High Camp

Debra, my home health care nurse, was late when she came to take my temperature and blood pressure. She was depressed about two patients so ill she had to send them the hospital that day. She perked up when I greeted her with, “I’m doing okay.”

As usual, I talked except when she stuck the thermometer in my mouth. Finally, to give her a chance, I asked, “What have you and your husband been doing?”

Her face lighted up as she said, “We went camping on the Brazos over the Easter Weekend.” Canoeing up the river to reach their first campground, she took the front position in the canoe. Fighting water whipped up by the wind, she was drenched. Her husband saw several inches of water in the bottom of the canoe and thought it had sprung a leak. “We spent four days and canoed 25 miles on the river. We did primitive camping and had a wonderful time!”

Only a true camper would have respond that way after being soaked with cold water, patiently blowing on damp wood to start a fire, and sleeping in a tent on hard ground. It is magical in the woods with no sounds but the wind rustling through the leaves, the crackle of burning logs, and the voices of children roasting hot dogs and melting “smores.” Camping is life stripped to the basics. All you need is a warm sleeping bag and a fire to cook your meals. Even if it rains, you slosh around in the mud and look for wildflowers.

I remembered the first time my family went camping. We were living in Michigan. My husband promised our son Karl we would take him to see the U.S. Constitution, the sailing ship moored in Boston Harbor. Two days before we were to leave, he came home after work, and, as I was dishing up supper, told me we did not have enough money to take a vacation. The next day I went to Sears and bought a tent. The kids and I put it up in the back yard. When The Cad came home that evening, I took him to the back door, pointed to the tent, and said, “We’re leaving in the morning.”

In Massachusetts we set up the tent in a state park with a pond, not Walden but near the famous one. My children – we only had two little ones then – enjoyed swimming in the pond as much as our sightseeing excursions in Boston and Plymouth. Back home in Michigan, a neighbor asked five-year-old Martha, “How did you like camping?” My little girl replied, “I liked it except for the underground plumbing.”

My husband did not like anything about sleeping in a tent or smelly outhouses. In the following years, the children and I went camping without him. Martha was a teenager when we moved to Illinois. The next summer she returned to Pennsylvania to go backpacking with the Girl Scouts on the Appalachian Trail. Two years later she went as an exchange student to Norway. Her Norwegian family told her, “We want to go to our summer place in the mountains, but it has an outhouse. We know Americans like indoor plumbing.”

Martha said, “They did not know that I had been backpacking where, when I felt the need, I looked for a convenient tree to squat behind.”

About that time Wally and I started having difficulties. I told my boss, “I have to get away.” I came home from work, put the tent on top of the car, and taking David (who had not been born when we camped by the pond near Boston), I fled to Pennsylvania, where we had been happy. We arrived at the campground after dark. It was raining. David, 13, helped me put up the tent. We climbed inside, unrolled our sleeping bags, and slept soundly. I woke up the next morning and realized I really did not need a husband.