For most people, the biggest danger of camping is bears or falling trees or if you’re a teenager, some ax-wielding madman in a hockey mask.

For me, the biggest danger has to be that I’m out in the wilderness and when I’m out in the wilderness, something changes in me.

I can’t tell you how it happens, just that it happens. Most of my brain cells seem to die. Nearly all of my common sense disappears like politicians getting audited.

Basically, I become that guy who wants to try everything.

At some point in our evolution, every tribe needed that idiot who looked at a blue mushroom covered in a fuzz of grey-green mold and thought, hey, why don’t I try that?

Darwinism at its best, right?

coffee poo

But if it weren’t for such people, we wouldn’t be eating rocky mountain oysters (aka bull testicles), Kopi Luwak, which are, in fact, coffee beans pooped out of some sort of a small mammal in SE Asia, or kale.

I mean, what thinking process happened there? My, those bull testicles look tasty, I think I’ll take a bite out of one of them? (though I do hope the bull was dead when this thought occurred). Or, oh, look that thing just pooped out something, let’s try it? Or hey, let’s use this leaf that tastes worse than bull-balls and call it kale?

Some would call it curiosity. Others insanity.

I think the NatGeo channel even has a show about this phenomenon. It’s called stupid people.

But without stupid people would we know we could fly with squirrel-like flaps, or swallow fire, or say things like ‘pain is temporary, pride is forever’? Would we have discovered electricity if someone hadn’t attached a string to a kite and gone out in a lightning storm?

No, I think not.

See, stupid…errr I mean, curious… people advance this world.

You’re welcome.

Now the odd thing is, I’m pretty cautious at home. I don’t look at a snake and wonder if it bites. I don’t look at bear scat and then take out my camera and shout, here yogi bear, here. I certainly don’t gape at a berry on some weird looking tree and think, hey, what does that taste like and will it kill me?

It’s why camping can be dangerous for me.

Hmmm, how hot is that fire? Will this explode? What happens if I shout at bees?

Who knows what will get into my head?

But something.

Something for sure.

Best have the first aid kit on standby.

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Does anyone else change their personality when camping?

Does anyone know a good psychiatrist?