Who's Your Daddy: Father & Son Camping

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Outside Magazine April 2004

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Who's Your Daddy?
In adventure as in life, wisdom is passed down from father to son. Or not.


	(Illustration by Zohar Lazar)

The proverbial wisdom that children are fascinating creatures who have much to teach us is probably statistically true. After all, it's grown-up guys who break the most eggs and wreak the most misery. Nevertheless, as a father (to the best of my knowledge) of four sons—Jeb, now legally qualified to drink everywhere outside the Arab world; Tim and Reid, fraternal twins with a combined age of 36; and Paul, young enough to be my grandchild—who has tried to do his part to introduce them to the potential risks and rewards of outdoor adventure, I've held fast to the catchall principle of I'm the daddy so I must be right. The younger and smaller they are, I've found, the more cheerfully susceptible they are to this spurious logic. Paul, perhaps because he is only five, easily confuses me with God and is great fun to go fishing with.

Inconveniently, Jeb, Reid, and Tim have all reached that station in life where they're not so easily impressed with my wisdom, though I've noticed that they still phone home when they have car trouble or need a cash infusion. But each, in his own way, is a sensitive creature, and typically, when I admonish them that the wilderness is tricky territory—where the risk of losing an eye or a buttock or an expensive piece of equipment is something worth thinking about—what I get back is mainly attitude. Of course, I'm grateful that these large-size spawn of mine can carry a lot of stuff, and, except for their tendencies toward knee-jerk enviro-fascism, I regard them as worthy traveling companions.

Over the years—since I was ostensibly not yet old, and my sons were still at that endearing developmental stage where contempt for Dad was not yet the default mode—we've done our fair share of backpacking (mostly on the wussy East Coast) and canoeing (in Minnesota, New England, and Canada). We've bonded, by God, and in the process I've inflicted deliberate psychological abuse only when I deemed it absolutely necessary. Along the way, we, as a bunch of guys, have acquired a few crackerjack insights that I'm glad to pass along. My hope is that if, by chance, you are a father or a son contemplating a bit of familial togetherness, I can shatter a few illusions by offering some instructive, though mostly negative, examples from my own experience.

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