Camping
It is a rare treat for this Wild Traveler, camping. The devilish combination of a finite number of three day weekends (usually reserved for trips to Barcelona) , unwilling companions (the last one this Wild Traveler introduced to the joys of camping committed suicide shortly after) and a nation-wide ban on free camping (resulting in all decent camping spots being either full of cops or, if not so easily accessible, full of campers), has resulted in a sad, sharp reduction of wild camping trips.
Introduced to this fine form of voyaging in a tender, shaping age, the Wild Traveler has been suffering from camping cravings ever since, his appettite rarely been satisfied. It was the father of his best friend that took the innocent lad to his first such trip, one that would shape his life forever. An avid traveler himself, the said father used to take his kids, his best friends’ kids and any other willing kids for camping every now and then. Stacking kids and supplies in a van bought specifically for camping trips with dozens of kids, he would haul all of us to places out of place, unpack his wondrous collection of camping gear, help us set up camp and let us roam in the wild. With a mysterious medieval castle or a breathtaking ravine as a backdrop, we would then set out for our adventures, more real and exciting than any in any books: we would dive into ice-cold water and challenge each other who would stay in the longest, then laugh at him for turning blue, we would climb steep huge sand dunes and roll back down hitting protruding limbs on the occasional stone, we would form bands and fight wars, explore nooks and scare animals, conspire against each other and play tricks on each other.
And, of course, we would look for the treasure. There was always a treasure where we would go camping, a different one every time: one was of the pirates that used to ransack southern Crete. Another was left by the Germans, when they fled at the end of the second world war. Yet another belonged to the Egyptians that had taken over from the Turks. The treasure stories were too detailed and documented to be false: they came with descriptions of the landscape and historical justification. They were linked to landmarks and phenomena specific to our camping spot. They were, definitely, true. And when, tired of unsuccessful expeditions, we would begin to doubt the stories, one of us would find a golden coin. A real golden coin. A single coin, that was enough to fire up our imagination and restore our faith to the dear man who would take us all camping, tell us great stories and feed us spam and rusks at dusk.
When puberty hit us all hard and strong, my friend’s father stopped taking us to camping trips. We wouldn’t go with him anyway, it was not cool and we hated having to clean up our tents every morning, but I suspect that once hormones told us that there was no real treasure, we were no fun to take camping trips with.
A decade later our teenage angst settled down, and we rediscovered the joys of camping: the sense of freedom, the excitement of the crack of dawn, the unerving buzz of the insects, the tingling feeling of the late night dew, the taste of salt on the skin, the effect of the lack of mattress on posture, the hardening of the soles of the feet. The sense of being alive.
And the taste of spam.
