Murderer in the basement

If and when I get skin cancer, I should remember today skiing at Pico. It was one of those classic spring days, the kind that feel like winter’s ransom. The sky was blue with a few swaths of cirrus; the sun and a south breeze warmed the air just enough that the snow’s surface softened, but not to the point of turning the snow to gloppy mashed potatoes; and the turns we made in the snow after the hour-plus hike up reminded me of why I love to ski. When I need a mental trip to my happy place, skiing Pico today could be it.

The only downside to the day—besides the hike up with skins stuck on our skis (which in my book isn’t a downside at all; the exercise is the reason we’re there)—was that I forgot to wear a baseball hat. I had slathered my face with SPF 45, but after five months of keeping almost all skin under wraps (hats, scarves, neck gators, jacket collars), it’s hard to think of the sun as a bad thing. As we started hiking at 12:30 p.m.—melanoma’s cocktail hour—I realized that we would be staring straight into the sun for the next hour and 15 minutes, never mind the rays reflecting off the bright snow. Well, I reasoned, it’s too nice to head home.

But at least if I do get skin cancer—and I very much hope I don’t—I can look back over the past 40-plus years and remember days like today. Or the eight winters spent in Colorado where every weekend was spent skiing at a different resort. Or 12 years racing my bike in the west, sometimes spending up to six hours in the saddle as we rode across the desert, our sweat long ago having washed away whatever sunscreen we remembered to apply at dawn. Or even childhood summers spent in the town pool or swamping metal canoes in the lake at summer camp. Like a really bad hangover, at least it will have been fun that led me to that state.

If only we earned all our illnesses, rather than just contracting them for no good reason other than the fact that we were unlucky enough to be sneezed on at the bus stop. We could rationally weigh the costs and benefits of our actions. Certainly some habits predispose us to illnesses. My weird Aunt Anne smoked eight packs a day and died of lung cancer. Duh.

But what about my friend Wendy? She contracted thyroid cancer several years ago, but as far as I know, she doesn’t eat pounds of bacon, spend her days on the couch, or sniff glue. She eats well and exercises regularly. She’s smart, funny and just weird enough to be an interesting person. So it’s not like I can say, “Well, duh, if you didn’t luxuriate in those radium hot springs, then maybe you wouldn’t be in this predicament.”

Despite regular tests, her doctors, so far, have been unable to find the source of her cancer. So in a sense, she and her family—her husband and two kids—are living with the equivalent of a murderer in the basement. They know he’s there, but they just can’t find him, nor do they know how he got there. So they go about their daily lives trying not to think about him but wanting to blame someone or something for his presence. “Well, you left the door unlocked, of course someone broke in.”

Maybe we call have murderers in our basements. And maybe I let mine in on a nice sunny day when my skis cut through the corn snow like butter. But I try not to think about it. Why ruin a beautiful sunny spring day? Or even a dreary one for that matter. And next time, I’ll remember my hat.

Psychotic Boyfriends

Spring is finally showing signs of arriving in Vermont. The crocuses are poking up their brave little heads, and the snow banks are melting, leaving behind their glacial loads of road grit and grime on the lawn. Yesterday, it was almost 60 degrees—the first time it has been that warm since ... since I can't remember when. Last October, maybe?

But no sooner have I washed and put away my winter parka and folded up my scarf, it’s back to blustery and cold today, with a north wind beating back any warmth from the sun's rays. And what’s this? Snow in the forecast for Friday?

It makes me feel as if I'm dating a psychotic boyfriend. For no apparent reason, he's suddenly friendly and warm, making me forget completely about the dark days of winter when he was sullen and mean. He even gives flowers on these days. When perfect spring days arrive, I feel like dancing in the street. Throw open the windows! Let’s have a party!

But Psychotic Boyfriend throws these days at us just often enough (which isn’t anywhere near often enough) to allow us to weather (pun intended) the bad days—the days when it snows in May or the rain blows sideways and the furnace can’t possibly take the chill out of the air. These are the days that Psychotic Boyfriend has not taken his medication. It’s a wonder anyone puts up with his behavior.

But just as I'm threatening to walk out—to move south or west or to remote Pacific atolls where the sun always shines—Psychotic Boyfriend softens his blows, turns sunny and warm again, and cons me into sticking around. The earth radiates warmth, the grass turns green, the daffodils finally bloom (despite the fact that psychotic boyfriend has tried to lock them in a deep freeze), the air smells like spring. Now this is more like it. I even feel like inviting the neighbors over for a beer.

For over a decade, I lived out west, where the weather was much more even-tempered (excluding the occasional tornado). I didn’t have to drop everything on a nice day just to get outdoors. There was always the weekend, when the sun would almost always continue to shine. But while living out there, I dated an actual psychotic boyfriend, who on a perfectly sunny day would attack me for something—that I didn’t make enough money, that I wasn’t ambitious enough, that I didn’t cook enough. I stuck with him for over three years, living for those really good days when we would climb three 14,000-foot peaks in a day, or mountain bike Moab’s White Rim trail.

I finally dumped the real psychotic boyfriend and realized that I could still climb 14-ners and do long mountain bike rides without the mental anguish. I traded him in for a place where the weather is psychotic and the boyfriend (now husband) is not. Although I would dearly love to live where the sun shines more days than not, we are (I’m slowly realizing) not moving. But if this is the sacrifice I must make--a balanced man for unbalanced weather--then I guess I can’t put the parka away quite yet.

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In 1876, Mark Twain gave a speech entitled “The Weather.” In it, he said, “I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in New England but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk's factory who experiment and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere if they don't get it.”

I’m so excited! ... (not)

I was cashing a check at my bank today and noticed that a recent merger had brought not only a new name to the institution, but a new slogan as well. Last fall, my old Factory Point Bank—a name that implied proletariat values and good honest labor—was purchased by the regional-sounding Berkshire Bank. Now, on the wall over the tellers’ windows, it says in big gold letters: “Welcome to Berkshire Bank, America’s Most Exciting Bank.”

I stood there feeling somewhat alarmed. I don’t want my money in an exciting bank. I want my bank to be staffed by staid, suit-wearing executives who view the slightest hundredth-of-a-point change in interest rates with great concern. I want my money cared for by men and women whose major form of entertainment is attending Kiwanis meetings and who view bowling as sport.

“America’s Most Exciting Bank” makes it sound as if the Berkshire Bank employs rollercoaster fanatics who want to take my money on a similar ride, who thought Enron was an excellent investment opportunity, and who speculate on real estate in volatile Mideast countries. Excitement in banking gives off a whiff of embezzlement, the savings and loan debacle, and the stock market crashing. It’s like your dentist promising “dental thrills.” Some institutions and occupations should simply not be exciting.

Standing at the teller’s window, I had to fight the impulse to withdraw all my money and run from the bank yelling, “Stop the ride! I want to get off!”

But raised by a thrifty Scot and a mother whose own father lost what was left of the family fortune in a dress factory purchased in 1928, I am prone to seeing the financial glass as half-empty—with several impending leaks. The glass is never ever half-full. Perhaps if I took a little fiscal risk—say, investing my entire IRA in Apple stock—I might get somewhere.

Still, I think I’d prefer having my money in a bank that promises “A Passion to Perform” (Deutsch Bank), or that it’s the “Bank of Opportunity” (Bank of America), or even one that tells me “You’re Richer Than You Think” (Canada’s Scotiabank), which I would be had I converted my American dollars to Canadian a few months back.

Or even “America’s Most Boring Bank.” At least then it wouldn’t sound as if I need Dramamine—or Valium—every time I deposit a paycheck.

Up up and away

I hate to fly. Which is a problem given that part of my income comes from travel writing. It’s not a fear of flying. I actually do love to fly. It’s the way that traveling via commercial airline has become torture.

I used to love air travel. I loved airplanes and airports and anything related to aviation. I even wrote a high school term paper on the history of aviation. When we flew to England in 1972—October 4, to be exact—on a BOAC 747 from Montreal, I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep the night before. I was nine, and this was the biggest adventure I had ever had, after a car camping trip to Minnesota the previous year. I didn’t care where we were going. We could have flown in circles and landed back in Montreal (something I did last year, in fact, but was far less giddy about). I was just so excited to be flying in an airplane. Finally. And a jet no less! The biggest jet they had ever made.

I remember how it felt as the 747 rumbled down the runway, my back pushed into the seat from the acceleration of those four big engines. I remember the cabin gently pitching up and the feeling of weightlessness as the plane’s wheels lifted off the tarmac. I remember the disappointment that we were stuck in the four middle seats too far from a window to really see the world grow small beneath us. But it was night, so it didn’t really matter anyway.

It was glamorous to fly. Exotic. Adventurous. There was enough security to know that we were special—that with whom and on what we were traveling was important enough to protect, not that we were the potential threat.

I didn’t fly again until spring break 1983—sophomore year in college. I flew People Express to Norfolk, Virginia, to a friend’s house in a more southerly clime. But I became stranded in Newark, the airline’s hub. A helpful gate agent found me and several of my fellow travelers a flight from LaGuardia instead—a cab ride away. Adding to the drama, the cab rear-ended another vehicle on the ride over, but somehow we made it. This was, apparently, what low-cost deregulated travel was all about.

And so it has become, even on legacy airlines. Flying back from Canada last winter, my flight was canceled due to weather. After much tapping on her keyboard, the gate agent presented me with my new itinerary: the same flight but two days later. Had I not rushed back to the house that I had rented with some friends (who still happened to be there), logged onto the Internet, Skyped Air Canada’s 800 number, waited on hold for one hour and 58 minutes, and listened to the same on-hold soundtrack set on a continuous cycle for the entire duration, I might still be there. Instead, I found flights routed through two different airports and actual free seats on those flights, making it home an entire day before I would have even taken off had I followed the gate agent’s plan.

Then there’s the issue of seating. It used to be a random surprise where we would end up (and on Southwest Airlines, still is). Front or back of the plane, aisle or hopefully window, as I still haven’t gotten over that windowless flight in 1972. But now, for the pleasure of sitting near the front—thereby giving us a shred of hope of making our connection in the likely event that the flight is delayed—it costs extra.

When I booked a $215 roundtrip ticket on Northwest to Dallas last May, I was only given the option of reserving a middle seat. “Must already be a full flight,” I thought. But when I checked in at the airport, I optimistically hit “change seat” on the self-service kiosk’s monitor. Hark! There were aisle and window seats available, and near the front! But not unless I forked over another $15 per flight. I upgraded on the first leg so that I had a better chance of making the 40-minute connection in Detroit, which turned out to be a sprint.

And what’s with these short layovers? When flying to/from more remote airports, say Boise or Burlington, it’s either four hours or 40 minutes. And the connecting flight is almost guaranteed two concourses away. How do non-athletic people travel by air? How would my 84-year-old mother make it from United’s gate C31 at O’Hare to gate F4 in the allotted 40 minutes, which becomes more like 20 after unloading from the back of the plane?

I had to make this exact gate change last week, but with only 10 minutes to spare. I work-out regularly. But by the time I reached F4 and my flight to Calgary—heart pounding, lungs gasping for air, ski boot bag and computer-laden briefcase swinging wildly from my shoulders, sweat soaking my shirt (the same shirt I would have to wear for the next 48 hours in the likely event that my luggage hadn’t made the flight)—I looked so bedraggled that the flight attendant parted with a bottle of water. For free.

When I did arrive in Calgary and found my luggage sitting innocently on the baggage carousel, I exclaimed, “Hey! My suitcase! What a surprise!”

This has become an all-too-common expression, even when connections aren’t tight. On at least a quarter of the flights I take, I am relieved of the convenience of my luggage.

This time, it was my friend Hilary’s turn, and she was not amused. Her luggage had not arrived despite the fact that her connecting flight had come into O’Hare’s gate F3 (immediately adjacent to the Calgary flight at F4). “Your bag is in Denver,” is what the customer service person told her when she filed a claim, as if this statement would reassure her.

It’s as if we’re flying Aeroflot, without the option of bribing baggage handlers. I have skied in other people’s jackets, used their toothpaste and contact lens solution, worn the same outfit to meetings and dinners, dried my socks with the hotel hair dryer, and tried to style my hair using my fingers and hotel conditioner.

At what point will we shout, “Enough!” If a restaurant treated us this badly, we would never patronize it again. “Ah, madam, we have a lovely table for you here,” the host would say, showing us to a table squashed in the corner near the dishwasher with nothing but a stale roll offered and canned pasta salad (yes, canned, like tuna). Then the bill would come: $300. Bon appetite!

But in this case, we can always try another restaurant. Or make our own pasta salad. We can’t fly—or even move quickly—to another part of the world without colluding with the airlines that insist on torturing us. Deregulation has fueled our wanderlust, and it’s tough to be grounded, even if it’s self-imposed.

Not that any of this is new. In 1984, again on People Express, my backpack went missing. I was en route back to college after a wonderful summer working in Glacier National Park. Inside my pack were waterlogged hiking boots, sodden during one last hike the day before I left, and a bag of dirty laundry, including my entire collection of underwear, save the pair I was wearing. I filed a claim, then hitched a ride to school with a roommate. I had a few clothes in storage that I could wear.

A month later, someone at the local bus stop called. My backpack had arrived (and mysteriously been delivered there). Inside were moldy boots and musty clothes, and on the outside hung a baggage tag written in what looked like Dutch. My backpack had apparently had more of an adventure than I had.

If this is where airlines are headed—to bankruptcy along with People Express—perhaps next time I’ll fly cargo.

Give me an H! Give me an O!

In September, we finally relented and let Samantha sign up for cheerleading. Or rather, Andy relented. I was OK with it from the time she expressed interest in it two years ago. We were reading off a newspaper flyer about all the kids’ activities offered by the city rec department: soccer (spoken with a hopeful voice), rock climbing, T-ball, gymnastics, cheerleading, ... . Samantha jumped at the word as if she had known what cheerleading was since birth. She was five at the time, and Andy said absolutely, positively, unequivocally no.

In truth, Samantha is a born cheerleader. She’s naturally loud—voted “loudest camper” at summer day camp this year—prone to spells of jumping around with arms flailing, and attracted to skimpy, sparkly outfits.

But the very idea of the sport, if I can call it that, has given Andy fits. He seems to think that eight weeks of cheerleading will start our 7-year-old down a career path to waitressing at Hooters. Or on the payroll of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

I, on the other hand, see the rec center program as an avenue to get cheerleading out of her system before an age where wearing tight outfits and cheering on the sidelines for boys to score a T-O-U-C-H-D-O-W-N really is loaded with sexual innuendo—women as inferior objects to men. Primary school cheerleaders aren’t sexual objects. They’re cute. Sort of. And why not let her see what it’s all about? To say no now could lead to her harboring the urge for a decade, then dropping out of college to pursue her unfulfilled cheerleading dream.

When I was a kid, cheerleading was the only activity available for girls, at least until high school, when field hockey and cross-country running were added to the menu. We didn’t even have to ask. Our moms signed us up, and every Saturday in the fall, in their dresses and high-heel shoes, they drove us to the flood plain that served as an elementary school football field.

We thought our cheers actually helped the boys and that they would look over and see how cute we were in our pigtails and short skirts. We weren’t destined for careers at Hooters. We knew one day we were supposed to date those boys, but only if they asked first. We were housewives in training—attractive and supportive, cheering on the boys in their endeavors, without anyone—except our parents—cheering our own.

By the time we were in high school, only the cool girls were picked to be cheerleaders. And the squad was as much a dating pool for the football team as it was a cheerleading group. With thick glasses, good grades, and no boobs, I was far from cool and way off the cheerleader radar. Not that I wouldn’t have jumped at the chance if asked.

Then my sophomore year, I went to prep school. Exeter had been all boys until 1970, and it never seemed to occur to anyone to start a cheerleading squad once girls were a part of campus life—probably because girls who win the math prize in public school aren’t typically the type to swoon after the quarterback. (And if we do swoon, we do so privately. No sense in setting ourselves up for public humiliation.)

At football games, a couple of potential theater majors with bull horns led the whole student body—or at least the students who attended the games—in loud intellectually elitist cheers such as “Pursue them, pursue them, make them relinquish the ball,” or the more low-brow “What do we do? Screw the blue,” for the end-of-season big game against rival Andover with its blue-and-white team colors.

Cheerleading wasn’t an option, and somehow this made us equal to the boys in those early Title-IX days. We could play volleyball, soccer, do crew, swim, even play ice hockey. We weren’t housewives in training. We were expected to attend college at the very least, get a job and make our way in the world. I wasn’t going to stand around and cheer for some boy. Unless he cheered for me too.

Fortunately, Samantha’s cheerleading career is over after only four weeks. Too much standing around, she says. “I want to play soccer next year,” she announced the other night. She had discovered it in gym class and liked all the running around. I know our days of skimpy outfits and sparkly eye shadow are far from over. But at least she’s learning that it’s more fun to participate than watch, and to be cheered rather than to cheer.

And if she does end up schlepping cocktails at Hooters, at least she’ll be on someone’s payroll.

First law of thermodynamics

My friend Nigel called the other day. He was in the San Francisco airport en route home to New Zealand after having climbed Mt. Rainier outside Seattle. “I crested the rim of the summit crater,” he recounted, “and I felt I couldn’t go on.”

A 15-year-old memory that had been buried deep in my cortex—beneath memories of child birth, mothering panic, and hellacious airplane trips with an active toddler—came back in pieces, as if I were an amnesiac. I suddenly remembered that view from the crater rim over to the actual summit—the highest part of the crater rim—of Rainier, a 14,410-foot dormant volcano. I remember it seemed infinitely far away across the snow-filled crater floor beneath a deep blue sky.

Nigel made it, he said, just as I had, slogging behind my then-boyfriend. As I sat on our screen porch, phone in hand, I was transported back briefly to that summit with the glorious view of Seattle, Puget Sound, the Olympic Range, Mt. Baker, the stump of Mt. St. Helens ... I sat there on the phone, feeling self-satisfied for just a minute.

“So do you have any adventures planned?” asked Nigel, a globe-trotting political science professor whom I met in 1994 while climbing 18,510-foot Mt. Elbrus, also a dormant volcano, in southern Russia. I looked down at the small roll of fat bulging over the waistband of my shorts and suddenly felt like a drop-out—the math prodigy who dropped out of Harvard and now worked as a mechanic changing oil at Jiffy Lube. Where once I would have replied, “Yes! I’m entered in the Leadville 100 mountain bike race in a month,” or “We’re trying to climb all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks this summer,” I said: “Uh, we’re going to Maine next week; I might play a little tennis.”

There was a detectable pause on the other end of the phone. Nigel once told me that I was one of the fittest people he knew. I didn’t just enter the Leadville 100. I won it. I once climbed five of Colorado’s 14-ners in a weekend. And when Nigel and I climbed Elbrus, I didn’t just summit it. I was the first one in our group of five—all men—to make it, and then, with time to spare that afternoon, I skipped up its 18,442-foot sub-peak.

Now here I sat 13 years later with a goal of playing a little tennis, maybe walking on the beach or doing a 20-mile bike ride. And I felt like two people: the Previous Peg who knew what blood tasted like in her lungs, and the current version—“Samantha’s mom”—who would like nothing more than eight solid hours of sleep and an afternoon reading a good book without hearing the word, “MOM!” shouted every five minutes.

As Nigel talked about his climb up the snowfields and glaciers of Rainier, I started wondering if Previous Peg would ever return, even for just a brief visit. Will I ever find the motivation—or desire—to push physical limits again? Or am I destined to watch my tummy roll grow larger, like tree rings building out each year?

I’d like to think that version one will return, once Samantha is older. If for no other reason than to still fit into my clothes. For now, I have slid into the role of Samantha’s mom, and I don’t have the energy to be both people. It seems as if the first law of thermodynamics applies to parenting—that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it just changes form. While some days it feels as if all our energy has been utterly destroyed, I realize it has simply been used to create a stubborn, strong-willed, six-year-old whose current life goal is to become a horse rider.

Although I always thought I would pine for adventure, I don’t. At least most of the time. Friends no longer call inviting us on bike rides or backpacking trips. I still enjoy riding for a couple of hours or going for a short hike with only adults; I have to in order to remain sane. But to go out for too long feels selfish, as if I’m disrupting the family equilibrium—sucking up all the energy for my own personal good, when it’s Samantha who needs it so she won’t wither.

In truth, Andy and I have both withered. But I like to think of it as lying dormant.

Camping

As a kid, I hated camping. Camping meant bugs. Camping meant no TV. Camping meant we weren’t cool enough to stay at Howard Johnson’s.

Other kids got to spend their vacations swimming in HoJo’s indoor pools and eating hot fudge sundaes in the restaurant chain’s turquoise green booths. We spent ours under the roof of a green canvas L.L. Bean tent, the design of which hadn’t changed since George Washington’s encampment at Valley Forge. And we ate whatever my mother could cook on the two-burner Coleman stove, set up on a picnic table at whatever campground was the site of that summer’s vacation. Mostly, we ate spaghetti.

Once it was pitched, which took the better part of an afternoon, the tent was spacious enough for four to sleep side-by-side, but that was about it. My parents each slept on air mattresses with matching flannel L.L. Bean sleeping bags, while my sister and I made do with cotton mattresses dug from the musty alcoves of my grandparent’s attic. These were covered with old muslin sheets and scratchy, moth-eaten, wool Navy blankets once used by my grandfather during the Great War (the first one).

But our vacation home was not entirely without luxury. In an uncharacteristic moment, my father—a man who takes his Scottish heritage seriously—splurged on the tent’s matching green awning that made it look as if it had a porch. If it rained during our camping expeditions—which it invariably did—my father would don a dark blue wool balaclava, sit in a lawn chair under the awning, and read Chekhov. Or worse, he would fish. We were expected to do the same.

My mother would shut herself in the car and read The New Yorker while my sister and I threw ourselves in despair onto our itchy wool beds. “I hate camping,” my sister said over and over again.

But by far the worst part of the whole experience was the fly-infested outhouses from which emanated the worst smell I had ever encountered. While our parents read, my sister and I would see how close we could get to the offending structure before the odor overpowered us, then scurry away. The very thought of setting foot inside it induced constipation. Only once, when I was eight and we were driving cross-country to see friends in Minnesota, did we ever stay at a campground with flush toilets. It also boasted a swimming pool, tether-ball, and four-square court, plus a bunch of other kids to play with. It was in Indiana, and I didn’t want to leave.

By our teenage years, we would have sooner done time in prison than gone camping. Camping was boring. Camping was for kids. Camping was barbaric. Camping was beneath us. We required daily showers and regular changes of freshly laundered clothing.

Sometime during college, though, camping became cool. On Friday afternoons in the early fall, we would load a friend’s Ford Bronco with sleeping bags (mine was a North Face bag purchased at EMS my sophomore year), foam pads, and a two-person tent into which four of us would squeeze. We would head north, where someone always knew someone who owned land in Vermont, although it was never easy to find. I liked it out here, despite the fact that most of the time I was cold, hungry, and not well rested. But we were different than the loafer-wearing, pearl-earring set back on campus.

I liked camping so much that I changed majors—from art history to geology, which I naively assumed was like Camping for Credit. One summer, the geology department unwisely gave eight of us the keys to a van and a week to reach the required summer field camp, 2,000 miles away in Red Lodge, Montana. The goal was to see as much of the country as we could—from Niagara Falls to the Corn Palace in South Dakota to the Grand Tetons—on the $75 our parents had paid the department for gas and whatever other money we had squeezed from their wallets. On that five day odyssey, we drove west, discovering places most of us had only read about, and pulled over when we were tired—in corn fields and state parks, in town parks and beside the road. It wasn’t exactly camping in the strict sense, more like a cheap way to sleep.

I continued camping even after I was gainfully employed. Yes, it was a cheap way to sleep, but it was the sense of promised adventure that was camping’s allure in early adulthood. A night sleeping in a tent was almost always followed by a hike up one of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks, an all-day mountain bike ride around Utah’s Canyonlands, a raft trip down Class V rapids in West Virginia, or a day spring skiing in New Hampshire’s Tuckerman Ravine.

My camping excursions stopped when Samantha was born. It seemed natural to stop when she was a baby. Who wants to dig for diapers by headlamp? Find the bottle in a cooler at 2 a.m.? Or make a convincing argument that the Big Bad Wolf doesn’t like to live in riparian forests like the one outside the tent’s walls but instead prefers darker evergreen forests in hills where no one in their right mind would never camp ...

But Samantha is almost seven now, and we haven’t incorporated camping back into our summer routine. The bugs have something to do with it. Black flies sense that I am a giant feast, and no level of DEET keeps them at bay. But it’s not like the bugs didn’t swarm me before she was born. It’s just that I’m not willing to put up with the discomfort of camping with no reward. And there’s not much promise for adventure when Samantha asks, “When can we go home?”

Last summer, we tested the waters with a modified backpacking trip to a hut on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire’s Presidential Range—modified because we attempted to mitigate whining by driving to the summit, then hiking the 1.5 miles down to the hut. And hut is a misnomer. More like a lodge with remarkably odor-free pit toilets. (This should not have come as a surprise, however, given that one night for three cost over $200.) The place slept 90 in bunk rooms, and Andy, Samantha and I were assigned a triple-decker bunk in a room with five other people. Once the novelty of the bunks wore off, Samantha was too scared to sleep alone and ended up sharing the two-foot-wide mattress with Andy, who had been trying to sleep on the bunk above her. We were all grumpy the next morning, and the only adventure was hiking back s-l-o-w-l-y to the car.

Do we try a bona fide camping trip this year? My enthusiasm is low. But I do want to instill the sense that we are a family that camps, that enjoys the outdoors, and that seeks adventure. Not a family that watches TV. But I don’t want her to hate camping either—to associate it with bugs and bad bathrooms, or think we’re doing it because we’re too cheap to book a room at the Sheraton (which would have cost less than our night in the “hut”). If we could camp at Disney World, would she have fonder memories of this summer-time ritual? Or would she just remember that her parents were both very grumpy?

Maybe we should start by camping in the backyard. At least then a clean, odor-free bathroom is only a few steps away.