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!
