That is exactly what I've become. Bats scare me when they used to fascinate me. I was that weird kid in my family that actually thought something that could fly in a general straight line while being pretty much blind was wicked cool. I admit that sleeping outside wasn't one of my favorite activities but I wasn't opposed to it, only at sleep away camp because I seriously was ALWAYS stuck with the girl that collected farts like she was starting a collection, wanted to stay up all damn night talking when we knew we had to be up in the morning, or who just didn't wash... anything. Who would have a good experience at camp living with those girls.
I did learn some good trade skills though. I can cook over a campfire. I don't eat them but I can make one hell of a S'more. I can sing a variety of Girl Scout themed camp songs really badly, and I learned to identify a few of the plants that would kill me if I were ever to be dropped off in the woods by myself.
Would I survive more than a couple of days if that happened? It's iffy. I know that moss grows on the north side of trees and that the sun moves from east to west so I would probably take those two things into account and start walking. If I can find a stream, I can fish. If it ever came down to survival, I could learn to clean one of those bad boys or at the very least stick it on a stick over a fire and roast it until it was edible. I can't hunt. I know that much. I will probably never learn to. Knowing me, I would pretty much try to find the water. I'm a water baby, when I find it, I'm fine.
When I was a kid, my family owned a lake house and my cousins and I had a good time exploring. Well, my country cousins anyway. I have two sets. Ones that grew up in the country, lived in the country and loved the country, and the other grew up in the city, visited the country onec in a blue moon, and generally hated the country. I was born in the city but came to the country every summer, every winter, pretty much anytime my mom had a vacation that would not be wasted by spending eight hours in a car to drive to said country. My grandfather taught me the basics of shooting and I used to walk outside their house when I was young barefoot across the empty fields to look at the deer that grazed. When I was small they weren't scared of me and I know that somewhere there used to be a picture of me maybe about five or six sitting on the field with deer all around me. As I got older and the visits got few and farther between, they wouldn't let me come near me but by then most things in the country bored, scared, or annoyed me.
My country cousins also abandoned me. I was a citified twit. I was actually called this. In my normal life I had water from bottles and paved roads, electricity everywhere and my entertainment came from a brightly lit box that had movie pictures. Their life included drinking water from the stream (yes we did that in the 80's and they did that probably through the 2000's) running and hiking every weekend and sleeping outdoors in hammocks that were pretty much large sheets tied up between trees. And since the channels were rarely cartoons in that area (You had to have a satellite dish to get more than the local channels 3 and 4 and back then satellite dishes were huge and expensive DirectTV hadn't been founded yet so very few people had them.) they spent most of their times outdoors.
Now my cousins, THEY could survive if you plopped them in unknown woods. Hell you'd come back for them and they probably would have built a house, started a farm, an irrigation system, and been featured in better treehouses and streams by the time you went back for them.
And I was always and continue to be jealous as shit of them.
In an unrelated but kind of related conversation I had the other night, I was told that I wouldn't enjoy a week long hike. That it would be painful for me and it just wasn't my lifestyle. To be honest, I was mad that the person I was talking to that thought that about me, but then I began to wonder, is that really the image I project? Do people really not see the little girl inside of me that enjoyed that stuff? Have I really built such a wall around her that not even she can see the stars anymore? That's horrible. I think this summer, on the rare weekends that I may be off, I'm going to try and rent a cabin on the local lake here and introduce my girls to the kid I used to be. They're going to learn that the world isn't necessarily connected by WiFi signals and cell towers.
They're too young and there aren't any around here but I would really like to camp out by a lake with a waterfall so that I could have the experience of bathing beneath one. Maybe when I get out west.
It's weird when someone says one thing that causes you to think about the person you've become over the person you used to be. It's even more disturbing when that same person causes you to actually not like the person you are now because you miss the person you were.
I have some thinking and some planning to do but not right this second because I have work tonight (I never thought I would get to say that again) and I have to figure out why the bottom of my abdomen hurts like all holy hell. I went to bed with it and honestly don't even remember going to bed. I just woke up in bed and don't remember getting in or laying down. It's okay though, tonight is mostly sitting. So I'll pop a Tram or some tylenol and be okily dokily!
Stay Frosty Bloggers!
