The Not - So - Great Outdoors

It’s camping season! Great news—if you happen to enjoy camping. Me, I like my clothes in a closet, not stuffed into a backpack. I’m happy sleeping under a nicely painted ceiling, not a flappy tent.

Some people live for nights cooking over a fiery pit and the smell of smoke permeating their clothes. If I were with them, I’d run screaming from the woods, begging any passing driver to take me to a motel (and a laundromat, to clean those stinky, smoky clothes).

I do my best to avoid the outdoors altogether, unless it involves a big patio couch, twinkling lights (the man-made kind) and a bottle of Chardonnay. My husband teases that the closest I’ve ever come to camping is sleeping with the windows open.

Why is it even called the “great” outdoors? To me, the outdoors is only great if I’m indoors. To be accurate, it should be called the “dirty outdoors,” the “scary outdoors” or the “let’s-go-to-a-hotel outdoors.”

I have lots of friends who camp. They love making a temporary home in nature. It taps into their creativity and feels like a return to simpler times. But isn’t the reason humanity progressed to tract housing was because we no longer wanted temporary homes? We wanted to settle into places with a roof.

Even though my friends say they like the simplicity of camping, it doesn’t really seem simple. You have to lug all that complicated stuff with you to make the camping more comfortable, like air mattresses and miniature cooking paraphernalia. Why not just leave the mattress in your bedroom where it belongs?

My friend Susan once brought me to her family camp near Angelica, N.Y. They call it their family camp because years ago they actually used to camp there. But eventually they converted a barn into a house with indoor plumbing. I asked her if that didn’t make it a country home. But she said she still felt like it’s camping because there are mice and a fire pit.

She says she loves waking up in the clean mountain air to the sound of the “crick” (they call it a “crick”) flowing along, the leaves rustling and the woodpecker in the trees. She also reminded me that on my visit there, I showed up in my high-heeled boots, like a New Yorker cartoon come to life.

She loves “camp” so much she expects to escape there one day and live there fulltime. This just made me wonder, “If your outdoor retreat becomes your home, where do you go to escape: Manhattan?”

I started my complicated relationship with the great outdoors after going to sleepaway camp as a teenager. We hiked to the great Poughkeepsie Overlook and camped overnight. To me, the experience was terrifying.

After sleep-away camp, my parents gave me the great gift of taking a national tour with other teens. The cool kids all took the camping version of the trip, but my mother found me a tour with hotels. The tour did include one night of camping in Yosemite National Park, but the tents—luckily—were far from rustic. They had lights, walls and a door. I remember fighting for a bathroom mirror with the other girls because they were all drying their hair with their enormous 1970s hairdryers.

The only time my husband and I ever came close to camping in our almost 30 years of marriage was on a trip through the Holy Land. We rode camels in the desert and ended the night in an enormous tent in a Bedouin village with 50 of our closest friends—and a hookah. Yes, there were large carpets to sleep on, but I had a rock in my back the whole night so I’m certain it counts as camping. Actually, I count it as camping because of the way I felt when I woke up the next morning, exhausted, smelly and with a film over my teeth that only comes from sleeping in the sand all night (or from trying a hookah).

Don’t get me wrong—I can appreciate nature. This past February, we took a family trip to California and drove down the coast from San Francisco to L.A., with the sun setting over the water along the cliffs. We spent the night in Big Sur at a rustic hotel along a creek (aka crick) in the middle of the woods.

Of course, staying in a rustic hotel doesn’t count as camping. But when the heat stopped in the middle of the night and we woke up in the freezing cold morning, I felt like we had slept outdoors.

The point of the drive was to show our kids one of the most beautiful places we’d ever seen in our great country. You don’t have to love being outdoors to appreciate the beauty of it.

I’ll never forget, as a teenager on that trip across the country, seeing the Grand Canyon and feeling the vastness of the landscape. One night we took a bus from our motel in Carlsbad, Calif., deep into the desert to lie on the ground and watch the stars. That night has stayed with me because of the great awe I felt gazing at the wonder and beauty of the enormous sky. That, and my terror that a rattlesnake would slither up at any moment.

Two years ago, I had the chance to travel to Banff National Park in Canada and visit the famous Lake Louise. The majestic mountains and lake, with the glaciers in the background, took my breath away. Of course, I had to wait for a break in the crowds of tourists so I could look like I was alone in the wilderness for a photo to post on Facebook.

On the return trip from Lake Louise to Banff, normally a 15-minute drive, the great outdoors came crashing into our good time. A mudslide had blocked the road, and we faced the possibility of spending the night outdoors in the Canadian Rockies but without all the camping paraphernalia.

The bus driver’s solution was to drive five hours around the mountain and come into Banff from the opposite direction. Seemed like a good idea until we started the drive into the plains of Canada. That’s when the driver said on the intercom, “There are some funnels being reported up the road.” I had no idea what a funnel was until my friend explained, “That’s Canadian for ‘twister.’”

Five hours later, I staggered off the bus and walked back into the elegant Fairmount Hotel. As I settled into the hotel room, listening to the rain and thunder, I was just grateful to be inside.

My friend Paul summed up how I feel about the great outdoors beautifully when he said, “Darling, I bow to no one in love for nature. I love the ocean’s pounding waves and tranquil mountain lakes. I love wild rainforests and stately formal gardens. And I love them all the more when indoor plumbing and room service await at the end of the day. I also love to shop, but I have no need to pitch a tent and spend the night on the floor at Barney's.”