Picnic on the sidelines

Vacation should be released. Weakening a grip of everyday life, life brings us to behave as a good way. Because of this, it is so difficult to dispose of earned freedom with the mind. Will requires much more responsibility than routine. Especially in the era, which abolished the measured alternation of seasons that always promised skiing in winter, and in the summer - a cottage.

The plane, like a supermarket, canceled the seasons. The earth is round and vast. There is always a warm place on it, no matter what month the calendar shows. There is an indisputable joy in wallowing on a tropical beach, recalling the neighbors who remained at home to fight with a blizzard. But there is also its own charm in in the spring to crunch on the March cucumber. Verigs of the seasons, like a sonnet - a poet, teach us humble wisdom. In order for summer to be in the summer, it is necessary to return the summer vacation to its antediluvian content and primitive form.

For me, this means one thing: a tent. Like almost everything in my life, I discovered the joy of Bivouac at first theoretically - reading the favorite book of every sane person "Three in the same boat, not counting the dog."

Jerome owes his meteorical success to Leni. In search of easy earnings, he contracted to compose a guide to Thames. Not wanting to delve into the sources, Jerome first described the small troubles, waiting for unlearned citizens in the bosom of a capricious British nature. Only then did the author intend to saturate the frivolous opus with the laid information, honestly writing them off in the library. Fortunately, the publisher stopped him on time. The book came out charmingly empty and seductive. It is built in the conflict of a good Victorian life with a parody of him. A gentleman in nature is a hilarious sight, because it, nature, resolutely shy of decency imposed on it with a stiff society. The heroes of Jerome, who do not dare to stay alone with the river without a frock coat and hat, are city knights who went in search of romantic, and therefore meaningless adventures. In essence, this is the “Don Quixote” of wagon fiction, and I only regret that, knowing the book by heart, I can’t re-read it anymore.

However, we are talking about something else. Three in one boat carried an entertaining news to the young reader: in order to experience funny difficulties in the camping life, it is not necessary to conquer Everest or the South Pole. It is enough for a short time to change the sedentary everyday life to the nomadic one, which I did, having carried out the best part of my youth with a backpack and in a tent.

A quarter of a century has passed until I opened the tent again. It turned out that for these (missed) years we have not changed much with her: we are still good together. This is explained by the fact that, steadfastly resisting progress, the tent even in America remained what she always was - a mobile den.

A sortie into nature provides for a voluntary rejection of everything that is from her, nature, separates. Having parted with comfortable over the past few millennia, we surrender to the will of the elements, moving into a shaky three -meter house. The meaning of this absurdity is the extraction.

“Art,” said Viktor Shklovsky, “it is necessary in order to make the stone stone again.”

It’s easier to stumble about this stone. The inconvenience caused instantly returns us to the materiality of the world.

The same with nature - so that it becomes again, you need to climb into its gut, even when it is wet. The weather cannot be dealt with. You can only hide from it. And no matter what a flimsy tent seemed, it necessarily becomes a house - a tiny patch of culture, burned out in the exorbitant kingdom of nature. When the rain pounds on a stretched awning, you understand the unsurpassed importance of the most monumental invention of mankind - refuge.

Actually, in this historical distance there is a temptation of wildlife. Traveling around other people's cities and countries, you move along a narrow corridor of exoticism in one or two centuries. Getting out for a week in the forest, you are making a voyage on the dawn of history, when it was still new. The path back is simple, but significant. The vacation revolution turns us into our own ancestors, forced to fight for existence, not only with the authorities. In nature, all needs are urgent, which means genuine. Actually, for this we arrange a picnic in order to distinguish arbitrary from the necessary - and enjoy it.