I don’t hate snakes. When I’m out camping or hiking I don’t go stark raving mad at the sight of a snake and remain raving until the snake has been bludgeoned into a sufficiently slitherless state. Not hating something doesn’t necessarily imply fondness.

I understand that snakes, like jazz music, are an important part of the ecosystem, I would just prefer that snakes, and jazz music, not share whatever ecosystem I am in. Given the choice, I’d prefer a snake encounter over a jazz encounter, as snake encounters are generally over as quickly as they began and tend to leave me in a heightened state of mental and physical arousal.

In contrast, a jazz encounter seemingly has no end, nor a discernable beginning, and tends to leave me feeling as I would imagine I would feel if I were a sack of potatoes. A pile of roughed up russets in an itchy sack with a fedora on one end and pale puffy feet void of any compulsion to tap a toe at the other.

My wife and I broke our 1967 Aristocrat camper free from its driveway moorings for its first excursion of the summer. 358 days in the driveway and 7 in a campground is the tally thus far this season for the camper. So it goes.

A day getting the camper ready to go camping, seven days of living in a campground with vault toilets 15 miles away from a perfectly good house, and a day undoing all that was done upon returning. Why do people do this, and more importantly, why can I not avert my eyes from the abys of a vault toilet before closing the lid on a deposit? Humans are strange…and devoid of adequate fiber intake.

I pondered why people willingly drag themselves and a large portion of their stuff out into the woods? I pondered this while swaying in a hammock enjoying a stogie and a cocktail by a babbling creek under a canopy of pine trees on a Tuesday at two o’clock in the afternoon.

As Norman Maclean wrote in A River Runs Through It, “Life every now and then becomes literature…as if life had been made and not happened.”

Perhaps we need to drag ourselves and a large portion of our stuff out into the woods to become literature, to make a story rather than let the same story happen again and again in our perfectly good house? Our perfectly good house with nary a snake in sight or jazz in sound.

My wife and I enjoy camping and hope to convert a few more driveway days into campground days for our camper before the campground gates close on the season and bring this year’s story writing opportunities to a close.

Summer is fleeting in this part of the world…soak it in.