A week of camping in Michigan, and I did not think of the brain once. I was too physically active, too impacted by my senses, too involved with my family.
We all slept in one tent. We shared our meals, went to the beach together, and followed each other on hiking trails. Conversation, laughter, flare ups, it was all non-stop between us. No one off at work or at school. All the time, us.
The noises of the night surrounded us through the fabric walls of the tent, the wind amid the leaves, the lap of waves, a nightly fight between two raccoons, the birds in the morning. Smoke from our campfire filled our nostrils and stung our eyes, the warm and slightly acrid smell of burnt wood clinging to our clothes and our hair. The sun poured down on us, turning my boys nut brown and myself a reddish brown. No walls to shut nature away; my first night back I woke up feeling odd, realizing that it was too quiet, too enclosed, too soft.
I walked from the moment I woke to the moment I went to bed. Every morning I took our dogs through the campsite. We had to move to get to the bathroom or to go for fresh water. The beach was down a long boardwalk, the fallen firewood in the nearby woods. But walking was only the background. I ran down 400 foot sand bluffs with my boys and then made the agonizing climb back up in the shifting sand, pay back for the exhilarating speed down. I swam in crisp and clear waters, rollicking around near shore or diving to investigate shells and fish skeletons in deeper water. No sitting at the computer, not too much driving, no need to set aside special time to “exercise.” It was all the time there, part of what I was doing.
Neuroanthropology 