Camping in Winter

Whenever I enter the world of hypothetical, why is it that everyone knows I'm talking about a real person? As if my brain capacity can't accommodate a genuine hypothetical situation, but can only handle real ones.

What's the point? Well, let's say I have this friend, a crazy in short, who equates negative temperatures with the desire to go camping. Wind-chapped cheeks, strange survival dances around a fire, and burrowing inside snow caves make a short list of things he's eager to enjoy on his impending winter camping outing.

So I ask myself, really, what is it that would possess someone to incur the risks of frost bite and hypothermia to challenge the beasts of winter? Maybe it's something primal, like an instinct: feel cold on skin = must go camping. Or maybe, like bears and elk and all sorts of animals that live in arctic conditions, it's just a matter of existence.

I've spoken of this idea before that to truly love a landscape, you have to experience it. Think of spending a day in the loess hills in Iowa to help your human consciousness "remember" what prairie was like. You've never seen a real prairie. You've only read about it in books, but then you go and you know why you want it to be there.

Perhaps the same is true for winter fascinations. It's easy to love rolling green hills of grass spotted with cloud shadows, but how attractive are they in a blizzard? How well do you love several feet of hardened snow in North Dakota, -34 degrees near Billings yesterday, and wind plucking the wool right off your chest. It's just like a long-term dating relationship where you purposely experience the other person in every mood, every situation, among all sorts of people to see if you can love the climate, not just weather the spring.