Did You Ever Go Camping When You Were Little?

My parents were both in The War. My dad was a Marine who fought his way across the Pacific Theater, and my mom was a WAC, stationed in London and then in Germany after the war ended. They are in their nineties now, and, like most vets, don’t especially like to talk about those times.

One direct consequence of those travels, though, is that once they came home all journeying was out of their systems. While my friends went to historic places for their summer vacations, and wrote about them in the obligatory essay every child is assigned each September, the titles of my pieces were always the same: This Summer We Went Camping.

Our camping trips lasted, at most, three days. We always went to the same campground – the Kelly Dahl north of Phoenix– hoped our regular spot wasn’t taken, pitched our tent, set up the Coleman stove, primed the Coleman lantern, and then we were really camping.  In a strange reversal of roles, my mom read while my dad did the cooking – a head-scratcher for those raised in the rigid households of the 1950s.

Because camping was our only vacation during my adolescence, my adrenaline started pumping the closer it got. Will we see a tarantula this year? Will the fort we built last year still be there? Will our dog, Pete, stay away from skunks? I could hardly wait.

One summer my mom took my sister and me into the woods and we carefully picked one of each kind of wildflower we could find. We pressed them between squares of waxed paper, brought them home, and placed them between the pages of Momo’s unabridged dictionary, where they are still today. As I was putting flowers in the book, I asked Momo, “Did you ever go camping when you were little?” Her response, even today, makes me laugh.

“ARE YOU KIDDING?” she trumpeted. “All I ever did was camp!” Then I remembered her stories of riding a cantankerous pony named Choctaw across Texas on a cattle drive when she was nine years old; of shooting rattlesnakes to keep them off her porch; of sleeping in a dugout in Indian Territory.

Her parting shot, as I left her room that day, was classic. And I got the point.

“Why would anyone ever want to go camping? I worked hard so I wouldn’t have to do it anymore.”

Last week Ron and Jon took our oldest three granddaughters camping. Ron says nothing has changed since we took our kids all those summers a lifetime ago. “The girls play in the dirt. Hannah’s afraid of getting carsick. They have to go to the bathroom every ten minutes.”

And, oh yeah – “It’s a blast.”

Momo would disagree.