i lied about being the outdoor type (part one)

There is a school of thought which divides people into two groups: those who want to get back to the land, and those who want to get back to the hotel. Guess which kind I am.
My childhood summer camp featured giant puppet making and the occasional anarchist guest speaker rather than the traditional canoe-and-volleyball torture that appears in other kids' stories. I was under the impression that I wasn't missing anything until a disastrous camping trip I took with Pubah eight years ago. (Let us just say that there was a happy ending, but the middle bit had snittyness and mutual sulking in a tent that was just too small for those purposes.) I don't know how to put things up or start fires without matches or how heavy is going to be too heavy when you have to carry your own pack yes all day there isn't a trolley in the woods you know. So when spook suggested that we go hiking, my enthusiasm was not unqualified. But heck, eight years is a long time, and I like to think I know a little more about myself now--enough to at least warn the person I'm with that I will be no help if there are bears on the trail.
I was secretly terrified I would trip on a root and sprain my ankle or that my shoes would bug me and I'd be whiny or that one of us would take a bad step on the rocks and wind up in Minnow Lake. "When they say 'easy,'" I ventured like a querelous old guy, "how easy do they mean? Like, paved? Or like you probably won't die?" I followed spook, who it turns out is like a little mountain goat, only cuter, and more with the sharing of the food. And you know, it was really cool. I went from wondering what good the blaze was going to do me since I couldn't look up from my feet to see the trail anyway to actually leading for a while. When we finished our walk, all I could think about was how I wanted to do it again. Right now. Or next weekend anyway.
We went in to look at the Petroglyphs themselves, which was a whole other kind of mindboggling. The carvings are (they figure) between 600 and 1100 years old, and were probably made by Algonkian speaking tribes. There is no unbroken line of knowledge between then and now, so what the carvings represent is understood on a best-guess basis, the guessers being Native people, anthropologists and historians. I stared at the lines, wondering how they got them so perfect and how they can possibly be so clear hundreds of years later. I was especially interested in the snakes, and kept looking for them all around. Lots of them are carved in a way that suggests they're coming up from the rocks. There was a woman there who was answering questions, and she talked to us about coming back next year for their night programs, because apparently there are hundreds of carvings you can't see in the daylight, layer on layer of them. She told us the wolves had been calling in the park the night before.
All in all, I was feeling like the day was a gift, and that I couldn't be much happier. On the drive out, we came around a corner and there was a white-tail deer standing in the middle of the road. spook pulled the car to a halt and we watched her bound off into the cover of the trees, where she stood staring at us. We stared back.

We sang along with our cds on the way home, the sunset glaring directly into our eyes for kilometre after kilometre. When they reopen the park in the spring, we'll be there. Maybe we'll even pitch a tent at Silent Lake and spend a couple of days. It's both scary and good to be at a point in my life where I'm realizing that when I say "I don't know how to do that" I can add "yet," and it's not just mouthing the word. Some of the things I can learn I will love, even if they're things I never thought would be part of who I am.