“To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.” - Jon Krakauer
Why is it that we leave behind the comforts of home for days at a time to sleep on rocky beds, eat out of tinfoil, squat over holes in the ground, and leave ourselves at the mercy of the elements? What is it about abandoning paved roads, climate control, and running water, if only for a short time, that so many of us find so appealing? Is it simply an appreciation for natural landscapes and the beauty of the wild? Or is there something more ... primal, driving us to escape from modern life?
There is something primordial about creating a fire and cooking with it; about sleeping under the stars and counting on the clockwork of the sun to keep time for you. I'm not necessarily suggesting there's some greater truth to be found by camping, or becoming a hermit of the woods, or whatever. I'm simply saying that the experience taps into some recessed hunter-gatherer portion of our brains ingrained by millennia of evolution. And if you are going to have some sort of self-reflection, or strive for a greater connection to the world around you, then what better place to start? In my experience, people who spend a lot of time camping (or hiking, skiing, climbing, biking, and otherwise enjoying the outdoors) have a greater admiration for the natural world, concern for conservation, and appreciation of life's all-too-fleeting moments of joy and wonder precisely because of the time they've spent outdoors, and not the other way around. That is to say, we didn't wander into the wilderness hoping to find our true selves or discover fulfillment; it was simply a by-product of our quests for fun and adventure within the natural world.
Of course, there are plenty of other, less existential reasons for spending our time outside—pursuing high-speed thrills on bikes and snowboards, taking a break from screens and traffic and the other mundanities of modern life; exploring, drinking, laughing, and howling at the moon. Camping isn't some monk-like endeavor to find spirituality through the denial of earthly sensations; quite the opposite, really. It's an embrace of so many the things that make us innately human and connect us to our ancestors, such as sharing food and drink around a fire; appreciating all of nature's wonders, from the grandeur of geological formations to the minutiae of cacti and caterpillars; singing, dancing, and telling jokes under a heavenly blanket of stars. In those moments, it's not hard to imagine another group of humans, despite a different culture and a different language and a thousand years of separation, doing essentially the same thing in the same place. And perhaps that is what keeps us ditching our queen-size beds and streaming video for a few days or weeks each year. A chance to connect with a truer and more ancient reality. Well, that and the fact that there's no better setting for sipping whiskey directly from the bottle than around a campfire.
“Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” ― Mark Twain
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