Please note, all characters are over the age of eighteen, and have no relation to any characters from other works, or real people.
There are two philosophies for camping- you have The Campers and you have The Glampers. These two philosophies are locked in eternal conflict, battling back and forth across the centuries, fighting for dominance and the soul of all mankind.
Campers:
Want to rough it, to live as our ancestors did. Primal, sleeping on the ground, or with a thin tarp overhead. Campers want to catch their food, to trap their prey, and to drink cheap, barely cooled beer around the campfire they made without the use of a lighter.
Glampers:
Want to have all their creature comforts and amenities, but a little closer to nature. They want sleeping pads, comfortable tents,
fans
. They want to cook hamburger meat and drink craft cocktails around the fire they lit with matches, made up of artificial, long-burn logs. Most importantly, they want to get out as soon as the weather gets a little bit rough, and scamper to their cars at the first sign of rain. Not to be biased, but they're disgusting.
My daughter Kaylee and I are real Americans- we're
Campers
, and take that responsibility very seriously. We rub mud into our wounds and behave much like our distant forebears. My wife, Emma, and son, Mark, are filthy Glampers, a fact which brings no end of shame to the family name. This familial delineation came to a head during our yearly camping trip. This year, Kaylee and I were in the sedan, our minimal gear, limited to a two-man tent, a handful of survival items (firesteel, paracord, knives and compasses, and water purification tablets, etc.) fitting handily in the back seat and trunk. Emma and Mark took my truck, with their bulky tent and sleeping pad, a massive cooler and solar panel setup, and plenty of snacks for the long weekend packed in the bed of the vehicle.
We set out from our home in Lincoln, Nebraska, for the nine hour drive into the Rockies, to our historic 'family campground' at the scenic Horseshoe Mountain. If you've never driven for a full day before, don't bother, it really isn't worth it for whatever you're trying to get to. If you've never driven down the length of Interstate 70, in particular, avoid it at all costs. It is, by leaps and bounds, more pleasurable to have your grey matter pounded flat with a meat tenderizer than to stare out the windshield at the featureless, utterly uninteresting facade of fields covering the world outside. If there were mountains, lakes, or any interesting landscape features anywhere closer to Lincoln, we would've stopped there, but given the length and breadth of the Great Plains, we gritted our teeth and bore it, as we had for the preceding ten years straight. It helped that Kaylee and I were now able to swap out driving, stopping for snacks, and choosing what podcast we would listen to, keeping things a little bit fresh and interesting. Comparatively, when the kids had been too young to drive, Emma and I would have to do a full workday of driving by ourselves, a miserable experience made worse by screaming kids.
The family convoy, as much as two vehicles could be called a convoy, had left in the pre-dawn of the early morning, heading west, meaning we made it to the border of Colorado by midday.
As we crossed into the Rocky Mountain state, Kaylee quipped, "The mistake by the mountains" gesturing to the uninspired continuity of boring fields.
I looked at her, brows furrowed. "The what?" I asked.
"You know," she replied, "like Columbus, but it's fields instead of a crappy city, and it's a mountain range instead of a lake." She grinned, as though she thought herself extremely clever, despite the long walk she took to get there. Her short, straight, auburn hair framed the thin features of her face- high cheekbones and striking blue eyes twinkling with mirth.
I frowned, "Columbus isn't on a lake."
She returned the expression, reaching for her phone to confirm her assertion. "I'm pretty sure it is, Dad." She started to type. "And I'm pretty sure it's a shithole." Her tapping suddenly ceased.
"Have you ever even been there?" I asked, even as she slipped her phone back into her pocket, "or are you just talking out of your ass about Ohio?" I was pretty sure she hadn't been. I disliked Ohio as much as the next guy, but it wasn't like it was legendarily worse than our home flyover of Nebraska.
"I've seen enough to know it's lame..." she replied, sliding her sandals off to perch her shapely feet onto the warm, sticky rubber of the sedan's dashboard.
"Did the internet tell you you're wrong?" I weedled, trying to recall the geography of the country's most unimportant state.
"The internet and I have differing viewpoints on a number of topics" she replied evasively, stretching and twisting, trying to get comfortable in her tight spandex shorts and tank top on the unforgiving cloth surface of the passenger seat.
"Is one of them the nickname you misremembered, then transposed onto both the Great Plains and Columbus?" I grinned at her stubbornness.
Emma said she got it from me, 'A daddy's girl with all his flaws, and my good looks.' were her exact words, but I prefer to think of it as a personality feature, rather than a flaw.
"Google suggests I may have been thinking of Cleveland, which is on Lake Erie, as opposed to Columbus, which is on Lake Nothing..." She tousled her wispy brown hair, removing it from her eyes and trying to maintain some semblance of correctness. "But until I see a peer-reviewed map, I'm going to reserve judgment" she finished with a flourish.
"Spoken like a true future lawyer," I laughed, "but it still doesn't apply here," I gestured out the windshield, "as I see neither lake nor mountains."
She reached over and patted my leg "Anything is close to mountains if you zoom out far enough, Dad." And she was technically correct, the best kind of correct in her mind.
The trip continued, more or less the same for the remainder of the trip, with various inane topics and technicalities picked apart, repeated, and bounced off one another until being abandoned when they lost their shine. The Rockies soon appeared on the horizon, growing to fill the whole windscreen. Turning south, we passed by population centers, and headed into the mountains near Boulder.
There are more interesting mountains than Horseshoe. It isn't the tallest, or the most conducive to camping, or the most interesting to hike, but tradition is tradition for a reason, and interrogating that reason wasn't something I was particularly interested in doing after a full day of driving.
Kaylee and I had always taken the backcountry pass, and set out into the wilderness to be away from family, from strangers, and of course, the incessant sound of cars which infested our lovely midwestern city. It had been a full ten years since we started, and for me, it was the time when I felt most alive, most connected with nature, and most intimately familiar with my daughter.
They neglect to tell you in Fatherhood School, how far the apple falls from the tree, and how little interest your daughter will have in you once she's off to college. Kaylee came out as bisexual four months ago, which I supported entirely, yet couldn't help but feel a wall building between us as a result. Despite my allyship, I was still an old man to her, someone who couldn't understand her struggles and experiences. Her liberal arts college education had done a number on our relationship with one another, something I hoped to reconcile during our backwoods adventure.
We pulled into the campground a few hours before the arrival of twilight, and seeing the sun start to meander towards its resting place behind the mountains gave me a start.
We'll have to head out soon if we want to make it to a campsite without electrical outlets...
