Camping

So we are sitting out on the patio last week, a bunch of us waiting while JB cooks our dinner on the Big Green Egg, and the topic of camping comes up. It seems that most of us have fond memories of camping with our parents when we were small and our families once we were adults. I've seen pictures of people sitting around campfires and know people who have it down to a science and can't wait for the opportunity to pack everybody into the SUV and head to the nearest state park or farther afield. Most of us. Not all of us.

Not so much with me. I don't recall ever hearing my sister say anything about taking her kids camping either. This is not the terrible, awful story of the time my ex and I (reluctantly on my part) took our sons on a camp-out that involved pack horses. Maybe another day.

This is true. I could not have made it up because my imagination is much too limited.

I was probably about eleven when my parents, who should never have married each other in the first place and who subjected us to the hell of it for thirty years, decided that we should go on the Great American Camping Trip. I will treat you to day one. You can pretty much imagine that the other twenty-five or six days were more of the same.


My parents did not grow up camping out. In fact, neither of them had ever pitched a tent in their lives. But they got the bee in their bonnet, or maybe it was just my dad and my mom went along with it. He got some plans from Good Housekeeping or someplace for this plywood box to go in the back of the station wagon. It would have compartments for everything we would need on our camping trip. It soon gained the name 'the knuckle buster.' I will also never be able to smell the distinct fragrance of Joy detergent without being trans-ported back to those days.

So they put the knucklebuster, the Joy detergent, the sleeping bags and tent and cast iron skillet and God only knows what else in the back of the sta-wag and off we went. Without air-conditioning, because it didn't exist. Three kids in the back seat. And, incidentally, no iPad or little video player or even WalkMan. Three kids who were bored before we got out of the driveway. And who would sit in that back seat from Ohio to Colorado, up through the Dakotas, over the Great Lakes into Canada to New York state and back home. Not a day too soon.

Here is the first thing my parents didn't know: that lots of people go camping and that the ones who know how make reservations for campsites at the campgrounds. I.e., that if you drive from Cleveland, Ohio for, let's just say ten or eleven hours, you can't just drive up to the next Campground of America in your AAA trip-tych and pitch your tent. Because it's full. So you keep driving, and driving.

And it's getting dark, and the sky is kind of cloudy, and the wind is blowing, and by now you are in Joliet, Illinois, and -- you are in luck! -- there is one campsite left at the campground. You can't take time to feed the kids because you've got to pitch the tent. Besides there is something freeze-dried that will do just fine.

The thing about the campsite, however, is that it is up against the fence of Joliet State Prison. The really high fence with the concertina wire on top. And all you can see are the guard towers with the searchlights that are scanning the grounds. Did I mention that it is getting dark? And that the parents have never pitched a tent in their lives? And that the kids are hungry? And that it is beginning to rain...and thunder...and that the wind has whipped up? And that the tent, which they couldn't have pitched in dead calm, is flying out of their hands, and that everybody is wet, and crying.
 

And so it went. Day after day of my brother acting up so often that he got left on the side of the road on at least eleven of the states we traversed. And picked up only to be put out again. Sometimes more than once in a day. That my most vivid memory is seeing a wax replica of the severed head of an outlaw named Joaquin Murietta (sp?). That my father made me eat the too-small fish I caught and kept reminding me that it was just a baby. And I cried so hard I threw it up and felt even guiltier but also furious because my parents thought it was too funny for words as they downed their martinis. Oh, yes, there was the gin.

So, in case you wanted to know, that's one reason I don't go camping.