An Odd, Essential Reason to Go Camping

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

I write to you from the bottom of Palo Duro Canyon, 10 miles southeast of the Texas panhandle town of Amarillo.

I’m in a folding “camp chair.” My MacBook Pro balances on my bare knees. All around rise the 800-foot crimson cliffs of this immense rift, second in size only to the Grand Canyon.

My wife Laurie and I are camping. Primitive camping. We’re traveling across the country to help our niece move from St. Louis to Phoenix to attend graduate school. We’re spending nights in campgrounds along the way.

We have a little blue tent. A 35-year-old Coleman stove. An old cotton blanket (no need for sleeping bags — in early June, our Interstate 40 trek across the southern U.S. is plenty warm at night). A couple changes of clothes. Some cans of beef stew.

One saucepan. Two spoons.

Why?

The simple explanation is that we love it. This, by the way, is the explanation that I often find on Facebook and Twitter accompanying photos of travel experiences.

“Here we are doing the thing we love in a place we love,” is the gist of pretty much every post I see.

But… do Laurie and I really love minimalist camping?

It’s an interesting question.

Were we to be honest, we’d say… we don’t mind it.

Challenges of Roughing It

The fact is camping as we do offers abundant discomforts, including clouds of mosquitoes, indelicate restroom experiences, and intimate encounters with rain, heat, dust, and muck. One night in northern New Mexico, howling winds threatened to blow the tent over with us inside it and kept us up half the night.

Challenges like these are, I suspect, why virtually no one seems to rough camp anymore. Surrounding us here in Palo Duro Canyon State Park are endless ranks of recreational vehicles. Most are immense — the one next door is at least 35 feet — and offer every possible amenity in a mobile, hermetically sealed envelope.

Their owners seldom venture outside. This campground seems as depopulated as the typical American suburb. Its residents putter within their vast vehicles to warm dinner in the microwave, watch some flat-screen TV, and ultimately sprawl on the king-sized bed.

But we don’t envy them. We’ve found that the hassles of primitive camping are almost perfectly balanced by its charms: fresh air, gorgeous views, the agreeable exercises of tent erecting and firewood gathering, and exposure to all-day sunlight that resets our office-addled circadian clocks. We also enjoy chatting with the few other odd ducks who are also tent camping.

In short, the thrill of bare-bones camping isn’t that it’s ecstatic in and of itself. Rather, it’s that…

It reminds one that the minimal life is nothing to fear.

Which brings me to the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D. 65).

The Benefits of Voluntary Discomfort

In his seminal “On Festivals and Fasting,” Seneca considers a conundrum that many modern researchers have noted: Wealthy people seem no happier than those of moderate or even hardscrabble means.

Rather than just shrug his shoulders at this odd state, Seneca — who was well-off himself — thinks long and hard about it.

He ultimately realizes that the rich person’s downfall is that he comes to depend on his comforts as if they are essential and worries that he would be miserable if he became poor.

So Seneca counsels his equally moneyed friend Lucilius to:

“appoint certain days on which to give up everything and make yourself at home with next to nothing. Start cultivating a relationship with poverty. For no one is worthy of god unless he has paid no heed to riches. I am not, mind you, against your possessing them, but I want to ensure that you possess them without tremors; and this you will only achieve in one way, by convincing yourself that you can live a happy life even without them, and by always regarding them as being on the point of vanishing.”

Take the process seriously, he continues. He suggests sleeping on a coarse mattress stuffed with straw, along with meals of “hard and grimy” bread:

“Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes for more, so that it may be a test of yourself instead of a mere hobby. Then, I assure you, my dear Lucilius, you will leap for joy when filled with a pennyworth of food, and you will understand that a man’s peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune; for, even when angry, she grants enough for our needs.”

In short, counsels Seneca, “Establish business relations with poverty.”

It’s a fine idea.

I am now finishing this little essay in our home in Tempe, Arizona, after a shower and a lovely meal of wild-caught king salmon, steamed artichoke, and a remarkable 2006 Freeman Sonoma Coast pinot noir.

It is very good… But the canned beef stew was good, too.

Sincerely,

Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions