A stairway to heaven

I just went camping for the first time in about 18 years. It was amazing! My only experience with camping previously was the annual camping trip I was forced to go on with my parents every summer. As I was driving to this campground a week ago, I had this feeling of "this isn't camping!" because it was only about a 45 minute drive to get to the campsite. Where's the long death defying stretch of highway 70? In order to fully build the right amount of enthusiasm and optimism for a camping trip you need to spend four hours in the middle part of a one seater Chevy Love pickup with a stick shift between your legs. Great way to make a gay kid feel more effeminate. The road to heaven (camping) needs to be paved with deadly winding mountain highways , stick shifts slamming into your groin, and Heart blaring in your ears. At some point stairway to heaven would be played to let you know that you were going to die. There is nothing more thrill seeking than barreling down tiny swerving roads with no guard rail, and, get this....a rickety wooden hand made trailer ( not unlike something the greeks would have built) attached to that janky, old, rickety tomb of a pickup truck. It really  hit home for me that this would someday be the road I died on, was when I was eight years old. I saw a train de-rail on the side of the mountain. I looked at these strewn rail cars thrown along the side of a canyon all the way down to the river (around 800 feet or more)and thought "If they can't maneuver this, then how the hell can my steroided out dad?". All this was to reach the oasis of Antelope lake. A strange,semi-pretty, but obscure bit of the deep Sierra Nevadas. far from where anyone would ever live. Someplace that the x-files would have shot some episode about killer mosquitos or a shack dwelling badger man. So I got to spend the days by myself, chasing ground squirrels and stomping on big black ant hills. Riveting really. Now that I look back, what the fuck where my parents doing most of the time? They had to be getting fucked up. I had to sleep in my own tent, not ok. 7 year old pre-homosexual boys love spending time in the middle of the woods in a little tent waiting to be eaten. I decided that I would rather be eaten by wolves rather than bears. It just seemed more original than most camper deaths. A bear mauling is a dime a dozen, but a good wolf attack is only for those special people like myself. I'd become a campground legend.