Best Nap You Ever Had

You’re nine. Your dad comes in on a Tuesday and says we’re going camping next weekend, and that’s it, that’s the whole conversation. He doesn’t explain where. He doesn’t ask if you want to. The week gets four days longer.

Then Friday happens and you’re in the truck and you don’t know the route and you don’t need to, because somebody who knows what he’s doing is driving and the only thing required of you is to be in the back seat. That is a very specific feeling and most people lose it around fourteen.

I’ve started calling it trusted adventure. You’re going somewhere you’ve never been, which is the adventure, and you are completely certain nothing bad is going to happen, which is the trust. Those two things almost never sit together again. As an adult you get one or the other.

Here’s the part I think about a lot. When you got there, you didn’t set anything up. Your dad set it up. You were sent to find sticks, or you were told to stay out of the way, and either way the camp appeared without you doing it. Then at some point that first afternoon you went into the tent for a minute and the sun was hitting the side of it and the whole thing was warm and smelled like canvas and dirt, and you were out for two hours.

Best nap you ever had. I’d put money on it.

That nap wasn’t about the tent. It was about the fact that somebody else had already handled everything, and you were somewhere new, and you were completely safe, and there was nothing at all you were supposed to be doing. Kids get that a few dozen times if they’re lucky. Most adults get it never.

And here’s what happened to camping, at least for me. Somewhere in my twenties I became the dad. Not literally at first, just structurally. I became the guy loading the truck. I became the guy setting the tent up at 9pm in the wind with a headlamp while everybody else stood around being cold and supportive. The trip is still good! But the freedom moved. I gave it to somebody else and I didn’t get it back.

That’s most of what we’re actually doing here. The tent is already up when you get there. The bed is made, the fire is laid, the whole thing is standing on a piece of land somebody’s family has had for a hundred years and nobody outside of it has ever slept on. You pull in and the work is done and it wasn’t done by you.

I’m not going to pretend that makes you nine again. You’ll still check your phone. You’ll still have whatever you drove up there with rattling around in your head for the first hour.

But there’s an afternoon in there, usually the first one, where the sun is on the side of the tent and it’s warm in a way that doesn’t happen in a house, and you go in for a minute.

Two hours later somebody’s going to have to come get you.

When’s the last time you showed up somewhere and the work was already finished? For me it was a long time before I did anything about it.