Sept. 22: Camping

I spend about one week every year visiting campgrounds.

For about a decade now, I have supplemented my income doing magic shows at various campgrounds or resorts. I always do my shows over the Labour Day and Victoria Day weekends. I try to get three shows for the Saturday and three for the Sunday. I was able to fill all the slots when I started doing this but it's becoming increasingly harder to fill my roster. Maybe I'm getting too old. Maybe the campground ownerfs are just getting tired of me. Maybe it's the recession. Who knows?

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Usually, when a campground books me, they tell me that the show will take place in the recreation hall. Before my first campground show, I had a mental image of what the rec hall would look like. I pictured it to be a small theatre with proscenium stage and tiered seating, maybe a tech booth in the back where someone would run lights and sound.

Not a chance.

Some of the rec halls were just tents, open on all four sides but with canvas on top to stop the rain. Some of them were just long garage-like structures with lots of dart boards on the wall. At one campground, I performed in a cottage-sized rec hall that had an ugly growth of black mould on one of the walls. After the show was over, the person who hired me told me I was the last performer who would ever do a show in that venue.

"It's condemned," he said. "They're tearing it down tomorrow morning."

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Ash likes to go camping. I don't. In fact, I'm not a fan of vacations in general. I always feel like I should be working. I feel guilty when I "take it easy." Still, I know it's important to Ash, so I do my best to relax. Earlier this summer, we spent a few days at a resort near Cobden, Ontario. We rented a cabin, which was probably the best thing about the place. There was a beach with an inflatable playground on the water but we didn't use it when we were told there was an additional cost. Ditto the waterslide park. There were two waterslides but the water flow was so weak that I stopped at the midpoint and had to physically propel myself to the bottom. The climatic splash in the receiving pool was more of a whimper.

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Before that, the four of us stayed in a cabin at another campground somewhere; I had traded the owners a magic show in exchange for a two-night stay. But when we got there, the swimming pool had been closed for the season and that was a disappointment, so we entertained ourselves by going on hikes and barbecuing our supper. 

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I remember being a kid and camping with my family. We would pitch the tent, dad would build a fire, and we'd sit around it and toast marshmallows and hot dogs and all the typical camp stuff. I think I remember enjoying it and understanding what it was for - family time away from the distractions of city life - but also thinking it was rather pointless. I thought we could have family time at home and not have to go through the troubles of setting up a tent and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes or sleeping on the hard ground. But I never voiced these concerns as I knew I'd be outvoted.

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When I do road trips today, I'm more likely to sleep in my car than find a hotel. I've even been known to do this in the wintertime. Once, while driving to a new job in Quebec in the latter part of 1999, I pulled into a turnoff on the side of the highway to sleep for the night. When I woke, my car was covered in snow. I got out, scraped as much snow off the car as I could, and carried on. When I relayed that story to a friend later on, he told me I was lucky to be alive. "A snowplow could have rammed right into you while you were sleeping."

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And that's all I have to say about camping.