Camping

It's time to take a break.

My father was the first storyteller in my life, and I learned the craft from him. That’s not to say there weren’t others on both sides of my family. They have all been storytellers in one way or another. But my father once reminisced about camping with his father, the man I grew up calling Papadon.

We have to take a trip in the Way Back machine for this since my father was born in 1942. We also have to travel a bit to the mountains and forests of Idaho in the 1950s, most likely to the Sawtooth Mountain range. Their tent was canvas, heavy and damp after a night of four kids and two adults breathing within. The story never talks about the tent going up or coming down. There is no reference to hikes or rivers or adventures. I don’t know if they played card games or told stories around the fire.

Here is what I know.

Papadon spent a lot of his time in anger. He was angry at loud children, angry at how much toilet paper they used, angry if they left food on their plates, angry about what everything cost. He was married to my grandmother for thirty years before he took her out to dinner. So yes, she cooked for them every night for thirty years without a break. Why this man decided to take his family camping is beyond me. The old man I grew up knowing was not the type to spend time outdoors in the dirt. But he did have a love of traveling and a sincere desire to harvest every single berry from any bush he could find.

The kids were snuggled up in their sleeping bags, my grandmother resting beside them, and the sun had long since set behind the Idaho trees that night. Papdon did not sleep. He sat up in the tent, eyes darting left and right, watching for the mosquitoes as they buzzed around his quiet family.

“One!” he shouted in victory as he slapped the insect out of the air. “Two! Haha. Three!” There was a small lantern on in the corner of the tent near where he sat, and my father woke nearly every time there was another gleeful shout of a mosquito squished. This went on for hours. By morning, my grandfather’s kill count was over two-hundred, but who is to say if it was accurate? He was certainly sleep deprived and delirious from the effort. Had he known that tents in the not-too-distant future would be sewn with mesh linings, I think he would have been all the more furious at his own suffering.

They never went camping again.

My wife and I started camping long before our children came along. We trekked out to remote places and shivered in the cold some nights, woke up to water streaming in under the tent during rainstorms, dried out sleeping bags in foggy mists. We hiked and explored and hated the sticky combination of sunscreen and bugspray that was necessary to survive without going crazy like members of my family in the 50s. But we always wanted to go back and do it again.

Our first family camping trip happened when our youngest was still too little to walk on his own. I carried him on my chest in a moby wrap while I cooked breakfast and dinner, and nobody slept.

The following year we set up the tent in one site, and I zipped the kids inside to play while we got the other things out of the car. The youngest fell, and his head hit the one rock under the tent, splitting his scalp open to bleed all over the nylon while his big brother screamed that we were all going to die.

We camped in pouring rain, a tarp pulled right up to the edge of the fire where my wife and I tried desperately to stay warm. The boys played happily in the lake twenty feet away, pants rolled up to the knee, raincoats doing nothing to keep them dry, giggles and howls of laughter echoing out over the rain-soaked forest around us. It took three days to dry out all of our gear once we got home from that trip.

And we just kept going.

They learned to ride their bikes without training wheels in a campground. We camped alongside raging rivers and bouldered in water so cold our feet were numb when we emerged. And then we drove to a tiny town ten miles off for cartons of ice cream that we raced to eat before they melted all over our sticky fingers.

We explored tidepools and cut our ankles on sharp barnacles. We found fish that were not real (but those little rubber bait fish squirm nicely if you wiggle your hands, and it was a great joke to share around the whole campground with people our children did not even know, the same anonymous people who become friends and family when you all live together under the cedar canopy in the summer).

We hiked and gasped at the view of waterfalls from high up in the mountains. We canoed, the boys’ fingers dipping in the cool water from the sides, a ring floatie dragging behind us as we explored lakes and rivers and salty inlets with purple crabs and sea stars along the rocks.

We ate so many marshmallows. I taught them how to play Chubby Bunnies. They told stories around the fire.

Stargazing became the most important thing in the world.

A chipmunk scared me so much I yelped, and then the chipmunk yelped, and we both skittered away from the picnic table where we met. The kids laughed over my retelling of it as they gorged themselves on chocolate chip pancakes and bacon.

We snuggled together for hammock naps. They stole bags of snacks and ran off into the towering blossoms of Ocean Spray to feast, chocolate smearing their innocent lips after. Every single one of us tripped over the line supporting the rainfly. We braved the pit toilets together. I don’t know about you, but they scare me, too. All those spiders. *shudder*

Every year when the weather begins to warm, the boys ask, “When are we going camping?”

And I smile. “Very soon.”

We are off both this week and next for some raucous camping disasters and fun. I am sure there will be stories to tell after these trips. This is also the first time I’m taking a break from this newsletter for a little while. I’m only missing a week of writing, and I promise I’ll be back. If you see us out there, I’ve got a marshmallow ready to toast with you. Happy summer, everyone.

Your trans friend,

Robin