wigwam tapered cocoon of my new sleeping bag, designed to keep people warm down to 37 degrees Fahrenheit, yet is simultaneously too warm and too constricting for me to fade off to sleep. I bought the bag when I was about to chaperone a different overnight a month or so ago, and the bag I borrowed was host to a crawly thing that scurried across my living room floor, not at all aware that my home is a no-bug zone. My intellect knew that once the scurrying creature was gone, it was gone; my irrational self knew I’d never let my body anywhere near that bag. Off I scurried to the local outdoor gear shop to purchase a fine new sleeping bag that any outdoor enthusiast would be delighted to have. It’s the perfect body sack to be in if you don’t mind being up all night.

I have been a game and eager chaperone, participated in every outdoor classroom, gone on night hikes, day hikes, helped cabin groups create skits, eaten at communal tables, lowered my personal hygiene requirements to fit the outdoor world, stayed awake most of the nights and still cheerily engaged in the next day’s activities.

But if you look closely you’ll see in my eyes the look of the indoor cat who got accidentally locked outside. We can survive without the comforts of the indoor world for a night or three, but we’ll eventually scratch and whine our way back in to the comfort and softness of a world with cushions, fabrics, and water that comes only from the tap.