Ellie and Donny went camping upstate this weekend. Ellie’s also has climbed mountains and done some rappelling. I don’t know from where she got this outdoors gene. Neither Gilda nor I could be considered the camping-out, outdoorsy type.
During her high school years Ellie and her friend Danielle decided they’d go camping at Bear Mountain. I wasn’t too keen on two teenage girls going alone but I really wasn’t in a position to ground them. Nor was I in a position to offer advice. Not that I didn’t try, but you know how teenagers, particularly teenage girls, are. They didn’t want to hear any of my suggestions.
I did, however, offer a cautionary note when I overheard Danielle say she would use a bag of marshmallows as a pillow. Whoa, I said. That would not be a good idea. Were you not aware that bears are attracted to food? The last place you want to have your head resting is on a bag of bear-enticing marshmallows.
A few years later Dan and Ellie decided to travel cross-country. Dan’s school ended earlier than Ellie’s so he drove her Jeep out West where she would join him. In Sequioa National Park in California, Dan attended a park ranger’s talk when he suddenly bolted from the campfire and headed straight to the Jeep. The park ranger had just finished admonishing campers to leave no food in their cars as bears commonly ripped off doors to get to the the goodies inside. Dan knew he didn’t leave any of his food inside the Jeep but he alertly remembered Ellie had a cornucopia of sweets stashed around the interior.
Back to Ellie and Danielle. They didn’t encounter any bears but around 9 pm they heard noises in the woods. The noises became voices, no less a reason to be wary. That is, until the voices turned out to be a boy scout troop. It wasn’t quite like Snow White encountering the Seven Dwarfs, but they definitely were calmer knowing the scouts were around.
Getting back to the opening of this blog, I might have left the impression that at least my genes could not possibly have influenced Ellie’s outdoorsmanship. Actually, we have pictures of my mother horseback riding, while my father grew up in a small town in Poland where he was part of a Jewish scouting organization. Maybe the gene skipped a generation (I’m fairly certain my brother and sister also lack the outdoorsman gene which resurfaced in Lee’s daughter Lauren. As part of a corporate exercise—she works for North Face—Lauren climbed Half Dome in Yosemite via the cable route, amazing herself as well as her parents with her fortitude). The extent of Gilda’s and my mountain climbing activity has been confined mostly to scaling Masada in Israel four or five times, as well as making our way to the top of some man-made structures such as The Vatican, the Il Duomo in Florence and the Eiffel Tower.
