Disclaimer: Camping is actually a fun and relaxing thing to do with your family. It's a cheap and easy way to enjoy the outdoors and get away from your worries.
Unless you're me.
You would think that previous mayhem would have been enough to change my expectations. Perhaps you know me, and can't believe that once, not too many years back, I had the heart, the energy, the sheer
gumption to persevere in the face of defeat. That wasn't really me. Normally I fold like a deck chair in a hurricane.
I assure you that whatever it was, it was only temporary; that keen defiance, that impervious drive to make things happen, that denial of danger was a byproduct of late-blooming infatuation. For ten years in the middle of my life I suddenly and completely refused to believe that fate or God or Mother Nature or Buddha had it in for me.
They loved me. Us. I was so happy.
For some people
Love is as toxic as crack, and twice as addictive.
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| This is your brain in Love. |
My wife still wanted to spend her vacations camping, and I still wanted to be wherever she was. We went back to camping alone, happy still, in denial. We dealt with a massive fish spawning that ruined the river next to us, and tenting under a screech-owl nest, and a few other things that don't even register with me now.
Not after this:
The second-last trip was to a campground closer to home, and closer to town.
Why so close, when we had always planned remote destinations, surrounded by trees? A recommendation by
Chuck and Dick. Before you ask "Whaaaa?" I remind you: we were in our 20's, and I had dumped my natural caution like a Kevlar vest at a love-in. With hindsight most things I did then look equally dumb.
OK. Here we go:
Fort Langley
The name alone causes me full-body sense-memory shock.
