Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, August 12, 1993                   TAG: 9308130182
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Beth Macy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

CAMPING: WHAT BETTER WAY TO RECOVER MY LOST YOUTH?

The good thing about camping is, you get to eat bacon every day.

As all veteran campers know, there's no finer smell than the waft of bacon mingling with fumes from the Coleman stove. Add to that medley the minty-fresh scent of Ultra Strength Ben-Gay emanating from your stiff neck and back, and it's an outdoorsman's paradise, a real eau de Naturale.

But I like camping, honest. It gets you in vacation mode quicker than any other kind of trip because there's so much to do, you don't have time to think about work, or bills, or the fact that your cats are home protesting your leave by peeing on the basement floor.

The tent and tarp need assembling. The cooler ice needs to be refilled. Coffee is made the best way possible: by pouring boiling water through a Melita coffee filter. And cooking calls for a lot of resourcefulness, but not many tools. It's a challenge.

Plus, you have to be constantly on the lookout for snakes.

Men are particularly fun to watch because camping highlights the Cave-Man Instinct they all have burning inside. That is, their obsession with fire.

My husband and I hadn't done any serious camping together before our recent trip to West Virginia. So I had no idea how truly deep his pyromania ran, even though he reminded me at least seven times beforehand, "We need to get some waterproof matches for the trip."

Which we forgot, of course, along with every other important camping implement, including pillows, rain gear and extra blankets.

Somehow he managed without the wooden matches, though. I watched him kill an entire evening fiddling with the burners on the cookstove, the knobs on the lantern and the sticks in the campfire - which just had to be built, even though it was 80 degrees.

It reminded him of numerous family vacations in the pop-up trailer, of being a Boy Scout, of the time he put Ex-Lax in the chocolate cake he made for the sixth-grade cakewalk.

Let a man fiddle with fire, and he will wax nostalgic for days.

I think the glow does something to their brains. Or maybe it's the Coleman fuel. One night after he was talked out, we enjoyed a relaxing evening reading books by the fire light. The couple from Maryland in the camping space next to us were playing cards by the light of their lantern, quiet as copperheads in the brush.

But as soon as we began to doze off in our tent, they began shouting unintelligible bits of conversation. Just when I started settling into a dream, I woke up to:

"DID YOU PACK BACON?"

"NO, BUT I BROUGHT A CUCUMBER!"

"A CUCUMBER?!"

I tried to re-align my ersatz pillow, assembled by shoving some dirty clothes into the tent bag. I tried to muffle the sounds, but it was no use.

"I CALLED IT HEARTS, NOT DIAMONDS!"

And so on for an hour until we were so angry I had to restrain my cavemanlike husband from lumbering over there and beating the Maryland barbarians with a large, cavemanlike stick.

This is Americana at its best, I kept thinking. It puts you in touch with your roots, especially that big tree root sticking up from underneath the tent.

My family never went camping when I was little, so in a way vacationing under the stars was a bit like recovering my lost youth. The closest thing to camping I remember is the time I had a friend over to sleep out in the backyard one summer night.

We threw a blanket over the clothesline, holding the edges down with rocks, and used one of my dad's house-painting tarps as a floor. We made peanut butter sandwiches on white bread, using an inch-thick layer of marshmallow cream instead of jelly. We got sick.

When my friend finally dozed off, I snuck into the house and into my bed. The next morning I crept back into the dewy tent before my friend woke up.

When we walked into the house, my mom didn't say a word as she stood there by the stove, frying bacon in a skillet.

Got some pretty interesting mail on my recent column on bridesmaid attire. A Martinsville reader sent me a wedding announcement from her local paper that "had the town buzzing all week."

The bride, Margaret Horsley of Collinsville, wore a white swimsuit with tea-length train. (A picture of the festive ensemble, white pumps and all, also ran with the announcement.) The matron of honor wore a black swimsuit.

It didn't say what the groom, Derek Barrow, or his best man wore. But we can only imagine black-and-white Speedos to match. The July 9 ceremony was performed at The Wedding Chapel in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Amy Whitlow of Chatham also wrote to share her own personal wedding dress rule: "To prevent looking ridiculous, for each year past 21 years of age, the bride should remove one ruffle from her dress. Of course, at 38 and counting I am about down to my underwear. As for my potential bridesmaids, they will probably have to wear hospital gowns and tie their nosegays to their walkers."

Beth Macy, a features department staff writer, saw a lot of deer and wild turkey - but NO SNAKES, thank God - during her recent camping trip. Her column runs Thursdays.