It’s only natural On camping, bacon, and making peace with Mother Nature BY ALAN OLIFSON

No one would describe me as a rugged outdoorsman. First of all, I’m allergic to bees. And I don’t think being allergic to the outdoors is a good start on the road to rugged outdoorsmanhood. After all, you don’t see too many people on the cover of National Geographic scaling a cliff with an EpiPen. Plus, I have a mild fear of heights, so scaling cliffs is out of the question anyway. I don’t even climb trees. Unless, of course, it’s to get away from bugs — which absolutely terrify me. My worst nightmare is to be stuck between a cliff and a giant beehive-laden tree teeming with hard-shelled beetles while a community theater company performs Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera (the Andrew Lloyd Webber fear, though unrelated, is equally real).

Despite my varied outdoor phobias, I’ve always been a big camping fan. The stars, the tranquility, the bacon. Oh, the bacon. My earliest camping memories are of my dad frying bacon on a portable propane stove, the smell covering the campsite like a cozy lard blanket. To this day, I have a Pavlovian response to being outside — I crave pork.

But it hasn’t all been love and grease, my relationship with Mother Nature (unlike my short-lived relationship with a girl named Ali). No, ours is a complex and evolving bond forged through horrible miscalculations.

My first camping experience started with nothing more than a station wagon, some sleeping bags, and an awe-inspiring lack of foresight. My sister and I were very young: she around one, and I somewhere around the third trimester. How my dad convinced my mom to go camping while she was eight months pregnant is beyond me. Equally confusing is why he convinced her to do so.

Driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco, they decided it’d be fun to set up camp in Big Sur, along California’s lush Central Coast. And by "set up camp," I mean, "park," since they didn’t have a tent. They were going to sleep under the stars, roughing it. Yes, my dad took his infant daughter and pregnant wife out to do battle with the elements. And for his hubris he was duly rewarded.

It began to rain.

The few pictures I’ve seen of this trip, if developed today, would probably require the One Hour Photo clerk to call the Department of Child Safety. When I first saw them, I thought, wow, my sister really dug into that chocolate cake. Then I realized that wasn’t Betty Crocker smeared all over her face, it was mud — nature’s frosting. Yum.

So I spent my first night of camping curled up in my mother’s womb, which was in turn crammed into the back of a station wagon, rain pounding down on the roof, my sister sitting in her portable crib looking like she’d just finished some kind of twisted pay-per-view wrestling match.

It’s no surprise, then, that I began to overcompensate for my prenatal nature experience when I started camping on my own. In college, with little provocation on their part, my friends and I would attack the mountains like plundering hordes — loading up the car with tents, propane lanterns, propane stoves, folding chairs, stereos, coolers, you name it. We weren’t going to commune with nature, we were going to colonize it. The only thing missing was a little flag we could jam into the soil of our campsite: "I claim this land for UC Santa Barbara." We weren’t really even going to "nature," per se. We went to managed campgrounds. The kind where you have to make a reservation. While having to reserve a slab of nature drove the more ecologically conscious of my generation into the arms of Greenpeace, my friends and I were blissfully undeterred.

So while my dad underestimated nature, dragging his family willy-nilly into the forest unprepared, I over-prepared, like a Boy Scout on a bender, trying to subdue nature. And for this hubris, I too was rewarded.

The ill-fated trip was just "the guys." Mostly because "the girls," in the very general sense, didn’t hang out with us much. Yes, just us men and the mountains. We drove right up to the ranger kiosk — our cars overflowing with beer and various REI paraphernalia — and checked ourselves in. From there the ranger-cum-bellhop directed us to our own personal little campsite. As usual, it came equipped with a fire pit, a picnic table, a faucet, and the obligatory tree. Ah, roughing it. We pulled into our two assigned parking spots, unloaded the cars, turned on the stereo, unfolded the chairs, hung some pictures on the tree, and generally provoked Mother Nature’s wrath.

Then the sun went down.

Six college students, a bundle of store-bought firewood, matches, lighters, and even a bit of lighter fluid could not mix together in the right combination to create fire. And it’s pretty amazing how a little thing like lack of fire can turn an innocent college camping trip into a twentysomething version of Lord of the Flies. By midnight, I was willing to kill my best friend for a flashlight and a raw hot dog.

Somehow we persevered, like the men from Alive! or Touching the Void, heroically spending the night huddled together playing cards and drinking vodka-based cocktails while our lantern illuminated the giant FLAMMABLE! NO LANTERNS! tag on our tent.

But this experience taught me a lesson. And now my camping has hit an equilibrium. Tent: yes. Stereo plugged into a power generator: no. I’ve made my peace with Mother Nature. Sure, I’m either allergic or deathly afraid of much of what she has to offer. But I’ve realized camping doesn’t have to be about braving the elements, nor does it have to be about subduing them. It can be about that beautiful middle ground where man and nature co-exist, the friction between them soothed with the calming salve of bacon grease.

Send REI gift certificates to Alan Olifson at alan@olifson.com