This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
- Andrew J. Beckner
- Sep 6, 2016
- 2 min read
What you are seeing is a campsite along the Chatooga River, in the Sumter National Forest, and part of the Ellicott Wilderness Area here in upstate South Carolina.
It is, perhaps, too much to hop that the idiots - and that's being far too kind - somehow, someway, see this and be, if not ashamed, then publicly ridiculed for said idiocy.
So let me break this down for you, at least how it plays out in my mind...
These folks were smoking a bowl one night, eating Cheetos and flipping between WWE and the Discovery Channel when, as luck would have it, they stumbled across Bear Grylls munching on grasshoppers and snaring squirrels. They thought, "Wow, we should try this survivalist stuff! It looks so cool!"
And so it came to pass they went to Cabela's and bought a tent. At Wal-Mart, they secured a box of Brillo pads, AAA batteries and some twine. Then, maybe they headed over to the sporting good section, and picked up an axe - a Gerber Bear Grylls brand, naturally.
My logic is well-founded. See that tent in the gallery? It's brand new, apparently used only once, and then left behind, now nothing more than an unseemly piece of garbage discarded on the bands of one of the South's most historic and beautiful rivers. The Brillo was likewise left near the fire pit, along with a AAA battery - an asinine attempt at starting a fire using the steel-wool-and-battery method. Except these clowns used steel wool coated in soap and, again, apparently tried it not with a 9-volt batter, but with a single AAA. I did not have to be present to know that didn't work.
Not that it would have mattered anyway. Instead of gathering readily available dry deadfall from the forest floor, they chopped down a tree, in a national forest, intent on burning freshly cut, green flora with the fire they couldn't start.
And what were they going to cook on that fire? Glad you asked. Fish, of course; hence, the crude fish "spear," fashioned from a limb of the fallen tree, it's tines barely separated and, thus, not wide enough to pierce any fish that happened to come their way. Again, not that it would have mattered. The place by the river where they camped was a deep pool, where, yes, there would have been a good bit of fish, but unreachable by the handmade spear that was barely four-foot long.
Now, I think it's great for people to try some wilderness survival techniques. We all should revel in the opportunity to get out of our comfort zone and enjoy mother nature while challenging ourselves and our suburban comfort.
But when you aren't good enough to meet that challenge, at least be responsible enough to clean up the evidence of your own ignorance. Because if you don't, you become worse than an idiot.
You become a coward.
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