Geeks in the Wilderness

Earlier this summer, I spent part of a week in the mountains with no air conditioning, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no cell phone signal and no internet connection.  I was with a group of people brought together by the circumstances of our day jobs.  Another common denominator, at least for the vast majority of us, was our geekiness.  We weren’t outdoorsmen by any stretch of the imagination.  Most of us were die-hard video gamers, among other geeky hobbies and interests.

 Wilderness Survival

When our employer scheduled a “team building” trip to the mountains, I’m sure most of us were hoping for some small chalet-style hotel or executive retreat center or, at the very least, something with air conditioning or indoor plumbing.  This is not what we received…

When we left the main roads behind after driving for almost half the day, we found ourselves on poorly maintained gravel roads only slightly wider than our rental van.  Our drivers decided to treat the experience as an episode of The World’s Most Dangerous Roads, at one point causing a man checking his mail box to run away and also ignoring a “bridge closed to traffic” sign.

Nevertheless, we made it safely to our destination and inspected our cabins.  There were 17 of us who would be sharing the 3 cabins we rented.  The three females would get one cabin, while the 14 guys would split the other two.  We quickly discovered the first cabin to be overrun by the local insect population, with huge ants crawling everywhere, along with other, less savory creatures.  After securing some industrial strength pesticide from a shed on the premises, we checked out the remaining two cabins.

The interior of these small shacks were about the size of my walk-in master bedroom closet at home, except for the addition of a small loft.  There was no way 7 full-grown adult guys were going to cram into that space with our cots, sleeping bags and air mattresses.  I ended up sleeping outside in front of one of the cabins, while another of us slept in out in front of the other one.

Random Wilderness Encounters

After the initial encounter with the giant ants, we soon encountered more of their kind on the clothesline that had been strung between  the two cabins.  These were not so easily defeated and kept returning to plague us throughout our stay.

After we settled in, we set out on the first of our two tubing excursions on the nearby New River.  We did a two-mile trip the first day and a four-mile trip the second day.  Having never been tubing before, I had a lot of fun with this, even though I had to buy some water shoes after the first trip, since the rocks on the bottom of the river were tough on the feet.

After our tubing excursion, we all piled into the van for dinner at a “family-style” restaurant and a trip to the nearest Wal-Mart for supplies.  Since we lacked experience in the wilderness, we failed to bring many of the supplies we would need for the next few days.

The “family-style” restaurant had some of the best food I’ve ever tasted.  They brought huge servings out to the table for us to dish out and just kept bringing them until we couldn’t eat any more.  Unfortunately, I contracted some form of dysentery or some other jungle disease just a few hours later.  I’ll leave the results to your imagination, but it was one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever experienced.  One of the offshoots of my bout with this malady was our van being stuck on a deserted mountain road in the middle of the night.  It was pitch black with no signs of civilization nearby, except a lonely, decrepit barn with a gaping black hole of a doorway.  You could almost hear the theme music from Friday the 13th.

The whole area actually had an underlying atmosphere of dread, even under the beauty of the idyllic mountain setting.  The place we were staying even sold t-shirts that said, “Paddle faster, I hear banjos.”  This was not reassuring.

Fortunately, not a single one of us was hacked up by a maniacal slasher.  There were no giant man-eating bears.  We never even heard a single chainsaw.  To our disappointment, we didn’t encounter any zombies or other walking dead and I see more inbred mutants on a daily basis than we saw on the entire trip.

As a matter of fact, the only creatures we encountered other than the giant insects back at camp were some pretty big snakes that shared the river with us on the longer of our two tubing excursions.  I survived my bout with what I was sure was a deadly illness and other than some pretty nasty sunburns, everybody had a decent time.

“I’ll take the first watch, nothing ever happens then.”

You may be wondering how our geeky camping trip was any different than anybody else’s camping trips?  I’m not sure.  I do know that I brought my battery-powered camping fan.  We also brought lots of personal insect repellant, including these really cool fan-powered things.  I also think our campfire discussions were probably a bit different than most campfire discussions of seasoned campers.

At our campfire, we talked about our favorite video games.  We discussed comic book superheroes.  We talked about the toys of our childhood and our favorite movies.  We were the same geeks we are in our comfortable, climate-controlled homes, in front of our computers and video game consoles.  Actually, the next time I go camping, it will probably be on a FPS and I’ll get the same shit from my fellow players that I always get for that, but hey, it’s a legitimate strategy, right?

Next thing you know, they’ll be making a video game about camping and kids will decide that it looks fun enough to try in real life…

Ohhh…

My question for you, fellow geeks: Do you participate in outdoor activities in the untamed wilderness, like camping?  Tell me about it…