IN THE BEGINNING

I started backpacking my freshman year of college. Looking back, I wish I’d started earlier. I had plenty of opportunity to begin my adventures long before that. My father has been an avid backpacker since he was in high school as a Boy Scout. My brother fell in step as well, travelling up through the ranks and eventually achieving the title of Eagle Scout. All those years he and my dad were involved in scouts I could have been tagging along. The camping trips, backpacking, everything in the wilderness, they were all at my doorstep waiting for me to take part in the adventures they offered and I spent so many years unknowingly closing the door to them.

I had been unintentionally brainwashed into thinking that backpacking was a boy activity. And I was not a boy, so why would I partake in it? I’d never slept in the wilderness, never gone number one or number two in the wilderness, never really eaten a meal in the wilderness… I was neglecting what would eventually be one of the best parts of my life all because of what I’d been led to believe about it.

Let me lay more ground work for it.

My mother is not a wilderness girl. She likes her city, her modern comforts, her toilet, her bed, her bug free zone, her dirt free zone, her running water, her car, her grocery store down the street, the high heels that she wears to church on Sundays, her curling iron, hot showers, magazines, television, pretty dresses, refrigerators, clean clothes, fans, painted toe-nails, comfortable couches, an overabundance of pillows, gardening, the internet, and her cell phone. All wonderful things in our modern world, but in my mind… none of them really contain any character building qualities.

During the earlier years of my life I was much closer to my mom than my dad. So all those things that she didn’t like about the wilderness, I naturally decided not to like as well, even though I’d never taste tested it for myself. The wilderness was dirty, inconvenient, something to drive to and look at a few steps from the car, tiring, filled with bugs and other nasties like squirrels and mice. What horrified me most was the idea of having to go to the bathroom out there in the unknown. No toilets is a horrifying thought when you’ve never actually gone without them. And how exactly did a girl go to the bathroom in the wild? With different plumbing than boys it just seemed far too difficult and more effort than it was worth. How can sleeping on a thin sleeping pad be more comfortable than a nice, thick mattress? Mosquitoes? Ants? Spiders? All of it was just more than I wanted to experience. I was quite comfortable with being a city girl. I didn’t need any merit badges or to know how to tie a clove-hitch.

All of that isn’t to say that I was a girly girl. Heck no. False. Far from it. I was the tommiest tom-boy around. I played with G.I. Joe and Max Steel, built Lego castles, pretended I was a pirate, or Link from Legend of Zelda, or a ninja. I trained in Martial Arts, played street hockey, drew pictures of super heroes, idolized Batman and Robin, had Water Wars with the boys in my neighborhood, and often times was the only girl invited to their birthday parties. When you grow up in a neighborhood full of boys, boy things become your reality. Girly things are girly and not fun. Ruffles on dresses and socks are unnecessary and ugly. Pink is the worst color in the world. Scraping your knee after trying to hop a homemade ramp and crashing your bike is a battle wound to be proud of. You are ushered into a realm that eventually most girls are kept out of. The sign on the tree house reads “NO GIRLS ALLOWED” but you know the password, come bearing popsicles for everyone, and will beat them up if they don’t let you in. 

                                           [TO BE CONTINUED]

[and by "played with G.I. Joes" I meant "still play with G.I. Joes"]