The Nearly Great Outdoors

The Great Outdoors is indeed great---until you're actually outdoors. That's when you realize that the call of nature that summoned you away from ESPN has also called all the world's ticks, gnats, green flies, wasps, hornets, thorns, poisons ivy and oak, carcinogenic ultraviolet sun rays, and mosquitoes bigger than your Aunt Edna's head to drop by for a visit.

Don't get me wrong, I like nature…documentaries. But to go outside, especially during summer, is the kind of adventure I think best left to professionals who are paid to swim with sharks or dig potatoes in their Victory Garden. However, I'm no recluse, and I do force myself to get out once in a while, mainly for my kids' sake. In summer we go to the lakes, we slip the canoe into a pond, and when we're on vacation we walk miles along the shore to dig up steamer clams that, according to them, look like something that Hagrid, from the Harry Potter books, might have hacked up. We have our fun.

And, one of the positive aspects of stepping out your front door is that invariably you learn something about yourself. I, for one, have learned that I'd rather not be there, but you already know that. But take a couple of years ago, when we took the kids camping at a state park in Massachusetts. Here's what I learned:

1. If you buy a cheap tent at K-Mart because a real tent from a proper camping store is a commitment too painful to make, you should open it up to make sure all the parts and poles are there before you're standing at the campsite while the light fades, slapping mosquitoes on your sweaty neck, and looming over what appears to be a burial shroud. An important part of a tent is the "rain flap," so called because without it the tent will flap uselessly in the wind and will be completely unprotected from rain, but that's irrelevant---it wasn't packed in the box. I also learned that at times like this it's therapeutic to mutter colorful words under your breath, away from the kids, whom you've sent into the woods to find branches to help prop up the tent, and, at this point, your marriage.

2. If you decide to buy your 10-year-old son a pocketknife to mark his first camping trip, don't let him practice whittling by using the branches that are now attached to, and holding up, the tent.

3. The human capacity for S'mores in a single sitting is one per 20 pounds of body mass. Even one more than is allowed will turn the expression "happy camper" into the oxymoron it nearly always threatens to be.

4. The complete lyrics to "Freebird." The group next to us, meaning they were approximately eleven inches from our flapless tent, and who were, I think, from Dubuque because they kept commenting on how clams looked like something Hagrid from the Harry Potter books might have hacked up, enhanced their intimate evening campfire by sharing their Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes with us at high volume, endlessly, with no break. Until a skunk ambled through their campsite and sent them running.

5. I love skunks.

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