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CAMPFIRES, WENCHES AND INTERSTATE TOURISTS

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© 2006 - Please do not remove the copyright from this essay

hen your wife is a midwife at a small privately run birth center, finding time together can be somewhat of a challenge, because even on days when she’s not technically working, she could still end up having to go in anyway. That’s because you’re not only dealing with scheduled office hours but also on-call hours where said midwife could receive a page at any moment and have to jump into her car and rush off to the birth center, the hospital or somebody’s house to catch a baby. But really even that is simplifying the matter. What actually happens is that the page comes in (almost always in the middle of the night, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of sex, or in the middle of some fun family gathering) and the midwife has to rush off to the birth center, hospital or woman’s house, then manage labor for several hours, then catch the baby and then spend an additional several hours taking measurements, filling out charts and doing whatever post-partum teaching she needs to do before dragging herself back home to catch (hopefully) a few meager hours of sleep before waking up to go do office hours… or another birth.

Paris Hilton once claimed that her entire life was either spent at a party, on her way to a party or getting ready for a party. As near as I can see, a midwife at a small practice spends her entire life either at a birth, on her way to a birth, following up on a birth, or else sleeping to recover for the next birth.

Over the last year and a half, Lauren and I have learned to grab time together between births and sleeping marathons anyway we can, which usually means just few hours at a time. If we can swing a full evening together including dinner, quality time with our daughter and each other, a decent conversation and even possibly sex, then it’s been a better day than most. A full, uninterrupted day together is almost unheard of. Expecting an entire weekend is simply laughable naiveté. So when we had the chance to take a long weekend out of town together, well it was like planets, stars, comets and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity had all aligned for one narrow window that had to be taken full advantage of. With that in mind, Lauren, Allison and I left home on a Thursday afternoon in September bound for Lancaster County, Pennsylvania for a weekend chock full of campfires, pirates, sleeping bags, jousting, zoo animals, s’mores, beer and idiots in RV's. Of course not all these things happened at the same time; now that would have been a story.

Lauren and I hadn’t been camping together since before we were married (II’d gone a couple of times on my own) though not for lack of wanting. Every time we’d be driving near a state park and catch a whiff of campfire, or even just a whiff of burning chaff from the farms around town, we’d always look at each other and say, “We have to go camping again.” There’s just something about that smell that fills a person with the irresistible urge to sit in the grass, impale a hotdog or a marshmallow on a stick and hold it over an open flame, then crawl inside a cozy sleeping bag, zip shut your door and fall asleep to the sound of the wind rustling through the trees. Or at least it does for us. Unfortunately, circumstances – grad school, pregnancy, surgery, and now of course, crazy work and on-call schedules – just haven’t allowed it in the last five years. So when we decided to head out to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire for the weekend, we figured we might as well camp out while we were at it. Unfortunately, Lancaster County where the Faire is held isn’t exactly the most camper-friendly of places. You see, for as middle-of-nowhere-looking as it is, Lancaster is still an incredibly popular tourist area for two reasons: the Pennsylvania Dutch and Milton Hershey.

Just across the county line in the town of Hershey, on Hershey Drive in fact, is the Hershey’s Chocolate headquarters / chocolate factory / amusement park, where you can learn about the history of chocolate, see how a Reese’s Pieces is made, and then go ride some of the biggest roller coasters you’ll find outside of Six Flags. And just in case you somehow missed the implication that this whole world of fun in Hershey originated from a chocolate empire, the entire town has jumped on the bandwagon to make sure you never forget again. Several of the streets have been given names like Chocolate and Cocoa Avenue, and even the streetlamps have been shaped to resemble giant Hershey’s Kisses.

But if eating a bunch of chocolate then throwing it up on a ride called the Sooperdooperlooper isn’t your idea of touristy fun, there is something else for you on the complete opposite side of the vacation spectrum. In Lancaster County the Amish tradition is still very much alive. And unlike in Hershey, it’s not just for show. It’s not like going into the older parts of Boston or Sacramento where they put up hitching posts and hire actors in period costumes to conjure up the Colonial or Old West vibes of the cities that once were. In Lancaster County, when you see a barn raising, or a woman cooking dinner over a hearth, or even a bearded man in overalls driving a horse drawn buggy down the street, they’re not putting on an act. It’s just the Amish being who they’ve genuinely been for the last couple hundred years. And because Americans invariably become insensitive idiots on vacation, they come out to Lancaster (said: “LEN-kester” – don’t be the moron who pronounces it “LAAN-caass-ter”) by the droves and busloads to stare at these people, take their pictures and buy cheap replicas of their trademark black brimmed hats – which they then proceed to wear through town, an accessory to their khaki shorts, Hawaiian shirts and big fat asses.

Suffice it to say, between roller coasters and “quaint” lifestyles, Lancaster County attracts a certain type of tourist, and unfortunately for Lauren and myself, it’s not the kind of tourist who generally enjoys sleeping in a tent. It’s telling that in researching the local campgrounds online, every single one of them, including the Hershey Conewago Campground where we ended up staying, boasted Cable TV as one of their primary selling points. These weren’t campgrounds so much as RV parks with a couple of tent sites thrown in as an afterthought. And I know it’s been several years since we’ve done this, and inflation is a bitch and all, but I thought the twenty-seven dollars per night they were charging at Conewago for a patch of grass, a picnic table and a fire pit was a bit hefty. Hell, you can still buy a yearly National Parks Pass – which allows you to camp out at the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park and the Great Smoky Mountains amongst other places – for a mere fifty bucks. Lauren and I just chalked the high price up to the general market all throughout the tourist-trappy area. Even the local Motel 6, the dirt-cheap emblem of economy hotels, was charging ninety-six dollars a night this time of year.

All in all it really didn’t matter that we would be sharing our space with a bunch of people whose idea of camping was watching cable TV in a boxy vehicle while a fire burned quaintly outside. First of all, this campground had thoughtfully put all the tent sites in one cluster on the opposite side of a manmade pond (which they for some reason filled with giant goldfish who looked miserable and horribly out of place in the murky stagnant water) from the RV sites, so at least we wouldn’t be breathing their sewer fumes. Plus, our primary reason for coming out here was to go to the Renaissance Faire anyway. Camping was really just an extra perk. No matter how far from the ideals of camping this campground has placed itself, at least Lauren and I would be able to sleep in a tent and roast marshmallows over a campfire again. And this time, we would be introducing that simple joy to our young daughter.

We left home an hour later than we’d wanted on Thursday and ended up fighting our way through Philly suburb rush hour on our way west. After that, it was only an hour or so on the Turnpike to our exit. Of course, funny thing about the Pennsylvania Turnpike, for whatever reason, they like to space out their exits more than most any other interstate highway I’ve encountered. There are places along its five hundred and twelve miles where it can easily be twenty-five miles or more between exits. That may not sound like a lot on paper until you realize that if you happen to miss your exit, you not only have to drive a half-hour before you can get off, but then you have to turn around and drive another half-hour back to the exit you originally wanted. So even though the campground was so close to the Turnpike that we could actually hear the traffic from our tent, it still took us a good forty minutes to get there after exiting. But we didn’t mind. Lauren and I are all about the journey, so we made the most of it. We listened to kid songs until Allison fell asleep and then put in a recording of “A Walk in the Woods” in which one of my favorite authors, Bill Bryson describes his experiences hiking the Appalachian Trail. It really was the perfect thing to listen to on this drive. If Bryson’s witty storytelling, illustrious descriptions and laid-back banter (which often shows traces of the English accent he never quite left behind after half a lifetime in London) don’t fill you with the urge to grab a tent and head outdoors, nothing will.

By the time we checked in and got to our campsite, the sun had nearly set and I raced through setting up camp – which really wasn’t all that hard since the pop-up tent I brought literally sets up in a matter of seconds with the rain fly only taking a few minutes longer. Allison immediately jumped inside, took a look around her new home for the next three nights and announced emphatically, “I ‘yike it!” After that, while Lauren got the inside of the tent set up with sleeping bags and whatnot, and while Allison skipped around the campsite picking up sticks and jumping off picnic tables, I set to work making fire. I know this is a basic skill that mankind has possessed for tens of thousands of years, but I always feel a certain amount of pride whenever I can get a campfire going on the first try. I’d bought a bundle of wood at the camp store, and even though this particular fire pit was too narrow and shallow to utilize my traditional “tee-pee” method, I still within minutes had a fire crackling hot enough to roast hot dogs over. Unfortunately, since this “campground” wasn’t part of a state park and didn’t border any kind of forest or woodsy areas, the pickins for roasting sticks was slim. I ended up breaking one of the cardinal rules of “Leave No Trace” and snapped a live branch off a nearby tree to use as our campfire skewer.

By now dark was fully upon us, and the temperature had dropped enough to prompt Lauren and I to put on long pants and sweatshirts and dress Allison in her thick fuzzy pajamas. Then while Lauren went to work spitting and roasting our dinner of processed pork product, I began the task of boiling water for hot chocolate. Rather than mess around with the campfire for this task, I turned instead to my little backpacking stove, a device that Bill Bryson described as something that “looked frankly like trouble.” He wasn’t kidding. I’d bought this stove, which looks like a three-legged Bunsen burner, over three years ago and still didn’t have a firm grasp on the thing’s somewhat tricky operation. You’re supposed to connect the stove to an external fuel bottle filled with something called “white gas”, which not only operates on a hand-pumped pressure system that “frankly” made me nervous, but which also disrupts the stove’s center of gravity so much that it can never seem to rest on all three legs. You prime the stove by releasing just a little bit of fuel into the burner and lighting it, careful not to release too much fuel lest it spill. The very first time I set up the stove to test it, this very thing happened and I nearly set the living room of our Philadelphia apartment on fire. (Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking… “Open flames and enclosed spaces,” but the less-attractive alternative at the time was a relatively busy sidewalk in a metropolitan area). In the dozen or so times I’ve used it since, I don’t think there has been an instance where my first attempt at priming the burner didn’t result in an unintended blaze three feet high which engulfs the entire stove.

This time was no different. Fortunately the thick foil resting pad and windscreen that came with the stove confined the blaze to a six-inch radius, sparing the grass and trees around me. Of course, if the RV “campers” on the far side of the pond had looked up from their cable TV at that exact instant, they would have seen a very tall and obviously gas-induced yellow flame jumping up from our campsite and wondered how long it would be before my little tank of white gas exploded. Fortunately that didn’t happen. It took two attempts but I managed to get that little stove primed and lit properly and set a pot of water over the tiny blue flame without tipping the whole works over. Less than five minutes later I was pouring boiling water and cocoa powder into a thermos that would help keep us warm for the remainder of the evening.

I don’t know why, but hotdogs just taste better when you cook them over a campfire. I’m not sure if it’s psychological or if the smoke from the wood coats them with some kind of natural seasoning, but for me, campfire hotdogs are the only dogs that don’t require mustard or ketchup or some other kind of condiment. Lauren was excited to introduce Allison to the campfire wonderfood that is s’mores, but the rambunctious little tyke fell asleep before she had the chance. But that’s okay because the way she fell asleep ended up being a very sweet and special moment. After running around the campsite non-stop for over two hours, Allison finally mellowed out as we sat on our blanket in front of the fire, seemingly hypnotized by the flames. She began rubbing her sleepy eyes and at one point crawled up into my lap saying, “Ho’ me ‘yike a baby.” So I cradled her in my lap, her head resting against my upper arm, and began rocking her and singing several of our special “Dad and Allison” songs: “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” and “Long December” by Counting Crows as well as “Ripple” by The Grateful Dead. By the end of the third song, Allison was asleep. Over the last few years Lauren and I have semi-joked and semi-prided ourselves on the fact that we feel we’re becoming more and more “hippie-ish” in our life decisions. And singing our daughter to sleep by campfirelight was such an awesome “hippie moment.” I laid Allison down on the blanket where she snuggled onto the pillow Lauren brought out from the tent and remained asleep.

Lauren and I stayed by the fire for perhaps another hour, drinking cocoa, roasting marshmallows and making s’mores. There was a definite chill in the air, not surprising for mid-September, and the air was damp all around. A mist had begun to rise from the pond and the grass already becoming dewy. We decided it was time to clean up and crawl into bed. While Lauren got Allison and herself situated inside the tent, I put our boxes of food and utensils back into the car and extinguished the fire.

As much as I love hiking, camping, backpacking and everything that goes along with it, I have an unbearable time sleeping in tents. I know that seems to run counter to the very essence behind camping, but it’s just something I’ve come to grips with. Don’t get me wrong, I love the whole allure of sleeping on the ground in the middle of the woods or desert or wherever, but more often than not on my backpacking excursions I end up lying awake for hours upon hours after zipping in. The sleep I do get is generally quite patchy, literally a succession of thirty minute naps broken by a dozen or so groggy moments of wakefulness which carry me through until morning – at which point I usually wake up feeling much more refreshed and well-rested than I know I should. Tonight was no different. After Lauren and I said our nighttime prayers together, thanking God for so many things, I laid awake for probably a solid two hours before lapsing into my broken march of sleep toward morning. It was a chilly evening and our breath was forming condensation on the insides of the tent, soaking anything that came in contact with the walls, and even in my twenty-degrees-rated mummy bag I still found myself needing to curl into a ball to stay warm.

I was impressed with Allison though. She only woke up once saying, “Mommy, I’ chi’yee.” We covered her up with the blankets she’d kicked off and she fell right back to sleep. This one is going to be a natural camper. I’m so proud. Lauren too, despite being six-months pregnant with our son, did very well sleeping in the tent. We’d gone to REI a few days earlier and bought a backpacker’s sleeping pad, which Lauren augmented with a foamy blue exercise mat from home. She certainly wasn’t as comfortable as she would have been in her own bed, and going out into the cold night air to pee several times wasn’t exactly her idea of fun, but all in all she made it through the night with a minimum of discomfort – just a little soreness in her hips which I promised to massage out later.

By the time the sun began shining through the front of the tent it was eight o’clock. I was still a little sleepy, but the thought of breakfast was all the motivation I needed to unzip my sleeping bag and crawl out into the daylight. The morning had a slight but invigorating chill with a healthy supply of dew covering everything. After heading to the bathroom to take care of morning’s call, I drove over to the camp store and bought another bundle of wood. The plastic wrapping they put on the logs hadn’t kept them from collecting moisture overnight, but despite the dampness, I still managed to get a functional, albeit smoky, fire going within a short amount of time.

Now with the exception of hotdogs, marshmallows and the occasional can of soup, I’ve never actually cooked over a campfire. Most of my previous camping excursions had consisted of a single overnight, so I was always content to deal with ordinary non-perishable meals like cold bagels and oatmeal if it meant not having to deal with coolers and pans and spatulas and what seemed to be a rather difficult means of cooking. But we were going to be out here for three days. Oatmeal would get really old really fast. We needed something to look forward to after a night spent sleeping on the ground. So with that in mind I’d purchased a cast iron skillet and brought along a cooler full of motivational camp grub: namely bacon, eggs and pancake mix. Rather than going out and buying ice, I’d been a bit more resourceful, freezing plastic bottles full of water ahead of time and using them to keep our food cold – and then as they melted, using them to keep our thirst quenched. I hauled the cooler out of the Mazda, happy that everything inside was still refrigerator cold, and dragged it over to our blanket.

First thing on the skillet was the bacon. As I said before, this particular fire pit was rather shallow, too shallow in fact to lower the attached grill over the flames without it slanting precariously on the logs. So I cooked pioneer style, resting the skillet directly on the embers. The bacon made a satisfying sizzle the instant I threw it into the pan and cooked slower than I had expected over the open flame, which was good because I’d been afraid that I would end up burning the crap out of everything in less than thirty seconds. Whenever the spattering grease got out of control and started singeing my arms, I removed the skillet from the heat and rested it on the side of the concrete pit. Cast iron retains heat remarkably well and the bacon continued to fry at a steady pace. While that was cooking, I scrambled up some eggs in a bowl. Using the residual bacon grease as my base, I dumped the thick yellow liquid into the pan where it too cooked up nice and even over the open flame.

Lauren, Allison and I ate together from one plate. Once again, there is just something about the taste of food cooked over a campfire. Or perhaps it’s just the taste of eggs cooked in bacon fat. Either way, Lauren felt no compulsion to add salt like she normally does and between the three of us we gobbled everything down in a matter of minutes. But breakfast wasn’t over yet. I mixed up some pancake batter and went back to work. Impressed once again at how evenly the cast iron retained heat, I was able to cook four pancakes all the way through without burning a one of them. We devoured these too with just a little bit of syrup. I truly don’t know what the secret is about these campfires, but breakfast has never tasted so good. I smirked to myself looking across the pond at the RV’ers who were just now emerging from their climate controlled domiciles, drinking coffee and eating cold cereal. I felt a modicum of smug satisfaction at our low-tech morning feast and hoped the smell of it was wafting its way over for them to envy as they watched the morning news on CNN.

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