CAMPING

My family and I have discovered camping! It is wild.

For a minimum of money, a family unit can discover and enjoy the outdoors. Fresh air, warm days, and cold nights. No telephones, no smog, no nerve-grating traffic and confusion. What a way to commune with nature and with your children!

How better a way to get to know them than over a roaring campfire on a pitch black night with a nip in the air. Or, during a sun-drenched walk through the woods, and the fields, or when fishing at a sparkling, bubbling spring, or during a driving rainstorm, when you are all huddled together in a tent, in common misery.

Suddenly everything is brought into focus. What more do you NEED? Now , someone will likely say "where the devil has he been? Camping has been out there for a long time!" In a nutshell, I have discovered life in its many different facets. I was a born-and-bred city boy who was brought up in a densly populated part of Toronto, where everything but very small patches of grass are covered with cement or tar paving. Our home, a semi-detached house, was only 13 feet wide! You should have seen the rooms!

But, we were well off considering the plight of other families in those days of the great depression. We had the benefits of a family situation and a home. From this background I went through years of fighting the corporate ladder at a bank, and gradually the drinking became worse, to the point where it was easier to stay at home on the weekends to suck on a drink, or two, or more than getting out into life and drinking in the sheer exuberance of life!

Meanwhile life was passing me by. Thank God, I got worse in my drinking habits. Yes! I am glad I got worse! I finally had to quit, and discover what I was missing in life, and to see what is really out there. Far away from the then important needs of money, material things, and an utterly complacent and lazy life. By the time you read this we will be a week into our driving trip to Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver, and as many points therein. Some of the time will be spent camping, some of the time at relatives, and friends. Our family will be together, probably arguing, sometimes laughing, experiencing a few tears, and a whole lot of love, for we have discovered eath other, and we are together. There is no greater gift I could have received than that of sobriety, thanks to the help at Donwood.

DON FELSTEAD

DON says: I wrote this for the Donwood newsletter in July of 1976, having been sober for 7 years. I thank God all the time for the timely intervention that brought me back to sobriety and a beautiful life!