It is now either twenty or thirty years, I forget which, since I went camping. The reason is that I no longer have to. I am now so rich and prosperous that I can afford to sleep in a frame house all summer, never wash a dish, and never make my own bed.
I lie idly in a hammock on a summer afternoon listening to the sound of the hired man cutting the fire wood or drowsily watching the ice-man trying to lift ice into the refrigerator. I have my duck trousers washed at a Chinese laundry and my house is near enough to a town to enable me to get my boots blacked in a barber shop. Under circumstances such as these I spend the summer in what the Italians call dolce far niente or words to that effect.
But I can still recall the time when I was a boy in short trousers at the old Upper Canada College on King Street and when it was the chief delight of my life to go camping in the summer time. It was a sort of longing that came over us at school as the spring term ripened into summer. The winter term was a rude rigorous time, made up of lessons and lickings, the school a gloomy place and masters like so many jaolers [sic]
But the spring term, with the playground green as emerald and the chestnut trees heavy with new leaves and blossoms seemed a more human time. The masters were suddenly transformed in [sic]cricketers, wore yellow-red-and-black blazers and became objects of intense admiration.
I think my first real appreciation of "Stoney" Jackson was got by seeing him drive a cricket ball over the King Street fence on to the top of a passing horse car. The spring term in short was so very human and so much filled with the joy of the open air and of being out of doors that it ended by giving us a longing to get away from school altogether and to go camping.
The first of July generally found us packing our things and boarding the train and heading gaily for the wilderness with a hired canoe and a seven-by-seven tent in the baggage car and a fishing rod in four sections lying in the rack above our heads. We went as I say to the wilderness, clear out to the wilderness, as for example Scarborough, or to Lake Simcoe. Some very adventurous boys even went to such unknown regions as Muskoka or Penetanguishene, hardly trodden by the feet of man.
The great aim, as I recall it, was to get as far away as possible from home as possible. Not that there was anything wrong with our homes. There [sic]were, no doubt, very much as homes are now. But from a boy's point of view they were seriously impaired by the blighting presence of "the old man." We bore no grudge as I remember it, against our fathers. We were in a way and in their proper place attached to them. But the plain fact was that we had outgrown them.
There comes a time in a boy's life when he can ride a horse and sail a boat and shoot a gun, and when he feels that the less he sees of the "old man" the happier it is for all concerned. And oddly enough this is the very time when the ordinary father first begins to take an interest in the presence of his son. He buys for his boy of thirteen a set of cricket things; they are really for himself: so that he can bowl his son out with what he calls a leg break on the lawn in front of the house and fancy himself quite a sport. He buys a shot gun for the boy and takes him out partridge shooting, or rather he takes him out to watch his father shoot at a partridge. I say advisedly shoot at, or towards, a partridge. I have never seen one killed in cold blood in this fashion.
But any boy's father finds it an exhilarating thing to walk through the underbrush with a gun under his arm, and a boy at his heels, and a dog in front of him stalking partridges. So it is exhilarating, very exhilarating for the boy's father. But both the boy and the dog feel that for real first class sport the "old man" must be left behind. That is why, when the time for camping comes, the boy takes the dog but leaves the old man at home.
A second very powerful incentive with us to go camping was the desire to get away from our mothers and sisters. I do not mean that we did not value their affection at its true worth. But we felt somehow that we could appreciate it more keenly from a distance, a long distance. Their views on certain things we felt to be entirely erroneous. Their idea as to what is and what is not a clean shirt, their ridiculous underestimate of the life of a collar, their preposterous theories in regard to the care of the hands and the hair, - these things jarred painfully upon the independent spirit of a grown-up boy of thirteen. There were times when we had to speak almost severely to our mothers and sisters on these points. On the whole we felt that is was a wise dispensation of providence where they could not accompany us to camp.
But an even higher exultation was found in the fact that our going camping kept us necessarily away from church and Sunday school. This our parents openly deplored. We kept our own views very quietly to ourselves, at least until we were on the train. But our feeling was that our spiritual life had been so intense during the winter that it would be better to have it forcibly suspended for a few weeks.
Under the circumstances it is not to be wondered at that it took us from six to eight weeks to wear out our enthusiasm for camp life. Only by degrees did its drawbacks dawn upon our mind. We came to realize as the weeks passed, that a bed of hemlock boughs is not in it with athis should be "an" ostermoor Ostermoor as in the mattress takes a capital O mattress: that a tin plate with a week's grease on it does not compare with white china washed in the kitchen: that the frogs make more noise that [sic]the trolley cars: that duck pants can not be washed by trailing them behind a moving sailboat: that rain is wet and that houses were built in order to keep it off: and that lighting fires and chopping wood and carrying water are things whereby a janitor may make a living but are beneath the dignity of a scholar and a gentleman.
So it was that when the time came to go home again we went back with a rush of enthusiasm; we threw our dirty plates into the lake, burned our duck trousers in a bonfire, lent the tent and the canoe to an Indian to save the trouble of packing them up and boarded the train in a wild desire for the joys of civilization.
Nor ever did anybody seem a kindlier and a better being than the "old man" himself when he met us at the train and joked about the fish we hadn't caught.
So it was with all of life, as Homer says, - or what did he say?
It's so long since I was at school that I've forgotten it. But anyway, whatever it was, he said it.