Camp of Ecstasy

Please note, all characters are over the age of eighteen, and have no relation to any characters from other works, or real people.

There are two philosophies for camping- you have The Campers and you have The Glampers. These two philosophies are locked in eternal conflict, battling back and forth across the centuries, fighting for dominance and the soul of all mankind.

Campers: Want to rough it, to live as our ancestors did. Primal, sleeping on the ground, or with a thin tarp overhead. Campers want to catch their food, to trap their prey, and to drink cheap, barely cooled beer around the campfire they made without the use of a lighter.

Glampers: Want to have all their creature comforts and amenities, but a little closer to nature. They want sleeping pads, comfortable tents, fans. They want to cook hamburger meat and drink craft cocktails around the fire they lit with matches, made up of artificial, long-burn logs. Most importantly, they want to get out as soon as the weather gets a little bit rough, and scamper to their cars at the first sign of rain. Not to be biased, but they're disgusting.

My daughter Kaylee and I are real Americans- we're Campers, and take that responsibility very seriously. We rub mud into our wounds and behave much like our distant forebears. My wife, Emma, and son, Mark, are filthy Glampers, a fact which brings no end of shame to the family name. This familial delineation came to a head during our yearly camping trip. This year, Kaylee and I were in the sedan, our minimal gear, limited to a two-man tent, a handful of survival items (firesteel, paracord, knives and compasses, and water purification tablets, etc.) fitting handily in the back seat and trunk. Emma and Mark took my truck, with their bulky tent and sleeping pad, a massive cooler and solar panel setup, and plenty of snacks for the long weekend packed in the bed of the vehicle.

We set out from our home in Lincoln, Nebraska, for the nine hour drive into the Rockies, to our historic 'family campground' at the scenic Horseshoe Mountain. If you've never driven for a full day before, don't bother, it really isn't worth it for whatever you're trying to get to. If you've never driven down the length of Interstate 70, in particular, avoid it at all costs. It is, by leaps and bounds, more pleasurable to have your grey matter pounded flat with a meat tenderizer than to stare out the windshield at the featureless, utterly uninteresting facade of fields covering the world outside. If there were mountains, lakes, or any interesting landscape features anywhere closer to Lincoln, we would've stopped there, but given the length and breadth of the Great Plains, we gritted our teeth and bore it, as we had for the preceding ten years straight. It helped that Kaylee and I were now able to swap out driving, stopping for snacks, and choosing what podcast we would listen to, keeping things a little bit fresh and interesting. Comparatively, when the kids had been too young to drive, Emma and I would have to do a full workday of driving by ourselves, a miserable experience made worse by screaming kids.

The family convoy, as much as two vehicles could be called a convoy, had left in the pre-dawn of the early morning, heading west, meaning we made it to the border of Colorado by midday.

As we crossed into the Rocky Mountain state, Kaylee quipped, "The mistake by the mountains" gesturing to the uninspired continuity of boring fields.

I looked at her, brows furrowed. "The what?" I asked.

"You know," she replied, "like Columbus, but it's fields instead of a crappy city, and it's a mountain range instead of a lake." She grinned, as though she thought herself extremely clever, despite the long walk she took to get there. Her short, straight, auburn hair framed the thin features of her face- high cheekbones and striking blue eyes twinkling with mirth.

I frowned, "Columbus isn't on a lake."

She returned the expression, reaching for her phone to confirm her assertion. "I'm pretty sure it is, Dad." She started to type. "And I'm pretty sure it's a shithole." Her tapping suddenly ceased.

"Have you ever even been there?" I asked, even as she slipped her phone back into her pocket, "or are you just talking out of your ass about Ohio?" I was pretty sure she hadn't been. I disliked Ohio as much as the next guy, but it wasn't like it was legendarily worse than our home flyover of Nebraska.

"I've seen enough to know it's lame..." she replied, sliding her sandals off to perch her shapely feet onto the warm, sticky rubber of the sedan's dashboard.

"Did the internet tell you you're wrong?" I weedled, trying to recall the geography of the country's most unimportant state.

"The internet and I have differing viewpoints on a number of topics" she replied evasively, stretching and twisting, trying to get comfortable in her tight spandex shorts and tank top on the unforgiving cloth surface of the passenger seat.

"Is one of them the nickname you misremembered, then transposed onto both the Great Plains and Columbus?" I grinned at her stubbornness.

Emma said she got it from me, 'A daddy's girl with all his flaws, and my good looks.' were her exact words, but I prefer to think of it as a personality feature, rather than a flaw.

"Google suggests I may have been thinking of Cleveland, which is on Lake Erie, as opposed to Columbus, which is on Lake Nothing..." She tousled her wispy brown hair, removing it from her eyes and trying to maintain some semblance of correctness. "But until I see a peer-reviewed map, I'm going to reserve judgment" she finished with a flourish.

"Spoken like a true future lawyer," I laughed, "but it still doesn't apply here," I gestured out the windshield, "as I see neither lake nor mountains."

She reached over and patted my leg "Anything is close to mountains if you zoom out far enough, Dad." And she was technically correct, the best kind of correct in her mind.

The trip continued, more or less the same for the remainder of the trip, with various inane topics and technicalities picked apart, repeated, and bounced off one another until being abandoned when they lost their shine. The Rockies soon appeared on the horizon, growing to fill the whole windscreen. Turning south, we passed by population centers, and headed into the mountains near Boulder.

There are more interesting mountains than Horseshoe. It isn't the tallest, or the most conducive to camping, or the most interesting to hike, but tradition is tradition for a reason, and interrogating that reason wasn't something I was particularly interested in doing after a full day of driving.

Kaylee and I had always taken the backcountry pass, and set out into the wilderness to be away from family, from strangers, and of course, the incessant sound of cars which infested our lovely midwestern city. It had been a full ten years since we started, and for me, it was the time when I felt most alive, most connected with nature, and most intimately familiar with my daughter.

They neglect to tell you in Fatherhood School, how far the apple falls from the tree, and how little interest your daughter will have in you once she's off to college. Kaylee came out as bisexual four months ago, which I supported entirely, yet couldn't help but feel a wall building between us as a result. Despite my allyship, I was still an old man to her, someone who couldn't understand her struggles and experiences. Her liberal arts college education had done a number on our relationship with one another, something I hoped to reconcile during our backwoods adventure.

We pulled into the campground a few hours before the arrival of twilight, and seeing the sun start to meander towards its resting place behind the mountains gave me a start.

We'll have to head out soon if we want to make it to a campsite without electrical outlets... I thought, as Mark and Emma pulled in next to us, parking the truck full of supplies in the adjacent space.

"Hey, you two, smooth ride?" I called to them in a joking tone, as they clambered out unevenly.

"Smooth as a pineapple covered in gravel," Mark replied sarcastically. I knew from experience that the truck was loud and not particularly comfortable on the highway.

"If you'd just consider roughing it with us you could've packed a little lighter..." I eyed the truck bed full of luxurious accoutrement, sardonically.

Emma reached up to pat the packs. "These are our lifeline out here, Greg; the only things keeping us civilized. You're going to wish you had joined us by the time you get out of the backcountry." She smirked at me, and gestured for Mark to unload the truck and start getting set up.

I shrugged with more confidence than I felt; Kaylee had tugged our packs from the back of the car and gestured towards the nearby trailhead.

"We should get going, we've got miles to cover to get somewhere a bit less..." she glanced at the handful of other campers nearby with their large, noisy setups similar to her mother and brother's, "...crowded."

I wholeheartedly agreed, and we bid the other two farewell as they began messing with a contorted pile of stakes and canvas, cursing their failure to adequately repack their tents in the past year. Unfolding our carbon-fiber walking sticks, Kaylee and I started onwards and upwards, literally. We made good time up the trail, but a dozen switchbacks to get into the deep pines of the cliff above set our blood pumping. The warm air of the day sent us sweating until the cool mountain breeze grew strong enough to cool us back down.

We paused at a fork in the trail, unclasping packs and digging water bottles out of them. Kaylee and I sat on a large boulder, and talked pointedly about nothing in particular- the weather, the trail, the drive up, and the state of various plants along the way were all picked up, examined in a handful of words, and summarily discarded as I felt the distance between myself and my 'little girl' grow wider. There was definitely a divide, perhaps one that the wilderness could not mend.

"Hey there!" a sudden call came from the smaller of a pair of other mountain visitors meandering down the leftward fork. It looked to be another father-daughter pair. They were dressed similarly to us, but the father had much more grey hair, and the daughter wore a windbreaker over her short-shorts and athletic-top ensemble, curly black hair tied back in a high ponytail. There were also festooned with only daybags, either ultra-ultralight hikers, or simply on an afternoon hike to clear the lungs.

I raised a hand towards them in a polite greeting.

"Hey, you two! How's the trail?" I wasn't particularly interested in human interaction during our excursion, but it's a rule of the trail to make the small talk that Kaylee and I had been failing at until now.

"Nothing to write home about," the older gentleman replied, seemingly wanting to continue trekking down the mountain, a hiker after my own heart.

"There's a bunch of backcountry folks out today," the girl said, eyeing our packs, and pausing, seeming to want to chat, "Y'all heading towards the others at Split Rock? Or up yonder?" Her accent was thick, somewhere between Southern and Canadian, a South Dakotan if I've ever heard one.

"Up into the pine forest, probably." Kaylee chimed in, water dribbling down her chin from a hastily swallowed mouthful. She seemed as eager as I to avoid large crowds of people.

"I think it's quieter than Split." A small lie, we usually went past Split Rock into the more relaxed groves of evergreens on the lower slopes. The pines provided less shelter from the wind, but were more secluded, and we had only been up there to hike in the past, rather than pitching the tent so far up.

The girl nodded, and planted her own walking stick, eyeing us both up and down with eyes like laser beams, even as her father started to trudge back the way we had come from.

"How long are you guys staying up here for?" And then, with a sarcastic gleam in her eye, she leaned in towards Kaylee "Is he forcing you to sleep on the ground? My Dad keeps insisting we need to stay out here for a whole week." She gestured towards the slowly retreating form of her father, as he hobbled towards the campsite.

I glanced at Kaylee and took a mouthful of my water.

"Actually, we come up here every year, and he's not my father... he's my lover," Kaylee said, and leaned in to give me a kiss on the cheek "The ground can be quite comfortable if you've got the right company..." she laid her hand possessively on my leg.

I choked, as I felt her grasp my thigh, and coughed, spitting onto the ground. She slapped me a few times on the back, while grinning at the girl, who was taken aback by her declaration.

She looked between the two of us. "Oh, sorry! I didn't mean to assume..." she paused, and the silence between us grew a little awkward. She looked towards her father, "Sorry, I'd best be going, have a great trip!"

She beat a hasty retreat after him, leaving me to cough out the last of my refreshment, and turn to Kaylee.

"That was mean..."

Her eyes just twinkled in response to my admonishment. A joke at a stranger's expense, just part of her mercurial nature.

"She was being a nosy bitch, and was making eyes at you besides." Kaylee gestured towards the disappearing figure heading back to camp. "If she wants to fuck someone, she can take Mark for a roll in the pine needles, we're here to camp."

She rose to her feet and pointed imperiously towards the upper reaches of Horseshoe's forests, giving her best Shakespeare delivery, "We ride north, lest the sun set on us already."

I laughed at her faux-sternness, some of the tension slipping out of us as she joined me. This felt right, as opposed to the awkward climb of before.

As we proceeded, despite feeling more comfortable with one another, the woods were quiet, and our chatter evaporated, as dusk began to fall, and we had to keep more of an eye out for bears and mountain lions. The night grew close and we lit our headlamps, crunching through the forest of imposingly tall pines, and their assorted needles. The smell of sap filled my nostrils, the sound of nightjars and cicadas the only things breaking the peace of our walk up the side of the mountain. Kaylee paused, and gestured up a side trail, perhaps used by an animal, game warden, or other backcountry campers in the past.

"This one look okay? Or wait for another?"

I squinted against the oncoming darkness, as the last vestiges of sunlight were cut off by the mountains to our west, and the trees seemingly pressing in against the secluded pool of light beaming from our headlamps. I looked for a marker or signifier of some sort more than a random break in the trees.

"This should be fine..." My answer lacked confidence, and I think Kaylee knew it. If we wandered upon a bear or mountain lion den, our journey into the wilds would be short lived. "But even if it's not, let's do it anyway, I'm pooped," I said, and started up the path.

After a handful of steps, it became clear that this was definitely not a formal trail, more of a loose connection of game tracks. Kaylee and I scrambled, ducked, and clattered our way through the underbrush, but, eventually, found something near to what we wanted.

It was a small clearing adjacent to a mountain stream, reasonably flat for our tent, and a pair of large, flat stumps which could serve as chairs or tables in a pinch. There was an indentation which may have held a firepit in years past, suggesting that someone had been here before. Kaylee pointed, towards the ground, clattering her pack down off her back.

"Dibs," she said with nonchalance, "dibs on all of this, all of this is mine." She looked towards me. "Best go find something for yourself, it's going on ten o'clock, and bears start hunting at eleven." She flopped down atop her gear, and feigned sleep.

I grunted, ignoring her claim, and dropping my own, larger pack. "Time-zone change, don't forget, it's almost eleven back home," I corrected, and began to undo my pack, tossing out ultralight poles and stakes for the tent.

"Almost time to sleep, at any rate, I'm dead tired," She replied to my pedantry, lazily pressing buttons on her smart watch as she watched me begin to assemble our tent, and me cursing myself for not packing it properly after last year. "Two thousand feet of elevation gain, ten-miles-and-change distance, don't forget to take Tylenol or you'll end up with a wicked headache." She lazily tore open a pack of turkey jerky, and chewed it contemplatively.

I cocked an eyebrow in her general direction as I wrestled with the thin canvas. "I'm better than normal humans, I don't get altitude headaches- YEOUCH!" I exclaimed. One of the flexible poles had whipped up and smacked me in the knee, leaving me flailing to the ground, and having to extricate myself from a tangle of tent-related lines, canvas, and stakes.

Kaylee laughed uproariously at my failure and the pain I had caused myself, and gathered herself to her feet, dropping the jerky back on her pack. She came over to me and gave me a kiss for my troubles, just a peck, but on the lips this time, and started helping me to untangle things.

"I thought you'd never get off your ass." I huffed with no shortage of wounded pride.

She gestured a finger rudely in my direction. "If I never got off my ass, we'd have to sleep under the stars, and that's not a good idea in bear season."

I got back up and we worked together to assemble our tent. My lips burned where she had touched them, and every time our hands brushed against the other's while putting things together- I might've imagined it- but, it seemed our touches were a second longer than they needed to be.

With teamwork, we got the tent set up in record time. I was laying out my sleeping bag when I heard a curse from Kaylee. She was rifling through her bag, then suddenly stopped and gave a heavy sigh.

"Dad, I may have unclipped my bedroll at the car," She said in a small, sad voice. It was truly pitiful to hear.

"Ouch, that sucks for you, it's going to get cold tonight," I said, not without a decent amount of schadenfreude. "Sounds like you'd better hike back down and stay with the Glampers." I gestured back the way we'd come, with distaste evident in my tone.

Kaylee gasped in mock outrage at the very suggestion. "You wouldn't condemn your only daughter to sleep with them, would you?" She pointed down the mountain, seeming to shake with anger at the very idea being levied in her direction.

"I suppose I could loan you a portion of my bedroll and blanket, as we are lovers, after all. But if a bear breaks in, you'll have to be the one to fight it off." I laid out my terms in the gravest of voices.

Kaylee snorted in derision.

"As if I wasn't always going to have to save you from the bears, Dad, you're too old to fight them off." She punched me playfully in the upper arm, and continued her preparations for the evening.

I couldn't help but feel a little sad that she hadn't mentioned my callback to her 'lovers' comment from earlier; in the past, we would've had a much more robust back and forth, but her burgeoning sexuality had evidently dissuaded her. I peeled off my boots, socks, shirt, and pants, hitting each of my armpits with a quick stick of deodorant, and slipping my flip-flops on as I went to tie up our food in only my boxer-briefs.

Snagging her clear snack bag, I couldn't help but watch Kaylee disrobing at the entrance to the tent. It's bad form to wear much in your sleeping bag, but she wore only a pair of panties, nay, a thong, and a sports bra of slick, black material. She climbed into the tent, and my sleeping bag, ahead of me, as I finished hoisting our food out of range for all but the most enthusiastic bears.