Mike Cooper: Camping = Reading

Much like we were, only cleaner

MIKE COOPER: When I was a kid, in the 1970's, our family went camping in the summer. Nothing fancy: mostly state parks in the Ozarks, where we could drive the station wagon right up to the campsite and unload our canvas tent, Coleman stove, big cheap sleeping bags and all the rest. We weren't alone. Other sites had more families, older folks taking their summer vacation, college kids down from St Louis, the occasional long-distance traveler with a pop-up trailer. Not so many RVs back then. No one seemed to spend much money -- hot dogs was about as gourmet as the food got, and typical gear wasn't much more complicated than an air mattress.

Campsite with Boston on the horizon

Today it's a different story. We still go camping -- my favorite destination is our annual trip to one of Boston's harbor islands, where we can cook mussels at the water's edge while jets take off from Logan and party boats cruise noisily past. But almost no one else we know does. Instead, there's the Patagonia catalog, with its gorgeous photos of trekking in the world's most difficult and spectacular terrain. Somehow we've gotten to the point that "camping" means thousands of dollars of high-tech gear and a National Geographic destination. If you're not bivouacked halfway up a sheer wall in the Himalaya, or sea-kayaking to remote islands in the Andaman Sea ... well, you can always watch Travel Channel. Something similar may be happening to reading. Decades ago people commonly read books, and they did so casually, without much thought. Sit on the bus, pull out a paperback. Take your lunch in the park, bring along a library book. Wait an hour at the DMV, finish that novel your friend passed along last week. 

The book club meets

I recently read two memoirs of the 1930's, and both mention that old magazines and paperbacks were common in hobo jungles: men who had to beg food and sleep on the ground still had books around them, to read and share. Today, reading a book is moving from "now and then" right through "uncommon" and into "eccentric." I often carry a book to the playground while our children are there, and that draws comments. Our pediatrician was quite struck by our children having books with them, rather than smartphones. What was once utterly commonplace is now almost ... odd. Furthermore, the cost curve is accelerating. Just like "proper" backpacking now requires an Arcteryx pack and Marmot outerwear, reading increasingly requires an expensive electronic device. So is this the end of literacy? Perhaps not. Radio should have been killed off years ago, and yet thrives. Despite cars people still ride bicycles -- more and more of them all the time, in fact. Just because the book is no longer the default go-to for transient entertainment doesn't mean we've given up on it completely. And perhaps technology will be its savior, in the end. Once everyone is wearing whatever succeeds Google glasses, they could watch videos and take pictures of their annoyed friends. But maybe, maybe they'll find something to read while they walk instead. 

  Mike Cooper is the pen name of a former jack-of-all-trades. Viking will release his novel FULL RATCHET, sequel to CLAWBACK, on July 3rd. Mike lives outside Boston with his family.

Note from Lucy: I love talking to Mike when I'm stymied while writing--he either recommends shooting someone or a chase scene. The writing always goes better after that...

When Things Go Wrong

RHYS BOWEN:

I’ve just had a lovely long trip in which everything went smoothly, the sea was like glass, the weather was perfect, the food was great, I didn’t get sick… which means that it will soon fade to just a pleasant but vague memory. It’s strange but the only trips we remember vividly are the times when things go wrong.

I still remember every detail of my first trip to Greece, wandering from town to town with a backpack, catching local buses, sleeping in people's spare rooms. We were two naïve girls alone, constantly having to fend off unwanted advances from Greek men who kept their own women shut away. There was only one occasion when it got really worrying—when we found ourselves alone in a house with three men and two beds. We had been invited there by an elderly man and assumed his wife would be waiting for us. A soldier and another man had accompanied us up the hill and we assumed they were escorting us out of chivalry.  When they stayed and there was no wife to be seen we got distinctly nervous. Well, nobody tried anything and we gave a good speech about promising our parents that we would not stay where there was no lady to chaperon, and eventually the soldier escorted us down the hill again. Pfew.

Another trip I remember vividly was the time we tried to be among the first tourists to Ladakh, the Himalayan kingdom that had been off limits because of its proximity to China. We had hired a Ladakhi driver to come for us with a vehicle at 4 in the morning, so that we could reach our destination by nightfall. He arrived, his face completely expressionless, not seeming to speak or understand any known language. The vehicle was an open jeep. Freezing cold. We drove and finally climbed the Zoji-la pass, 15000 feet. Road had streams running across it, herds of nomad sheep and goats wandering down it—oh and a 3000 feet drop on one side. We reached the top, kept going through wild, Himalayan no man’s land and at 4 p.m. we reached a road block, manned by the Indian army. It turned out there had been a landslide, washing away twenty five kilometers of road.  The driver had obviously known this before we started. We had no choice but to turn around and drive back.

                It began to get dark. It was bitterly cold and we discovered the driver had other little quirks—like thinking he could save gas by switching off the engine every time we went downhill. Since the hills often involved sheer drops this was not good. I sat with my hand poised and every time it went near the key I slapped it away.  We were horribly conscious of that three thousand feet drop on the Zoji-la. We had had nothing to eat since a breakfast stop at first light. We finally got back to our houseboat at midnight and the driver left without a word or a smile.

                Yes, I remember that trip pretty well. And the French farmhouse in which my first task every morning was to sweep up the bits that had fallen down during the night, or the camping trip when it rained solidly for a week and our site became a lake.  My theory is that humans aren’t meant to have it easy. We are built for survival and struggle and it’s only then that we feel fully alive. Maybe that’s why we like mystery novels—we create times of stress and heightened emotion when humans are at their most vulnerable.

So… any good survival stories to share?

I'll be giving away an ARC of my upcoming Royal Spyness book called HEIRS AND GRACES to the best story.