camping is about sharing.

how I remembered to be a friend in the woods

This weekend I went camping and it reminded me of something important. Friendship is about sharing.

Friendship is not about the kind of sharing that you do in civilization. It’s not about the sharing you do on twitter, or on instagram, or even at a pizza party.

Friendship is about real sharing, the kind you do when you are camping. Like when you are in the woods and no one has a tampon and you need one and you worry that you are about to draw eight million bears to your campsite and then someone says, “wait, let me check my car one more time” and finds a tampon. Friendship is about the kind of sharing you do when there is only one pot of boiling water and one packet of instant coffee and the whole group has to decide who is the least likely to survive without caffeine in the morning, and you vote for your poor caffeine-addicted friend, even though you really want that coffee for yourself.

Friendship is about inviting someone you don’t know that well into your tent because, whoops, it somehow became twenty degrees at night even though we are camping in Southern California and no one was expecting this and some people only brought one blanket.

Friendship in the woods is not everyday friendship, even though it should be. It is the real deal, the stuff that human relationships are made out of: helping each other stay warm, helping each other survive, helping each other not be miserable.

One time in college I cut up a green apple into perfect slices and put it in the fridge to get cold and when I got home, my roommate had eaten it. To this day, that story lights a spark of anger inside of me. I am angry, years later, that someone ate my sliced apple. Not that someone stole my Hope Diamond. Not that someone murdered my cousin. That someone ate my sliced, Granny Smith apple in a ziploc bag.

In the woods, in the mountains, when we are all sleeping under the stars, I’m not like that. I’m not crazy ziploc-apple girl. I’ll give you my apple gladly, because you are my human friend. You are my real friend. You are my partner in surviging this day. And I wish I could remember that you are my partner in surviving this day even when we go back home and we look at websites instead of stars; where there are things as fancy as ziploc and refrigerated fruits. I wish I could remember that sharing means more good stuff for everyone, instead of just less good stuff for me.