Lisa Scott has her standards, even when it comes to camping sans gas stove, tent et al.
It's that time of year again, when closed offices drive the milky-skinned forth, unplugged from the motherboard, to experience nature in all her splendour.
Soon, massive SUVs - children fighting in the back, dads threatening to put them out on the side of the road, fragile, hungover mums being conciliatory in the front - will squat their haunches upon the beauty spots of these fair isles, dispensing their cargo as part of that much-vaunted Kiwi tradition, camping.
Last weekend, the economist and I camped next to a placid, duck-paddled pond.
Our version of camping asymptotes to zero (a little maths humour there) because
1. We are lazy and
2.The economist is hysterically averse to paying campsite fees.
Of the $15 per person fee, payable to the Waitaki District Council, he bellowed, "They can take it from my cold, dead wallet!"In our minimalism, we simply throw a mattress in the back of the Camry, pack a box of vittles and a peter of Emersons and head off.
No gas stove, no tent, no outdoor shower, no nothing.
"It's really the same as living at home," says the economist.
I wonder where he lives.
I do take loads of books, as I become quite mean when bookless.
Driving homeward of a Sunday, we came upon the full catastrophe of fenced compounds at Waitangi recreational reserve.
Cheek-by-jowl, secured by a thousand yellow plastic pegs, miles of green net barriers segregated each dwelling from its neighbour.
It appeared Rommel's troops were advancing across Waitaki.
Dismal wisps of smoke issued as from a Soweto ghetto.
As we passed, disillusioned males pressed up against the wire, peering out in envy, unused Swiss Army knives in their hands.
En vacance, my grandparents tootled about in a slow Zephyr, peripatetically taking in the delights of the long white foreshore.
Granddad, as friendly as a Labrador, often accosted gangs of bikies to discuss the relative merits of Harley over Norton.
Needing little in the way of accoutrements, they would have been bemused by the notion of staking claim to land not theirs.
Today's unhappy campers are a sad indictment on the ravenous consumerism and backyard feudalism of New Zealanders.
Never, it seems, has the pursuit of burnt sausages required so much mesh fencing.
Camping (when not pertaining to Miss Ruby's Fabulously Camp Christmas Party) means getting away from it all.
Not bringing it all with you.
And one can only imagine the carbon footprint of relentlessly driving back and forth replicating one suburbia in another.
Sins against Camping:
• Mowed lawns or cutting the herbage around your caravan to approximate a lawn
• Fencing, screens. If you hate the sight of other people so much, stay at home
• A satellite disk perched atop your enormous white road mobile, which is parked next to your enormous boat, all surrounded by a gulag wall of cables, posts and trip wires
• A little wooden sign hammered into the ground proclaiming the site as Dun Roamin (perhaps Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here).
Of course, camping excursions with the economist were originally part of a battery of girlfriend suitability tests, run in the hopes of not making the same mistake twice, which included a pea under the mattress (Darling, I couldn't sleep a wink).
A dating Krypton Factor, I needed to cope with dirt, depravity, lack of both hygiene and pillows, while withstanding the advances of merciless blood suckers (luckily, I worked in the arts so had natural immunity).
But it could have been much, much worse: when it comes to matters of outdoors, the economist is only a llama hair jersey away from a housebus.
I blame Lord Baden-Powell and a steady diet of post-apocalyptic movies.
These days, in holiday Stockholm syndrome, I appreciate simplicity (although sometimes dream of hot showers, and in turning under a warm jet bash my head against the wheel arch of the Camry), but there are lines of feral anti-materialism I won't cross.
Smelly, sooty, sunburnt, mascara-less and as hairy as a monkey, the floaters from that mornings gritty coffee still between my un-brushed teeth, I am comforted in the knowledge I didn't gut a possum, weave anything from tree bark, brew medicinal salves, or wear tie-dye.
Despite appearances, a girl has her standards.
- Lisa Scott is a Dunedin writer
