​

THE INTRODUCTION
By Pat McManus

1970

 

The reason that many men and women camp all their lives may be that they are trying to recapture the fun, joy, and excitement of kid camping. It can’t be done. Kid camping has only one requirement: being a kid. You can be a girl kid or a boy kid, but you must be a kid. Otherwise, you cannot know true kid camping.

 

To a grownup, a backyard at night is only a backyard at night. To a kid, a backyard at night is a vast and mysterious frontier, and sleeping there, a journey into the unknown. No explorer ever returned from an expedition more haggard and more exhausted or with a greater sense of accomplishment than an eight-year-old returning from his or her first night of sleeping out alone in the Great Backyard.

 

Grownups have no grasp of the distances involved in kid camping. They might suppose that a kid is sleeping out only twenty-five feet from the back door of the house. But to kids, the Sahara Desert, Mount Everest, and the Amazon River may lie between them and that back door. Grown-up observers may calculate that a kid travels the distance home in exactly two seconds. They don’t realize the kid has five years crammed into each of those seconds.

 

Nor do grownups know anything about kid camp cooking. What is “burnt to a crisp” to an adult is “done” to a kid. An adult’s junk foods are kids’ staples. What a mother may think of as robbing her refrigerator is thought of by a kid as “living off the land.”

 

The sound a grownup identifies as the mournful cry of a night bird may be a kid’s non-stop ticket home. Maybe not, though. You can’t predict kid campers. There are spaces, you see, that grownups cannot cross, no matter how much they like to return to kid camping. But if the grownups were once kid campers, they can always remember how it was. This is what I have attempted to do in writing this book: to remember exactly how it was. I have tried to describe the various aspects of kid amping as I knew them in a distant time and place, but which I believe are the same today as they were then. Sleeping out alone for the first time is always sleeping out alone for the first time. It is an experience that will remain for all eternity.

 

Gradually, kid camping becomes grownup camping, which, to my mind, means backpacking. In addition to kid camping basics, therefore, I have also attempted to give you information that will be of use to you in your progress toward backpacking. Backpacking will never be quite as good as kid camping, but it’s the next best thing.

 

My own research for this book has included personal interviews with my own four daughters, two of whom are still kid campers and two of whom were recently kid campers. I have also interviewed the kid camping sons of a friend of mine, and they have been most helpful in recalling certain details I might otherwise have overlooked. For example, when Jimmy asked me what the first topic in my book was to be, I told him “air Mattress.”

 

“Air Mattress?” he said, astounded. “What about Aaaaiii!”

 

“Gosh,” I said, “I’d forgotten all about Aaaaiii!”

 

“And what’s the last topic going to be? Jimmy asked, now more than a little doubtful about my book on kid camping.

 

“Zip,” I said.

 

“Ah, good.” He said. “I’m glad you didn’t forget Zip.”

 

“Listen,” I told him, “nobody who has experienced Zip ever forgets it!”

 

​

Autographed, first edition, hardcover copies of Kid Camping Aaaiii! to Zip are available at
Grogan’s Mercantile (published by McManus Books). Autographed softcovers of this title are also available.