It's all Magic

Tricks are a combination of ‘slight of hand’ skill and knowledge others don’t have ( secrets ).

Real magicians won’t show you how they do their tricks. One reason is if they did you would no longer be in awe of their seemingly mystical abilities.

Knowledge really is power. Imagine a cave man who figures out how to ‘make fire’. Would he rush off to show his clan how to do it? Maybe not. He might keep it a secret and just reveal that he ‘can’ create fire not ‘how’. Wouldn’t everybody be amazed and even imagine that he has some divine power bestowed upon him by the powers of the universe.

Some of us are teachers and we gladly show others how to do things ( and often end up being very under appreciated, I might add ;-). Others of us are more secretive and keep our knowledge to ourselves. 

The secret to creating fire may have been past down through the generations from father to son. I can imagine that family wielding great power in a given community. Then one day one of the decedents reveals the ‘secret’ to maybe a friend and all the power of the secret is lost. His friend tells others and before you know it everybody knows how to make a fire. And in fact, at some point, anyone who does not know how is considered stupid. 

Very quickly, knowledge and secrets can go from being power to, take it for grant it, common sense. I’ve always been somewhat amazed at how quickly people forget who taught them one notion or another. We often just incorporate knowledge into our gray matter without so much as a thank you to those who teach us.

Well in the age of the Internet you have all sorts of knowledge available to you. However there is a different problem. Finding just one secret is like looking for a marigold in a field of sunflowers. It’s the ‘too much’ knowledge problem. And if you think Google is good at sorting it out for you, well you are sadly mistaken. They will give you 'popular' results not necessarily ‘good’ results.  

Over many years I have collected an array of camping tricks and secrets and organized them into a nice tidy website: 

and a Youtube videocamper channel. If you camp, you are just completely silly to not take a little time snooping around these gems filling up your 'mental' camping ‘bag of tricks’, with free knowledge.

And far and away the best camping trick I can tell you is get a good chuck box! That not only makes it so much easier to go but also gives you that all important table space once out in the boonies. You don’t forget key items and you go more often which are tremendous benefits. 

So the moral of this story is "it's all magic" - get our secrets and Go Camping!

Lost

I must have been about 12 years old at that time. It was the time I got lost, really lost, not just a little turned around. Wouldn't you know, my direction of movement was exactly wrong. Completely backwards, instead of going south I was moving north.



"How does this happen," one might ask?

• It was a new, thus unfamiliar area


• It was a cloudy day so the sun was not available to aid in navigational efforts


• I was young and stupid. ( now I'm just stupid :o()


• I didn't pay attention and did not mentally note the salient features of the land before leaving the vehicle.

Now in my later years, when things are not working out the way they should, I tend to ask myself "am I really doing what I think I am doing?". Not surprisingly the answer is often no! Which is why it is advisable to check our points of reference occasionally.

That, of course, is why we did the little camping survey a couple months ago. Checking our reference points. I am happy to say that, by and large, we are not lost. In fact most readers seem to be pretty happy with the general direction of the newsletter. Folks seem to like the cooking, dutch oven and family camping content but would like to see more localized information on specific areas to camp and such.

If you have a look at the writers page on our camping terms website you'll get an idea of other things people were interested in knowing about. If you have some expertise in any area of camping and would like to share it with us, please sign up to be a writer.

And if you are wondering how I managed to get out of my lost situation, well while wondering aimlessly, I came across my cousin, same age as me, walking the same direction as me ( exactly wrong ). His stupidity reassured and added to mine and visa verse. So we just kept walking the same direction !

This experience has lead me to the mathematical equation:

1S + 1S = 2S where s=stupid

so one stupid plus another stupid = two stupids (stupids will not cancel each other out!) And if you think about it, we have seen this many times especially in political arenas. Additionally, adding more stupids to the equation only adds to the reassurance of all the stupids in the equation and does nothing to offset the stupidity of the situation or the equation. In other words, just because a lot of stupids all think the same thing, that does not make it true - it's still stupid.

I hope I am not acting "stupidly" here. ( Now there is a word that says a lot!) My gout does not allow me to drink beer anymore so I can't just ask you over for a beer and make it all better.

As for my cousin and I, we ran across another hunter way back about where the last dirt road turns into a cow path and he very kindly gave us a ride back to where we should be. There is no substitute for blind luck.

Don't get lost and Go Camping! Or visa verse.

Ken

Think Camping

"Thoughts are creations," a friend once told me. I am not sure that is exactly true but surely thoughts lead to creations (or 'destructions', as it be).

The aging process has afforded me a reverence toward thoughts in general. There is something mystical about them. Once I was swinging my granddaughter, Emily, at the park. She was sitting in the swing and I was behind her so she was looking exactly the opposite direction from me as I was pushing the swing from behind. I looked at the water bottles, we had brought with us, and was thinking to myself a drink of water would be good. She turned her head back toward me so I could hear her shout "if you are thirsty papa you should just go get a drink". I know she either pulled that thought right out of my head or I sent it to hers!

Perhaps, the best example of this 'thought telepathy' is when two people are intently trying to remember the same thing, like maybe the name of an actor. They might be pondering, who was that other guy that starred with Mel Gibson in " We Were Soldiers"? Seconds pass....nothing, nothing, nothing more seconds pass.... more nothing, nothing, nothing then in unison both shout "Sam Elliot!". Coincidence, you say....maybe...but it sure seems to happen a lot.

I have learned if one treats a thought as if it were it's own little entity with it's own personality separate from one's own mind, at the very least it seems to create an independence from existing perceptions and prejudice thus allowing for the possibility of new ideas. Many of the innovations associated with my chuck box products were achieved this way. You learn to let the thought guide you instead of you guiding the thought. (It's harder to do than you might think. )

"Be careful what you wish for, you may just get it," is another one we have all heard. I can guarantee you, that one is true. I asked you for your opinions on the newsletter last month and boy did I get an earful. But it was a good earful. While, by and large, folks seem to be contented with the general direction of our efforts, there were also some wonderful new insights and ideas presented too.

I am still compiling and incubating that information. Therefore, we are going to hold off on the website survey till next month and by then, with any luck, I will have digested all your thoughts on what the camping-tips.com newsletter should be.

In regard to those who offered their opinions in our survey, I have one word for you:

Thank You!

OK, I guess that's two words but it is one thought and a good one at that. ;-)

Think Camping then go!

Ken

Forget the Swine - Go Camping!

I take a week off to go turkey hunting and come back from the woods to find the swine have all but overtaken us. I'm not talking about the flu, I'm talking about the press. There is a pandemic happening all right, but it's not a disease it's a press feeding frenzy. It is so bad my president felt compelled to say "Cover your mouth when you cough." Don't they teach that in kindergarten anymore?

Our vice president says don't fly because you have to breath that recirculated air? A plane is diverted to a landing because someone has flu like symptoms? Our press has taken compulsion to new hipes, I mean heights. I have four words for them - GIVE ME A BREAK ! And find some real story to report or take a vacation if things are that slow. But please, don't go turkey hunting, you might get shot.

After all, a lot of bad things 'could' happen. Let's see, we have the possibility of an E.L.E. meteor, a nuclear holocaust, global warming and, my grandmother's favorite, you could poke someones eye out if you don't put that stick down!

All I can say is I am sure glad it isn't a turkey flu. It took me six years to get drawn for spring turkey which is my favorite hunt because it follows those long hard winters we have here in Camp Verde Arizona. It got all the way down to freezing several times this winter and it even threaten to snow once! Think of the havoc that could have wreaked - cars sliding into ditches, potential power outages and your ears could get cold too.

I have actually had the flu, several times in my lifetime and while it certainly wasn't any fun, I never felt like it was on the same level as small pox or leprosy. I guess that shows you what little I know about such things. Ignorance truly is bliss.....I guess.

I'm going back to the woods. I have never seen a turkey sneeze.

Go Camping!

So this is camping???

I have been wrestling with this whole notion of what the term 'camping' has come to mean and why.

To me, camping is a spirit or maybe even a state of mind that results from the shedding of modern conveniences and distractions and reducing things down to simpler essentials. (The purest form of camping would be backpacking where the object of the game is to have exactly what you need and nothing else.)

Strangely, this process facilitates more of an awareness of ones own existence. The senses become more amplified. The thoughts become less cluttered. It just feels good.

One of the weaknesses of our capitalistic society though, is that marketing tactics tend to pick at our wants and desires and paint magnificent images of the virtues of what we don't have. This in turn drives us to wanting more, more, more which is completely contrary to the aforementioned simplification process. So we go from a tent, to a camper shell, to a tent trailer, to an RV, to a summer cabin etc. and that spirit of camping just gets lost in the clutter. Unfortunately, I'm not sure we realize what's going on or what we are missing.

I talk with folks who tell me things like, "I took my son/daughter camping but they hated it". But then you ask and find out that their son or daughter spent the whole trip with either their IPOD or their cell phone in their ear or they just had to have their best friends along for someone to talk to or they spent the whole trip watching videos or even satellite TV with the generator running outside the RV.

( A very valuable lesson that backpacking has taught me is that things own you as much as you own them. Maybe more, as we may not ever know how much 'things' distract us from who we are . )

I suspect some of you might be thinking I'm being a socialistic hypocrite here. After all I do sell camping products. Actually my point is to maybe, get some discussion going about what camping really is.

Who knows maybe you're missing the whole point......or maybe I'm missing it?