Ways to Avoid Cannibalism While Camping

I live in Oregon, which happens to be a camper's paradise. Finding a spot to camp is like shooting fish in a barrel. However, if you don't want to pay to camp at a state-owned campground, the next best thing is to go into the wilderness and find a spot to pitch a tent (literally, not figuratively). Back in 2007, some friends and I decided to do this very thing on a whim. We said, "Load up the van with beer and a tent and let's go camping!"

I was caught up in the moment, and didn't have time to plan out what I was going to bring. I brought a jacket, some cheap cigars, and (of course) a cooler of beer. We loaded up my buddy's van and took off. Planning in this situation is something that happened to get overlooked. I'm going to spell out the moral of this story early on: carefully plan what to bring before you go camping! In fact, plan to go camping in the first place!

Perhaps I'm being overly dramatic. We're all okay now, but at the time, it felt as though we were all going to die. Our biggest problem was that the only food we brought was liquid bread (aka beer). No water. No tiny morsels. Beer. How could something so wonderful turn out to be something I would later feel anger toward? Needless to say, we had set up camp, built a fire, then realized that we had nothing for dinner. We all knew that we would be drinking our dinner that night.

Needless to say, we were all drunk, hungry, and could not drive anywhere to get food. We weren't even near somewhere that sold food late at that night for that matter. We realized that we would be waking up the next morning with hangovers and empty stomachs. As you get hungrier and hungrier while at the same time getting drunker and drunker, your buddies begin to look pretty delicious.

I tell you this, not as a story about drinking, but as a cautionary tale. Please be careful and plan before you go camping. The lives you save may be more than your own. Only you can prevent camping cannibalism.