Don's Blog The Need To Be Outside: Camping As Life And Life As Camping -A Memoir I

Part I

I have shared for years my love of being outdoors. This started early in my life. Our home was on a small block that had once been a city park.We were surrounded by the woods of the Cook County

Forest Preserve District. I learned to fish in the Salt Creek Woods at the end of our street   Just down Ogden Avenue  was Bemis Woods  where we would toboggan in the winter.  It was rumored that  German  prisoners of war (WWII) were secretly kept near the Bemis Woods. We  gave those woods a wide birth. Another favorite  was Belly Deep Slough which was on LaGrange Road south of our village. We lived on wide streets and had  vacant lots where we grew fresh vegetables in Victory Gardens, my first experience of growing things. During this time in the early 1940's we were all out of the house from sun up to dinner time feeling completely free in our choices of  outdoor activities and spending much of our time in the neighborhood. We often went down the street to Gilbert Park where we could play tennis or ice skate. We loved our neighborhood games especially kick the can and spinning tops (my brother David was unmatched in tops maneuvers),shooting marbles,and a knife game called mumbeldy peg.

As a young child our family spent summers in Lakeside, Michigan where we learned of the dread under tow. We had to wait for more than an hour after meals before we could go into the water safely. Every year we would go  to  Starved Rock State Park on the Illinois River and imagine ourselves going off Lovers Leap  My mother had gone to summer camp as a child and she firmly believed that all her children should have that experience. This ultimately resulted in outdoor experiences that were so powerful that I actually developed a need to be outside in nature to maintain my equilibrium. Initially there was Camp Greenwood in Ellison Bay Wisconsin. We hiked secluded trails through primeval deep woods and I learned to swim in cold clear water. Using pine boughs for a mattress we slept on smooth white pebbled beaches on Washington Island and marveled at the milky way and its multiple shooting stars. We started new friendships and learned camp songs. We learned ArpArp Larpanguarpage and we even spied on the girls as they were taking their baths in Green Bay.

During our teen-age years we started going to Cheley Camp in Estes Park, Colorado. My grandfather

had taken my mother and the family to Colorado in 1921 so she had always been a fan of the Rocky Mountains. This broadened my travel experience. Whereas we had driven to Camp Greenwood, to get to Estes Park we took the Burlington Railroad's Denver Zephyr from Chicago west through La Grange (one block from our home) and on to Denver. We ate dinner and breakfast in the dining car and spent the night in a sleeper car full of other campers. It was wild. Cheley Camp was an adventure 

camp with horses and hiking and backpacking. I spent the next three years hiking and camping in and around Rocky Mountain National Park. I learned to love the experience of total exhaustion and the feeling of quiet elation while hiking and climbing mountains called Longs Peak, Flattop, Notchtop and Little Matterhorn. A porcupine ate the tops off my hiking boots. I earned the honored and coveted Fourth Degree Mountaineering Award. One of the requirements was to be able to identify alpine flowers. This was one of the reasons that I became The Flower Guy after I retired  and why I spent several months identifying images of arctic flowers after a recent trip to Greenland. We sang different camp songs and discovered the illicit limerick. We made friendships that have lasted to today. Going to camp was a life changing experience.

During college one of the areas in which I excelled was singing camp songs (now more like drinking songs) and taking limericks learned at camp to a new level. In med school my limericks were likened to an art form. For example:

   Dr Schoepfle of Washington U.

   Kept Snakes in his own  private zoo.

   He found the deflection of reptilian erection,

   Exceeded his own by point two.

But I digress. We have been talking about the relationship between camp and life. Near the end of Med school I married a beautiful art student who also shared a love of the outdoors. After residency training our young  family moved to an outdoor paradise. I had signed up for the Air Force and had requested the north west. We were sent as far north and west as possible. We served at the USAF Hospital Elmendorf in Anchorage, Alaska for two years. For me it was another dream come true. I traveled extensively around the state. I was able to hunt for caribou near Palmer and moose at the base of Mount McKinley and black bear on the Kenai Peninsula.  I fished for dolly varden on the Kenai and salmon at Nak Nak. We dug out razor clams; and while netting " hooligan" I got stuck in some boot sucking mud on flats with an incoming tide. I had to squirm out of my boot to crawl to safety on top of the net pole. Along with its serenity nature can always provide danger. 

Ear disease in native children was endemic and each Tuesday I was 'loaned" by the Air Force to the Alaska Native Medical Center, a Public Health Hospital to do ear surgery on children. This provided a chance to be  flown out to case finding clinics in the Alaska Bush. There is no bigger thrill than flying in the winter into a native village on a small plane on skis and being taken by snow mobile to the health clinic where the children of the hamlet await. About that time I received a small inheritance from my grandmother. I blew it all on a red and black Scorpion snow mobile for the family (mainly me). We could ride directly up into the Chugach Mountains from our home. I used it to homestead an acre of Open to Entry  land on the Deshka River.  I learned to enjoy the Alaskan winters and their dry cold.  During the winter nights we had a neighborhood watch for the Northern Lights. It would not be surprising to see  all the neighbors out in the middle of the night in our night clothes and parkas enjoying the Aurora Borealis.  What an opportunity.