Strange Days

I've been in a strange mood lately. I've been reading Carolyn Heilbrun's The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. In this lovely memoir, she reflects back on her sixties, seeing them as full of rich and insightful experiences. This is all the more remarkable on her part, as she had decided when much younger to end her life at seventy, thinking that her life would be intolerable by then.

As I zero in on my sixties, I find this memoir immensely cheering. Although it did get me to thinking about decades--I seem to remember Gail Sheehy's book Passages looking at the decades of our lives and linking them to certain life-lessons that we're supposed to internalize or learn from or pass through or some such thing.

Which also got me to thinking (I seem to be doing a lot of that these days) about my life decades past and this blogging project that I've taken on. When Heilbrun wrote her memoir from the vantage of her seventies, she was looking back only ten years or so. My writing adventure starts in my twenties and continues through my thirties and forties and meanders into the present fifties decade. My memory lane is longer than Heilbrun's, although she is such a compelling writer that she makes walking the dog an epic adventure.

And so I've been thinking about decades--in our individual lives and in our history and culture. Why do we ascribe such talismanic properties to chunks of ten years? We talk in terms of decades--the Roaring Twenties, the Dirty Thirties, the Warring Forties, the Complacent Fifties, the Sixties (no adjective required for that one!), the Me-Seventies, the Eighties, Nineties. No one has come up with a satisfying term for the decade just past, however. The Double-Oughts, Noughts, Oh-Oh's--these all sound cheesy and contrived--perhaps that's simply because we live in a contrived culture.

But back to decades--do we label these spans to impose order on a chaotic world? Does it satisfy some organizational compulsion on our parts? Or is it because we happen to have ten fingers? I don't really know, but I've been musing on stupid stuff like this for the last several weeks, to the point where I'm not writing because my musing is taking up all my time. Strange days for me, these last several weeks.

As you can see from the last post's date, I've had trouble writing the latest installment. I'm thinking (again with the thinking--will this madness never end?) that perhaps, just perhaps, at this mid-point in the fifty-sixth summer I've been careening around the universe on this nice planet, that the weight of years gone by is precariously balanced by the spectre of years to come. Not in chronological or mathematical terms, unless I live to be one hundred and twelve, God forbid. If that happens, I hope my kids will have shoved me off on an ice floe well before then (although it should be a nice ice-floe).

No, it is the emotional weight of past and future that I am considering. Perhaps because it is mid-summer, this has somehow fixed the balance between these temporal partners. I see the past, contemplate the future, and I am frozen in time. I realize that this writing project has necessitated much remembering--and in that practice of conjuring up the past, I am paralyzed by it at times. Its weight, its implacable immutability. And I wonder if this is the beginning of dementia, this living in the long-ago while furiously searching for my keys or trying to remember the name of the movie I saw last week. Perhaps it's because the future is unclear. Being the control freak that I am, I dislike immensely the looming uncertainty. And then I remember--when I was younger, uncertainty was possibility. When did the two change? When did I become such a chicken?

Then I recall the magic of writing--that even a memoir is an invented narrative. It need not be a strict rendition of what has happened. It is, above all, a story. And the nice thing about a story is that you can edit to your heart's content, selecting the choice scenes, the ones in which you emerge as heroic, kind, understanding, noble, etc., leaving tantrums, bitchy remarks, cruel words and deeds on the cutting room floor. You can weigh the past with enough good stuff to shift the balance, and perhaps, just perhaps, the good stuff will spill into the uncertain future.

So I perk up. I'm not just telling the past or predicting the future. I'm being creative--in the now, the tao of now, the wow of now, I'm kow-towing to the now, saying ciao to the now (such are the dangers of an online rhyming dictionary and a strange mood). So much "now" is bound to shift the balance between past and future, freeing me from my paralysis. I can mine the past for its story elements without getting stuck in it (at least for another installment!).

And so I think back to my thirties--the decade that began with three kids--a four-year-old, a two-year-old and an infant. These were my "tired years", as friend Claire called them. The decade continued with another kid (not expected at all!), my return to university, our house growing by about two thousand square feet, our coagulation (icky word but apt) as a family unit, kids starting school, big hair, mullets, shoulder pads, long lapels, skinny pants, ankle boots, and a LOT of bad music. The decade also saw us embrace camping as the holiday of choice for one income and four children.

Perhaps it's because it's mid-summer right now, that delicious time when July isn't quite over, when there's still August and a few extra days to tip the balance of freedom and sun into the black for a few days more. At any rate, my thoughts have been turning to those gone-by summers when we discovered family camping. Jack and I had camped a lot before we had kids. Jack had a two-person (if you happened to be from Lilliput) pup-tent that was state-of-the-art for the nineteen-seventies. It could be set up in minutes, if you happened to hold an advanced engineering degree from MIT. But it was woefully inadequate to the task of sheltering five (later six) people from the elements.

By the time Tercero came along, we were desperate for an actual holiday that could include the kids. Jack's parents gave us their old canvas tent--the one he camped in as a child. We were on our way. The canvas tent lasted one season--it had a centre pole that I was always banging into, and smelled like canvas that had been folded away for years. If you've ever sniffed that particular aroma, you will understand why we ditched the tent. But that old tent helped us rediscover the joys of camping, which the boys took to like ducks to water. We were lucky enough to live within driving distance of stunning lakes and superb campsites, and family camping was born.

We started when Tercero was a baby. He slept in a car bed at the foot of the tent. He was our baby camper, as was Cuarto when he came along. Primero and Segundo were a bit older, but immediately got into the outdoor life. Primero discovered the joys of playing in the fire-pit, experimenting with various combustibles. This turned into a life-long preoccupation that amuses him yet. Segundo started hanging around the fish-cleaning pits, mooching fish-heads so he could gouge out the eyes. He's still poking at eyes as a second-year ophthalmology resident--who knew? Tercero apprenticed at the feet of his siblings. By the time Cuarto came along, we had a gigantic dome tent, a canoe, fifteen thousand fishing rods and lures (or so it seemed), and enough sleeping bags to accommodate the entire standing Chinese Army.

The boys learned how to build fires (not that they needed encouragement in that direction--more about this later). They learned that the J-stroke is not a pornographic act, but an efficient means of propelling a canoe. They learned how to catch a fish, take it off the bazillion-barbed lure, clean it and cook it over a fire. They learned that coming down a tree is much harder than going up, and can lead to nasty contusions in places where contusions are nasty. They learned to pull leeches off with salt or lit cigarettes (it was the eighties--we all smoked back then, yes, even in front of the kids) and that leeches cooked in a coffee can over the fire are inedible.

They learned many things, most of all the sweetness of nature, to be gratified by its embrace, to walk through woods and glide over water, to breathe clean air and sleep under starts, to be comfortable where there are no people, no cars, no houses, no roads, no electricity, no modern conveniences. In an increasingly urban and electronic world, these are precious experiences and quickly-disappearing skills.

Every summer we'd cram ourselves into the car. The canoe, overturned on the roof, functioned nicely as a car-top carrier into which we stuffed sleeping bags, pillows, life-jackets, tents, backpacks, etc. We had our favourite sites--Nemekus in Prince Albert National Park was one--no motorboats were allowed on this round little lake. Because of this, mostly families camped there--the partiers stayed in Waskesiu. The best sites were right on the beach. We would send in a kid to claim the picnic table until we unloaded the car. Once the tent was set up and arguments over who was sleeping where settled with sweet reasonableness ("you sleep here, you sleep here, you sleep here and you sleep here--now cut it out!"), we'd build a fire, fill the sooty coffee pot with water, and hoick it onto the fire-pit's bent and rusty grill. For those who have never experienced cowboy coffee brewed over an open flame, you are to be pitied. It is one of the finer things in life, and you should put it on your bucket list.

Then wiener sticks had to be cut--this is where the coveted Swiss Army knife came into play. As the boys grew, getting their first Swiss Army knife became a rite of passage (as did the inevitable cuts and gouges in flesh and furniture). They used them to carve fish clubs out of driftwood and whittle hot-dog sticks that quickly morphed into lethal weapons. They were no longer just little kids. They had become tool-makers, heirs to the paleolithic heritage of homo habilis. It was all so primal--fire, food, fish bonking, hot-dog roasting, brother-bashing--it didn't get much better than that.

Last week, Jack and I camped for the first time in ages. We were returning from visiting Walt and Nancy in Radium Hot Springs, and were taking our time driving home through the Kootenays and along the southern Crow's Nest highway along the U.S. border. We broke the journey with a night's stay in a pretty little provincial park just north of Oliver. Because we'd planned to only stay the night, we hadn't packed any pots or dishes or food. So we had no fire, no cowboy coffee and also no kids. It seemed very strange to pull into the campsite and not have a horde of boys boil out of the car to pee in the bushes. No boys heading to the river or lake to push each other in. No boys to lug firewood from the big pile down the road. No boys cutting hot-dog sticks or looking for drift wood to make fish-clubs out of. No arguing, hollering, running, shrieking (although I did my best!). No one falling down, skinning knees, cutting themselves on their Swiss Army blades ("hold it with the blade UP before you open it!"). No boys gazing raptly the cliff looming over the campsite ("Can we climb that? Why not? Aw c'mon. Please? Can we, huh? Please? Aw, NUTS! Can we climb it tomorrow? Whay not? Aw c'mon. Please? Can we, huh? Huh? Awww NUTS!").

It felt strange, camping with just the two of us. Don't get me wrong--it was okay. But it was strange, nonetheless. In the morning, it took us no time at all to pack up. We headed into Oliver for breakfast. Very civilized. Someone else made us coffee, and it was pretty good. But it wasn't cowboy coffee.

My mind was stuck on those camping trips of yore, how dirty, noisy, messy, chaotic and fun they were. It always seemed to take forever to pack everything, especially with Jack unpacking and re-packing everything that I put in the car. This propensity for re-organization (an anal-retentive quality that Jack shares with his brother Walt, if the weekend in Radium was any indication, and Nancy has shared certain information that supports this). Then it took forever to set up the camp and get it organized (tarping is where Jack's anal-retentive qualities actually come in handy--he can string tarps to keep us dry in the hardest rainstorm). Then we'd have to strike camp, pack everything away and shove it all back into the car. Then we'd get home, have to unpack everything, dry it off and put it away. There were times when the amount of work involved almost overbalanced the fun.

Almost but not quite, because the fun part always won out. It was never so much work that we didn't do it. Because that first cup of cowboy coffee, the first fish-club to exclaim over, the first bite of fresh-caught northern pike, the first hiss of the paddle in calm water, the first night of hearing four sets of soft breathing from the tent as Jack and I sat outside waiting for the Big Dipper to appear as the cool night seeped into deep blue to the north made it worthwhile.

Camping this time, just the two of us, in the hot evening air of the southern Okanagan, felt strange. It was okay, but it felt strange. Much like my mood lately.