About ten years ago, my father was invited to a hunting retreat by his friend for Thanksgiving. Though he spent quite some time with his head over the outhouse toilets and had to slather a quart’s worth of mosquito repellent all over himself day and night, and even lost his glasses to a particularly fresh pile of bear feces, he thought there was no other place in the world like that small, three acre piece of land. He returned year after year to celebrate Thanksgiving (and any other holiday they could think of – as an excuse to get away) with his friends – and once, even managed to drag my mother along. Four years ago, he abruptly stopped going because he was too busy. Since that first trip to the woods, he has become a grizzled veteran of the business industry, but there are days when the stress and humdrum of work makes him long for the tranquility of that lake in the woods. A few months ago this feeling got too strong, so my father bought a couple of whitefish hooks and plenty of fishing line, and returned to that lake with his friends, for a week of hunting and fishing with me alongside him.

　　I, who had never seen the gory process of skinning and gutting a deer and who had only seen people shoot guns on TV, was going camping. On the road to the lake, I spent four hours imagining a Bambi-esque scene, where I would play with the deer and the skunks. My father wondered aloud how the time would have changed this sacred campsite. He recounted how he remembered clearest of all the crisp air in the mornings, when the lake was calm and silent save for the eerily haunting yet majestic call of the loon, remembered how the trailers smelled of the musk and mildew and the heady scent of the damp underbrush, which wafted through the screen door. Always one to wake early, he would stroll down to the lake to watch the sun rise and then cast some lines from the dock, sit under the long shadows of the pines and laze in the serenity of the forest.

　　There was a small lake, which was encompassed within the camp. Though tiny, the lake was extremely deep – my father warned me that someone had drowned two years prior and said I was not to go swimming in that lake by myself. There were no cute cottages sprinkled around the lakeshore; it was a secluded, private piece of land, and was in the middle of a forest, so the area was heavily wooded. It was easy to get lost in the dense brush, so it was required for all chidren to carry flares at all times. The trailers in the camp were owned by friends and relatives of Larry (the owner and my father’s friend), and we were to live in a trailer and eat our meals in the “mess hall” – an army tent erected for such purposes. There was a large clearing with numerous picnic tables, which functioned as the gathering place.

　　When my dad and I arrived, we settled into a trailer near the mess hall and I ran off to explore the strange wilderness. My father shed his three-piece suit and loafers for some ratty camouflage gear, and clunky boots. We snuck down to the dock early next morning to fish, and we both felt the cold metal of the whitefish hooks, and saw dragonflies mate mere inches above the unbroken surface of the water. The small waves were soothing, gently knocking the dock against the shore – like a mother would soothe her baby. The dock was an old dock, the wood bleached and battered, and the nails bent and rusted, and on the dock, the olive green mildew grew between the rusted fishhooks and there were traces of blood and guts from yesterday’s catch. We stared silently at the tips of our rods, at the loons that glided by, at the flies that whizzed back and forth across our lines of sight. I dipped my feet into the frigid water and relaxed; my father told me that the fish would only bite if I stayed very quiet and able to out-waited them. Patiently sitting on that ever rocking dock, waiting for the fish to come to me, I felt very calm.

　　We hauled in three whitefish laboriously, as though they were 100 pounds, pulling them over the side of the dock along with a ton of lake grass with the heavily bent fishing rod and nothing else. As they frantically flopped around on the deck, my father quickly taught me to de-hook the fish and throw them into a water-filled pail. We basked in the serenity of the lake for a little while longer before my father suggested we head back for lunch. Surprised that we were going to eat so early, I checked my watch, only to find that five hours had passed. The time had flown by; nature was more captivating than I had first thought. In the depths of the boreal forest, time both seemed to slow to a crawl, yet fly by; each moment was clearly imprinted upon my memory, but it seemed that the time had flashed right before my very eyes – hours felt like mere minutes.

　　Upon reaching camp, my dad took the fish from me and grabbed a wickedly sharp knife. He demonstrated how to efficiently (it took about a minute) gut and fillet two of the whitefish. Proffering the knife to me, he told me to give it a try. It was harder than it looked and I am sorry to say that I completely butchered the last one and so, we only ate two grilled fish for lunch.

　　We went back to lake after lunch to explore. My father slowly eased me into the wobbly canoe, and we pushed off. Ever the patient guide, he taught me how to row the canoe, how best to maximize the strokes of the paddle. In the shallows, the dark, waterlogged twigs and leaves, old and crumbling, rested in clusters on the lake bottom against the undulating weeds while small aquatic bugs darted around. My father showed me a muskrat nesting in the weeds, and two brown bears resting on the far shore. He provided anecdotes, like how one time he was out deer hunting, and unexpectedly, through the undergrowth, a quail popped up and my father was so startled that he shot the poor thing to bits (a bullet from a rifle has enough force to tear apart the whole bird). A group of geese swam by, each with its ebony head held high, and a raccoon carefully washed his masked face with tiny paws. Sitting there, basking in the sunlight with my father, I felt so carefree, and I loved my father for bringing me to this small haven, where I could better understand nature.

　　We hiked up to the mess hall for dinner through the deserted gravel trail, the pebbles under our sneakers announcing our path with its crunching and rattling. Dinner was a splendid affair; of course, my father and I were not the only two people there; Larry and his beer-drinking hunting buddies and their families were also present. Larry brought a 200 pound pig, and set up a pig roast (he actually put a pig roaster in the bed of his pickup truck and brought it to the camp along with gallons of gas). The marvelous smell of the pig roast permeated the heavy night air. Two campfires were lit, and Larry’s mini-generator was turned on to power the lights. This was surreal; it did not seem like camping – this place was fit for kings. The women made mountains of coleslaw and mashed potatoes, and fragrant corn on the cob. Larry also roasted a whole turkey. All in all, there were thirty people present for dinner, some friends even drove over from the nearby native reserve. For dessert, there was a choice of pumpkin and apple pie, cake, and lemon torte. The kids also got to char puffy white marshmallows while the adults chugged beer and smoked. One man brought out his guitar, and he played some tunes in the darkness, with only the flickering and crackling fire as accompaniment. Another fellow joined in with his harmonica, and soon we were all belting out old country tunes. Someone brought out hot chocolate, and we sipped and sang and danced until our legs could no longer support the weight of our food-laden bodies.

　　It seems that those times were priceless and worth saving. There had been peace and happiness. From the first arrival, as we pulled up in our massive truck, with mud painting the sides, to the first catch of the day, to the first bite of roast pig, to the snug warmth of the bonfire, and the view of the sunrise, I was content. The shouts and cries of friends and strangers when they saw you, the wilderness to be explored, and the fish to be caught all remind me why I loved camping and nature. Peace and happiness. There was nothing wrong, no droning of jet skis, or wakeboards. Nothing broke the timelessness. This camp was the best relaxant, amidst natural beauty, that ever-rocking dock, away from the oppressive city heat.

　　In the afternoons, while my father went out hunting with his comrades, I would pick wild berries from the nearby thorny bushes with the other kids. What seemed like a bland forest actually teemed with life. The undergrowth was resplendent – a burst of magenta cranberries here, and a cluster of vibrant blueberries there, and many zany polka-dotted mushrooms and caterpillars. One caterpillar I named Tiger, whom I kept during our stay; he was truly a beautiful creature, with white-tipped, bright orange fuzz and long black tufts. He was a big caterpillar, and his vivid colors contrasted most stunningly with the olive-brown branch he rested on. The undergrowth looked like a scene from Alice in Wonderland. Such beauty was plentiful, but only if one were to pay close attention to their surroundings. In addition to teaching me to recognize beauty, my father taught me to recognize which mushrooms were poisonous and which tasted good, and how to track animals by their prints or how they disturbed the wildlife around them. He told me that the most important skill one can have in the forest is that of patient observation. One day, we sat motionless on a rock for an hour, just to wait for a glimpse of a spotted owl roosting in the tree above us. Over the course of that week, I learned far more with my father than my biology teacher could have taught me in a year.

　　Nature was good to us, the whitefish were biting and the sun shone, day after day. At night, we would lie in the narrow cots in the tiny trailer and cross our arms behind our heads, and just breathe deeply. Sleep came easily and in the morning, the mice would scamper about under the trailer (the first time I heard the noise, I thought it was a bear and I was terrified, because the noise of the mice had been amplified by the trailer). I would lay in bed in the pitch-black pre-dawn and reminisced about what my dear father had taught me the day before. My father took me to explore the streams, quietly, where the slugs slid out from under small boulders and left their moist trails; and we squatted by bushes to eat wild blueberries, staining our lips purple, and watched the clouds roll by.

　　One afternoon while I was fishing alone, my father ran over helter-skelter and excitedly recounted the story of how they had shot two bucks that morning. I was curious: would it look regal, like the stuffed deer I sometimes saw at lodges? I went with my father to watch the spectacle unfold. When we got there, however, I saw that he was not beautiful like Bambi, nor elegant like a stuffed deer, but grotesque, almost obscene. One buck’s hind legs had been tightly strapped to the top crossbar of a carefully constructed skinning rack. His hooves and lower legs, which were inedible, had been sawed off with a mini chainsaw. The man who had shot the deer had unfortunately missed the heart, and instead punctured the stomach so half the ribs were sawn away too (because intestines had splattered – and no one wanted to eat that). When I stood on my tippytoes I could look through the window that the chainsaw had made, right through the deer. His entrails were strewn all over the blood-soaked ground; his ruptured stomach and intestines lay coiled, like a snake in waiting. And out of the deer’s mouth, whose tongue had swollen, blood kept dripping, dripping, and dripping.

　　This horrifying image almost made me puke. My father, who saw my face turn ashen, dragged me away from the carnage and explained to me that this was natural. Predators hunt prey to survive. This was not trophy hunting, it was life, and the people would all take home the meat to eat, so it was not a waste. After all, he reasoned, no meat originates from a prepackaged bag. He thought he had taught me a life lesson, when in reality, I didn’t process any of his words until much later, after the horrifying images had faded (at that time, I was just trying not to vomit). But I did understand, this was life; when humankind were nomads roaming the land, this was how they survived, and now with the aid of technology, the animals suffered less when they were killed. He always told me that life for these animals was to eat and try not to be eaten. Humans are similar, we must work hard and succeed, and try not to laze around and be surpassed by those who are working harder than you. That camping trip, I also found that not all of nature was pretty, she could also be fickle, both giving and taking lives with ease. I had not only glimpsed the absolute allure, but also the ugly underbelly of our earth.

　　Some of my pleasantest hours were during the rain storm on the fourth day, which confined me to the trailer of the tents for the afternoon, soothing me with the ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long, languid evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and grow. My father taught me to enjoy the storm, the first feeling of the rising humidity and heat. I had never really appreciated a thunderstorm the way I do now; the rapid darkening of the sky and the lull in noise – not even the crickets chirp – and suddenly the beginnings of a hard breeze sweeps through, rustling the foliage, making it seem as though the trees themselves are impatiently waiting for the rain to fall. Then the portentous rumbles, and thundering beats faster and faster, and the cymbals clash, then the crackling fission of lightning streaks down, and for a moment, time seems to stop, and then the light fades, and the cycle begins anew. During these flashes of lightning, I forgot to breathe; the scene is always so surreal. I feel honored that nature has graced me with such raw beauty. After this breathtaking performance, the sky calms, and the rain falls steadily over the trees, over the trailers, over the lake. It beats a soothing pattern on the roof and as the storms dies, the forest once more livens, the birds trill, and the loon calls, and I can still hear the distant symphony of the storm and the dark clouds recede, and the sun shines once more.

　　I will never forget all I have learned and experienced from that first acquaintance with camping. The serene lake, the woods so ancient, the rain so sweet, the deer slaughter so shocking, and the miles of natural earth, extending far past my horizon of sight: this was the background, and friendship was the forefront. Larry and my father and I and innumerous friends and strangers, we all enjoyed ourselves with the timeless backdrop. White cotton clouds speckled the azure sky, and a web of little paths led to the outhouses, to the trailers, to the dock, and to the mess hall, where laughter and joy could be heard and felt all through camp.