On hammock camping your way back

is it the gear or the attitude?

That old adage, the one I read somewhere on the back cover of a self-help book or while scrolling mindlessly down my facebook feed, keeps coming to mind: Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

“Dude,” says my spouse Janyce. “I have the Yamaha AV controller app, can you stand it?”

It’s Saturday morning and I’m in bed drinking coffee and eating toast with raspberry jam. Suddenly, I hear the music come on in the living room. Janyce is sitting up beside me staring down at her phone.

“I think this is the song I heard the other day by My Morning Jacket. It’s got some Pink Floyd in it,” she says.

I’m not answering her because I’m looking up “hammock camping” on my laptop. It occurs to me for a second to ask her why it’s more fun to turn on the music from her phone and have it start playing in the other room instead of from the speaker right next to us. But I don’t.

Just this week, I found myself asking similar questions of both of my sons.

“Is that how you are sleeping? Under that tarp?” I texted to my youngest son Aidan who was halfway on his drive back to Nashville. I was keeping in constant contact with him during the workday, asking him to send me a few pictures of the scenery along the Blue Ridge Parkway and to let me know when he landed at the latest campground.

“My hammock is hung up under there with a sleeping pad!” he texted back.

“Oh wow,” I said, “I don’t know if I could camp like that, I’m impressed.”

I read the description from an article titled “hammock camping, the good hang” in the Google list.

“Many backpackers quickly fall in love with hammock camping and never look back. Others have a tough time getting comfortable and end up back in their tents. It really does depend on your personal style and preference.”

I don’t know much about camping and I’ve never been particularly drawn to it. Once, when I was in my twenties and a new mom, I thought it would be okay to bring our baby with us in a tent in the middle of a mowed-down hay field during a music festival surrounded by the rolling Berkshire hills. It was beautiful and bucolic in the valley during the day, although it never occurred to me how far the temperature would drop at night. The three of us— mom, dad and one-year-old— would end our first day of camping with a frightening hour-long ambulance ride to an Albany, NY hospital. There we were, speeding down the highway in the middle of a black July night while our baby was getting an emergency nebulizer treatment, the first of many to come through his childhood. They said he would grow out of his asthma and allergies and mostly he has. But that event may have ruined the romance of camping for me all these years.

Last Sunday, that same baby, my 27-yr-old son Connor, stopped over to sit with me in the yard. “I have this story I want to tell you,” he said. He’s a good storyteller, just like his father, and I listened intently while he told me the tale while also describing the nuances of disc golfing. “Wait, what does it mean when you say floater?” I said. Both my boys are heavily into the sport and they each spend a fair amount of time talking enthusiastically about all the minutia. Each one of them has his own backpack to hold the discs in, and a metal basket to stick in the ground in the yard to practice putting.

“So my fitbit on my wrist is saying I got six and a half hours of sleep and not the five and a half hours that it says on my phone,” says Janyce.

“Yeah sometimes stuff just happens,” I say back, only half-listening to the fitbit commentary coming from the kitchen.

“Did you just say sometimes stuff just happens?” she says, smiling in at me from the bedroom door.

Lately, I’m realizing that I may have lost the ability to be a good hang. I’m probably not the only one. The events of the world are stressing me out and it’s no fun living through a pandemic. But if I’m totally honest, I think it’s more than that.

That old adage, the one I read somewhere on the back cover of a self-help book or while scrolling mindlessly down my facebook feed, keeps coming to mind “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

When did I stop taking chances? When did I become so hesitant about everything? When did it all stop being fun?

One thing I love about Janyce is that she understands, just like the boys do, the thrill of the gear. I’ve watched her many times go through the routine of suiting up for one of her solitary motorcycle rides: jeans, boots, leather jacket, riding gloves and even red bandana and rawhide choker, all the trappings that signal that you’re part of a secret society, an insider, the one in the know. The gear may be the outer expression of an inner attitude. Seems to me that riding, disc golfing, and hammock camping might all have the same one thing in common, the ability to count solely on yourself while having a great time doing it.

Is that too far in the trees? Is it buggy? You need a little camping chair! Are you lonely? I read through my “mom texts” from the last few days.

My son Aidan sent me back a short video of his fire roaring, his foldout camping chair, and his hanging lantern. Evidence of him surviving by himself with all the gear.

“I’m doing good,” he said.

Maybe it’s time for me to take some advice from the same playbook that all my loved ones are reading these days and get myself some gear. Hammock-camp my way back.