What’s so great outdoors?

Perhaps it’s because I’m from Britain, perhaps it’s because I’m just incredibly lazy and complacent, but I’ve never understood the Canadian obsession with camping. Shared showers, cold food, hard-mattress beds, and a fire-fighter from the great City of Hamilton snoring and passing gas all night in a tent 10 feet away. Vacations are best described in those two compelling and glorious words that should be part of our The Charter of Rights and Freedoms: room service.

Not that I’m completely rejecting the idea of the great outdoors. Sitting around the open fire at night drinking good single malt and listening to nature’s approaching sleep is strikingly beautiful. But what does one do for the rest of the week? When it rains it’s an incredibly exciting “drive into town,” and the social high point of the stay is buying groceries from the camp store.

My wife is the eldest of — you will make a gasping sound in about three seconds — 15 children. Yes, 15. Not a typing error. Also one of the most remarkable, balanced, well adjusted clans I’ve ever met. Because of the numbers and expense involved, they were obliged to take camping holidays, where they would, presumably, take up most of the camp. Fine. Point taken. So my wife and our children still camp.

Not me. But here is the central point: Perception of natural beauty is largely shaped by early, perhaps even childhood, experience. Canada is without doubt a stunning country, its forests blending greens, browns, and reds with a blinding lustre. For many Europeans, however, it’s all too bold, too severe, too loud.

Too great outdoors, really. Yes, that’s it. Not an issue of better or worse, but different. The controlled beauty of an English glade or a French garden is probably less authentic and honest than a Canadian landscape, but a large part of visual joy is finding a place in an aesthetic comfort zone. Natural grace is for me, European for 27 of my 49 years, moulded on rural Britain.

So waking up in the middle of a camping site in Ontario or Quebec, even one that is relatively isolated, can never tingle nerves and sensibilities formed 5000 kilometres away. Trees are just trees and lakes just lakes. And smelly tents just smelly tents. Never the possibility that in some distant time that lake hid a sword that would set all humanity free; or that a Shakespeare or an Anne Boleyn walked through that valley.

It must all sound rather ungrateful coming from an immigrant who has been welcomed by some of the kindest and most compassionate people in the world.

Yet it’s not a question of ingratitude or lack of respect. More a grand way of telling my poor wife that, much as I love her, I’ll never be climbing into that minivan and driving to the bloody campsite. The great outdoors is precisely that. Great and outdoors. She can show me the photos while I’m sitting in front of the widescreen, high-definition television.

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