The Great Outdoors
I haven’t done any serious camping since about 1976 when I spent a summer on the road and part of autumn living out of a tent. This month my road buddy Sky Pilot Larry and I are wending our way through the mosquito fogs of Alaska, setting up camp and cooking on campfires beneath glaciers, alongside salmon spawning streams and near tourist towns.
For you retired backpackers and tent pitchers, you’d be surprised and maybe saddened by how things have changed. We just drove through a Forest Service campground of 59 units, all full, no tents, just 30-40 foot mobile homes with steering wheels, dish antennas, generators, full kitchens, baths, 3 bedrooms, walk-in closets and a rec room. Hardly a soul was outside by a campfire even though the skeeters aren’t bad, the sun is shining and the nearby stream is drop dead, picture postcard, write-back-home gorgeous. I mean, are you kidding me here??? They’d rather sit inside their drag along home and watch TV beneath all these mountains and glaciers?
Maybe there’s too much beauty to take in all day long for these adventurers. Or maybe TV has stolen their brains. Hell if I know.
I do know the drone of the generators running across from us drowns out the babble of the brook and the sound of the wind off the glaciers stirring the spruce and the fir and the cottonwoods. So okay, we can’t hear the mosquitoes either, but not our idea of a fair trade-off. It’s a free country and those with the most money apparently are the most free. No law that says you have to come to the great outdoors and enjoy it. At least not when you can watch Wheel of Fortune in the comfort of your livingroom with all your neighbors in the ritziest ghetto outside marinas filled with yachts.
Sky Pilot Larry and me are going to head backcountry soon, not so much to adventure in the wilderness as to escape the one here. Most of these humans in the 21st Century must think wilderness is just a place they can’t get TV.
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