Why cavemen would be ashamed of us

      As I have always pictured it, Marquis de Sade was sitting in his imitation-leather throne, resting his feet on Toady, his lawyer. Although the Marquis had just finished torturing some small children by making them watch presidential debates, he still felt displeased.
      "Toady, I feel displeased," he said.
      "Why, oh great one?" Toady asked.
      "Well, for one thing, the lack of wide-spread enthusiasm for torture," the Marquis sighed. "I had hoped that many people would discover the joys of this good, clean pastime besides the CIA."
      "You did sponsor those rap concerts," Toady pointed out.
      "Well, yes ..."
      "And what about your success with Paris fashions for women?" Toady continued. "Women are wearing uncomfortable rubber clothes that make them look like an explosion at a tire factory. What more could you want, mighty and huge lower colon?"
      "True, I have had my little successes," the Marquis said. "Still, if I could just involve more people, get whole families involved in painful and humiliating activities." He strode to the window, past the large portraits of heavy metal bands and television evangelists, and looked out over the wilderness. Suddenly inspiration struck.
      "I have it!" he announced. "The perfect activity that whole families will do together! It'll cause them pain and misery! They'll bicker, they'll fight, they'll try to stab each other with sharpened sticks! We'll call it camping!"
      "Camping?" Toady asked.
      "Yes, yes, people will go out into the wilderness and sleep in tiny tents that force them to bend their bodies like pretzels," the Marquis said. "They'll suffer with half-cooked food, horrible weather and fight off mosquitoes as big as albatrosses! There'll be snakes and bears and gigantic blood-sucking ticks and chiggers!"
      "I don't know, oh great and bloated one," Toady said, doubtfully. "You actually think it'll catch on? Surely people are too smart."
      Toady, of course, was wrong. Each year, millions of families spend millions of dollars to return to the wilderness that their forefathers spent thousands of years getting out of. It's enough to make a caveman weep.
      Now, don't think that I'm criticizing the great all-American sport of camping. I like being miserable just as much as the next guy. The way I look it, you just can't measure such things in terms of the number of mosquito bites and poison ivy hives. No, the proper way to rate a camping trip is how many weeks you have to spend in a hospital following it.
      And I know what I'm talking about. I went camping a fair amount in my teens because my parents forced my participation in the Righteous Rangers, a church organization similar to Boy Scouts. In fact, the only difference between us and the Boy Scouts was that we worked harder; after all, if we didn't get those badges, we knew we would suffer eternally in torment.
      Every Wednesday night, our parents would drop us boys at the fellowship hall of the church. Our commanders would lead us in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, the Lord's Prayer and, of course, the Ranger Credo (which went: "As a Righteous Ranger, I promise to be truthful, kind, honest and caring, and promise to obey my commanders in all things even though they don't have the combined intelligence of a wart-hog" or something like that).
      After which we would sing a few hymns and then devote the rest of the evening to discovering exactly how many ways we could burn, cut, fold, mutilate and spindle ourselves with the assorted tools of wood carving, leather working, knot tying, etc.
      A few words at this point spring to mind about our commanders, but they are mostly unprintable. I'm probably being unfair to those men. After all, they could have stayed home and watched television; instead, they gave up their hard-earned leisure time to come to church and make some boys very, very miserable. They were sick men.
      About once a month, our supreme commander would stand and announce our monthly camping trip. We greeted this with groans and pleas, but it was to no avail. Off we would go into the wilderness.
      I am exaggerating somewhat when I say wilderness. Usually we would camp in someone's pasture in which cows had thoughtfully left little surprises to keep us on our toes or actually to keep our eyes on the ground. In fact, our campsites taught us the joys of shoes. Most of us country boys ran around barefoot; that changed. After you've plopped your foot into a wet, cold pile of cow surprise and felt it ooze between your toes, you realize that shoes are a gift from heaven and not just something your mother wants you to wear for appearance's sake.
      After we set up camp, we would then work on the outdoor badges: stargazing, tracking, camp cooking, fire-starting, etc. Don't think these were easy, either. For instance, to get your fire-starting badge, you had to start a fire with only one match. You got one chance each camp-out. The wind would be blowing, the leaves and grass would be wet (it always rained on us), and you only got one match. It was practically impossible, but one camp-out, Harry Havelock actually did it.
      After he had received his badge, we boys took him off into the woods and forced the truth out of him. He had carefully soaked some twigs in charcoal starter and then slipped them into his fire teepee. With that information, several of us rapidly received our fire-starting badges at the camp-outs that followed.
      All of us would have claimed that badge, but Max Latimore soaked his twigs in gasoline. Not only did he start a fire, he also took his eyebrows and most of his hair clean off. The commanders finally caught on (probably the fact that a log in Max's fire took off and actually pierced the side of our bus was their first indication that something was wrong) and thereafter required us to gather the firewood and kindling while they watched.
      After we had a fire going, it was time for one of us to earn his camp-cooking badge by cooking breakfast, lunch and supper for the entire troop. For some reason, we all cooked the same things: scrambled eggs with bits of twigs and bacon and burned toast for breakfast, Sloppy Joe hamburgers (take one pound of hamburger and drop it on the ground at least twice; brush off the worst of the dirt; drop it into the skillet; add two cans of soup; spoon onto hamburger buns; tell everyone that you're not hungry) for lunch, and stew for dinner (some veggies, breakfast and lunch leftovers, and a couple cups of water). None of us
ever brought dessert, although Rolaids-Tums-Jello would have been perfect.
      After the last meal of the day, it was time to bed down for the night. I always dreaded this. The commanders assigned us our two-man pup tents in alphabetical order. This meant that I would share a tent with Rudolf Chester. Rudolf wasn't a bad sort, despite the fact that he was named for a cartoon deer. His problem was that his mother always packed him cabbage and corned beef sandwiches that Rudolf's stomach and lower intestine found hard to digest. There were stomach growls and belches and, ahem, other natural body noises. I won't go on, other than to mention that starting a fire with one match in our tent would have been easy. In fact, we would have gone up like a rocket.
      After the miserable nights would come miserable days. Days at camp would be given over to various activities, such as hiking up steep trails, falling off steep trails, running from hornets, treating stings, putting lotion on poison ivy, setting bones, etc. For some reason, every single one of us had his First-Aid badge.
      I haven't even mentioned the worst part of camping, which is the restroom problem; the problem being, of course, that there weren't any. Depending on the length of the camp-out, we sometimes had to dig latrines, but for the most part, it was find a convenient place near a tree and dig a hole. You needed to be near a tree so that you had something to hold on. Choosing the proper tree was important. It needed to be small enough that you could get a good grip on it or have a convenient branch for that purpose. The variety of tree is also important as Billy Watson once found out. He dug his hole near a small tree and squatted to do his business while holding on to the tree trunk, not realizing that he had chosen a cottonwood tree. Cottonwood bark comes off easily. I think we'll leave Billy's story there -- which is what we wanted to do with Billy afterwards.
      Now having said all this, you probably are thinking, "Hey, it couldn't have been that bad. Surely you have at least one good memory of camping." And to be fair, there were those glorious mornings when the sun would rise and spread a rosy symphony across the sky and a single bird would be singing softly in the evergreens. And the only other sound would be me gasping for breath in my tent.
      The Marquis would be pleased.

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