Who's Your Daddy: Father & Son Camping

You Are Here:

Home >> Who's Your Daddy? (cont.)

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine

Page:

Who's Your Daddy? (cont.)

WOOD CAN BE USED AND WOOD CAN BE ABUSED
Where there's fire, there must be a preliminary ritual of wood gathering. But must there also be wood sniggering? What is the source of the preoccupation these virile young bucks have with wood, the chortling that emanates from their tent as they analyze the mysterious distinctions between morning wood, evening wood, late-afternoon wood? Wood is wood any time of day, I say.

Each of my sons spent several summers at my old camp, where, in theory, a lot of worthy new rules have been conjured, among them the wood-scattering dogma. What used to be regarded as a gesture of wilderness good citizenship—leaving a supply of firewood for the next group that might come along—is now considered a careless insult to the ecosystem. As Reid reminds me each time we abandon a campsite and he tosses any unincinerated logs into the forest, "You don't get it, do you? You still refuse to give even the slightest thought to the trees that need redistributed deadwood to provide nutrients as it decomposes into rich soil." That's not fair; I have thought about it. I've also thought about those thousands of long-gone tuition dollars. And I've thought: Would Ping-Pong camp have been such a poor alternative?...Auto-repair camp?...Venture-capital camp?

THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO FEED A FIRE
Perhaps our most memorable journey to Quebec began with an e-mail correspondence between me and the palindromically named Pierre-Jacques Jacques-Pierre, operator of a hunting-and-fishing camp. P-J J-P's clients always boarded in his cabins, he said; he couldn't recall the last time anyone had pitched tents. But—pas de problème—he knew of a sandy beach near his camp, and he could arrange for a pontoon plane to deposit us there.

So we drove 700 miles (the last hundred on a gravel road) to a lakeside air base, spent a night in a fetid bunkhouse (dining on freeze-dried beef teriyaki hydrated with bathroom tap water—a dish we renamed carne del baño), and were airlifted the next morning on a vintage eight-seater whose most reassuring feature was that the barf bags were within easy reach.

As we unloaded on the beach, Pierre-Jacques arrived, towing our canoes behind a motor launch laden with cooking supplies and a cedar picnic table. Jeb, Reid, and Tim, who regard themselves as backcountry minimalists—their favorite adjective is "hardcore"—eyed first the picnic table and then me with naked disgust. How, exactly, had it come to this? Was I in reality one of those faux-gung-ho dads most at home in an RV park? Or was it not possible that over the years I had acquired an understanding that the presence of a few bourgeois appurtenances in the backcountry wouldn't cause the planets to alter their orbits? No matter, it was time to build a fire. I dispatched my insolent minions on a wood-gathering mission and they soon returned with a hefty supply, which Pierre-Jacques augmented with a live maple he had felled with a chainsaw. The boys would have spent hours chopping if Pierre-Jacques and his chainsaw hadn't briskly transformed the trunk into handy Duraflame-size units. Reid had already dug a pit and now began to build a fire—a kindling tepee in the center, birch bark for tinder, a superstructure pyramid of logs. He was rooting through his pack for matches when Pierre-Jacques, no doubt assuming he was doing us a favor, soaked the assemblage in gasoline and ignited it with a cigarette lighter.

To my amazement, Reid and his brothers said nothing. They just smiled and faintly waved as Pierre-Jacques, unaware that he had become their mortal enemy, climbed into his motor launch for the trip back to his island. It's unclear to me which of them came up with the inspired idea that, when my back was turned, they would dismember the picnic table and reduce it to firewood. But it quickly became a consensus, as was their plan to add to the fire the red-and-white-checked tablecloth that Pierre-Jacques had thoughtfully packed. I was troubled by all this, naturally, because the group impulse seemed not just a coincidence but evidence of, shall we say, very bad breeding.

When I discovered what they were plotting, I made plain, concisely and profanely, that this gesture struck me as the antithesis of doing the right thing. Somebody would pay for this, I insisted, and it sure as hell wasn't going to be me. I'm proud to say that my boys seemed to know better than to argue that point. That much I had taught them; I was, after all, still the daddy. Plus, as they later acknowledged (if somewhat grudgingly), those fish dinners at sunset, there on the beach—gathered around the picnic table, with Pierre-Jacques's dishes and cutlery spread on the checked tablecloth—were all so terribly, gloriously civilized.

Page:

•	Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!

•	Give the gift of Outside Magazine!

•	Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.