Testing the Boundaries

I’ve been eating a lot of ice cream while here at Berkeley. I justify it by saying that I don’t eat that much so I need the calories but it’s getting to a point where even I feel I need to stop. And when I start to feel I need to take a break from ice cream then I know there’s a problem.

Barring my ice cream misadventures, two important holidays went by in the past week and a half, one in my birth country and one in my adopted country. So I like to think that I celebrated both over this weekend when I went camping for the first time (one of those days was one of my few no-ice-cream days for the past two weeks). In some ways, camping combined Finnishness and Americanness into one wonderful experience: being out in nature as the Finns do in Midsummer and eating a lot of puppy chow and banana muffins for the American side.

Though you can’t compare the two, camping had a different kind of uplifting effect than staying in a summer cottage. Something about making a fire and cooking over it, waking up under the stars and peeing in the forest is profoundly spiritual as well as calming.

Admittedly, I did not feel at all so positive before the trip, or even on the first day. The idea of living out in the woods without running water, having to cook over a fire and being dirty for two days while hiking with people much more outdoorsy than I have ever thought myself to be was nerve-racking.

In some ways, this trip tested my boundaries. It tested my boundaries for pain when I slipped and fell squarely on my bottom, leading to a spectacularly purple bruise that is still painful four days later. My boundaries for acceptable levels of cleanliness were tested since I did not shower for two days and was forced to wear the wet, sandy socks on one of them. It tested my boundaries for new situations. Besides my friend and her husband, both of whom I adore, one of his friends and his cousin went with us, neither of whom I had met before and who were both camping pros.

It was this boundary that was tested the most. The boundary that makes us want to save face in front of strangers; to appear more put together than we feel. It put a strain on me for the first part of the trip that made enjoying the beauty around difficult, though not impossible.

I still loved sleeping under the stars on the first night on a picnic table. It wasn’t the most conventional of places to sleep but it felt amazing to have the universe and trees as a canopy above me. I loved hearing the sound of the river next to our campsite, the waters roaring as they attempted to drown out the sound of the campers next to us. I loved watching my friend’s husband and his cousin coax the fire out from the wood and then tracking its progression as it slowly engulfed the logs.

 

Fortunately, I came to realize that even though I felt like the weakest link of our small group, this was more of a figment of my imagination than a reality. And therein lay the spirituality of the camping. Out in nature, where we were stripped of many, though definitely not all, of our modern comforts, reality was easier to find. I will definitely be going camping again, holiday or no holiday.