Proper Camping

When I was eleven, my mom’s whole side of the family went on a camping trip together. Granted, it’s not that big of a family – just the six of us, the five of her brother’s family, my grandparents, and my great-grandma – but we had a grand time. The first day we were there my mom jumped up from the picnic table yelling about bears. My sister, who was around nine at the time, was in the outhouse and thought a bear was trying to get to her.

The bears were not after her, but were down the road a ways, digging through the trash cans. We all walked down to see them – a mother bear and her two babies. That night I kept imagining bear claws ripping through our tent. The next night I slept outside with my cousin, Travis, and saw a bear quite close to me and a whole bunch of shooting stars.

When I was five my family tried to go camping on the beach, but we fled to a hotel when we heard there were ticks in the area. All I remember from that trip is my mother panicking about a mole on my stomach and asking if it had been there before. I couldn’t remember, but years later, it still hasn’t given me Lyme Disease.

We camped out on New Year’s Eve of the year 1999/2000. We were living in Lebanon, and we watched the fireworks over Beirut before turning in, blissfully unconcerned about Y2K problems.  

It was another time, but at that same campsite, that I saw a UFO while spending the night about nine feet off the ground in a hammock. (I swear I saw three lights in a row close together and a disc-shape curving off behind them. And it never moved for hours.)

Josh and I went camping in Arkansas one spring break. It rained EVERY night. Raindrops on canvas can start to wear away at your sanity after a while. There was water in our tent the whole time and it was always cold and soggy. But we still had a marvelous time, building fires, cooking on the camp stove, and mining for diamonds at the nearby Crater of Diamonds State Park.

The last time Josh and I went camping we stayed at a Forest Service cabin near Butte, Montana. There were beds… with mattresses. It was amazing. We had a wonderful time, mostly solving crossword puzzles, reading the cabin guest journal, and driving around finding open range cows and old abandoned miner cabins and horse corrals.

This past summer I went camping with a bunch of young people. We slept in hooches, and cooked over fires, and swam in the river. We saw spiders and snakes, and hundreds of fireflies that twinkled in the forest at night. A whole family of toads decided to live in our woodpile. We painted our faces with mud.

My parents went camping last weekend. My mom said they had a good time except for the noise from the generator that ran all night in the next camp sight. Who takes a generator camping??? You’re supposed to sit around the fire and get sticky fingers from marshmallows, and freeze in your sleeping bag all night, and wake up smelling like an odd mixture of damp and wood smoke. Otherwise, you’re just not camping properly.