The secret to successful camping - for women - is learning not to pee in your shoes. Once this skill is mastered, it's all down hill from there.
I learned this when I embarked on my first camping trip, at the tender age of 32. Until that time, "roughing it" meant going somewhere where there wasn't a Seven Eleven (or Circle K) at every intersection. I grew up in the inner city in a sooty east-coast metropolis. For me, the great outdoors consisted of a city park where you could fly kites without getting them caught in the power lines.
I remember the morning I got the phone call from a friend. "Do you and the girls want to go camping?" Debbie asked. I thought briefly about snakebite and scorpions. "We've got the R.V. up at the lake if you guys want to come." With that promise of modern shelter, I agreed.
Debbie picked us up in her car and we drove to the lake, where her 40-foot, fully equipped R.V. with its satellite dish, television, radio and flushing toilet was parked on a spit of land sticking out into the lake. Judging by the switchback curves we had just negotiated, I was convinced that the R.V. must have been manufactured on location - unless it folded in half, I couldn't see anyway to maneuver the mammoth camper on Arizona backroads.
So, we set about camping, which consisted mostly of watching the kids splash in the lake, while we kept the folding lawn chairs firmly anchored in the sand with our behinds. I even tried my hand at fishing, although when I got a look at the size of the fish, I went back to my lawn chair duty. I wouldn't know what to do with the Loch Ness monster if I caught it anyway.
But a funny thing happened. This city girl began to like the great outdoors. The first evening, I hiked up the trail far above the campground and just drank in the darkness and the silence. And even though I know the wilderness was full of dangers, I felt unafraid.
On the evening of the second day, the kids caught a fish. A big fish. They were absolutely delighted and preserved their aquatic trophy in the ice chest. Then, Debbie made an announcement. "We have to leave."
"Why?" I wondered, squinting at her over my sunburned cheeks.
"The generator on the R.V. is out."
"So?"
"So, we can't cook, we have no electricity and the toilet won't flush."
"We'll pee in the woods," I said.
"I can't, I'll get my shoes wet! How are we supposed to cook dinner?"
"Build a fire?" I ventured. After all we were supposed to be CAMPING.
"I don't know how. And you can't cook microwave dinners on a fire."
"We'll eat the fish," I said. "And we've got some potatoes we can fry up. It'll be fun."
"I don't know how to clean fish," Debbie said, and then I realized that she had no idea how to camp at all. I knew then that if I didn't figure out how to camp and quickly, our mini-vacation was doomed.
As I began to give instructions to the kids ("Go get some firewood." "Bring me some rocks." "Find a really sharp knife.") I turned to my defeated hostess.
"Just how many years did you say you've been camping?" I asked.
"Twenty years," she replied.
That night we feasted on the fish that the kids caught and I cleaned, supplemented with crawdads and potatoes that I cooked on the fire that I built by the light of some lanterns I made from oil and string in juice glasses. "Hey!" I thought. "This camping stuff isn't so hard." We stayed two more days and I became a camper for life.
And my shoes never got wet.
