Campgrounds are like holidaying in a trailer park. At least that is the conclusion I have come to after all my campground experiences.

Will and I tent camped back in the day in those large couples groups where sleeping and being sober are optional activities. Noise is ever present though the decibel level varies with the amount of daylight which means louder at night and death-like quiet in the heat of the afternoon when everyone is sleeping it off.

Well not everyone. Not me. I found tent camping with the gang an adventure in good humor and something I needed to recover from once we got home.

Rob’s camping history is more family and then just couple oriented and is decidedly more au naturel. Off road. Desolate. Mountainous. With activities right off the cover of an eco magazine.

We have a tent trailer and since last summer’s front yard camping adventure, BabyD has been begging to camp away from home. So we set up camp late yesterday afternoon at our local national park just twenty minutes east of here to spend the night.*

We arrived to find that both the site next to ours and the one beyond were occupied. The farther of the two was an old land yacht that belonged to a couple of young men who were clearly not into the rustic adventure of the outdoors. They had either borrowed dad’s RV for a weekend away or were shift workers with too much money and no sense of a better way to spend it.**

Our near neighbors at first glance appeared to be a man and his harem and children.*** But it turned out that the gentleman had drawn the short straw, the other husbands arriving much later to rescue him from the gaggle of wives and horde of children.

Though we didn’t take much note of them at first, they noticed us. And stared. A lot.

It could have been that Rob was shirtless. Or that he went into camp set up mode as soon as we arrived with his typical methodical and efficient manner. Or it could have been that unlucky chain smoking dude tasked with setting up their camp (a job he didn’t do too well****); Rob was clearly in his element and he made it look easy and impossible at once.

It wasn’t until we were eating our supper, prepared with precision by my husband and myself, that I started paying more attention to our neighbors.

The women were engaged in a lively conversation about Rogers, a cell phone company up here who pride themselves on monopoly and poor customer service. It was no surprise that they were complaining but what was truly interesting was their attitude about paying bills they actually owed.

They weren’t too into that.

They boasted to each other about refusing to pay for  certain services that they used but hadn’t understood were extras. One of the woman maintained that she regularly harassed Rogers’ employees into discounting her monthly bill. Another told about cancelling her service after she’d gotten a $400 bill and couldn’t understand why they sent her one for $2000 the next month. After all, she’d told them they had over charged her and that she was cancelling. Didn’t they understand that?

What I understood clearly was that these people were white trash and I find it so interesting that trash is not always white. Being white trash is a mindset. A philosophy of life born out of a combination of conscious disregard for the way the world works and crappy parenting a bad set of genetic fortune.

I taught for a long time. Public school. Mostly working classes (hardly, poor and indebted to plastic). There is a prevailing sense of entitlement to things one isn’t born to yet unwilling to work for and a disdain for anything or one that points out the error of this logic.

Eventually the poor lone husband was joined by the other mates who helped him set up his tent again (he had to move it as it was on the land yacht’s space and another tent besides. Here I should pause to point out that there were seven adults and almost twice that number of kids. In the end they all ended up sleeping in the two SUV’s as we had a wicked storm push through and the great thing about that – for us – is that for a time the thunder and wind drowned the inane conversation and drunken-ness.*****

So how was our trip? Good. Despite the fact that BabyD slammed the tent trailer door on her thumb and face planted off her bike into gravel after hurtling down a hill (she’s okay – just her usual bandaged and bruised self), it was a great success. I even learned to pee in a waste basket.******

We will definitely be doing more of this in the future.

* Since BabyD has never camped outdoors with the exception of our own front yard, Rob was not anxious for our first “real” overnighter to be too long or too far from home.

** Fifth wheels or RV’s are the nouveau riche of Alberta’s answer to the summer place. People buy lots near what passes for lakes around here and then motor out to them every weekend they can manage. For the money they put into it, building a real cabin would be a better idea but that doesn’t seem to occur to anyone.

*** Don’t assume that only the FLDS gets away with polygamy up here.

****  At one point one of the women borrowed an axe from us so he could chop wood for a fire – I think they had run out of cardboard and plastic debris from their meal – and as I watched him hack at a piece of wood like a girl, I asked Rob, “If he cuts his leg off, our we liable? It being our axe and all?” Rob just smiled devilishly and said, “No.” But I know he was thinking that he would have to be the one to put the tourniqet on the guy when he did chop his foot in two. Although since we didn’t bring the first aid kit, I would have had to supply the shirt – his was already off.

***** The drunken-ness was the land yacht boys. The white trash neighbors just smoked. All seven of them and those really stinky foreign cigs too.

****** In keeping with my adventures in peeing in unconventional places, I ended up squatting over the plastic waste basket during the height of the thunderstorm. BabyD was so impressed, she tried it herself. Next up is pooping in the woods. Like the pope.