Camping Like a Scout

Camping today is so civil. We drive our RV filled with books and blankets, a canned bathroom complete with its own permanent toothbrush, and hot running water at the push of a button. Frozen and refrigerated food awaits our plundering.

We find our reserved slot and pull  onto a cement pad. It might take a little shifting to be perfectly level. Open the door and steps automatically extend. 

I rearrange items on my little play-kitchen countertop while James pulls out the awning and sets up chairs and a table-et. Cozy? Here–let me fluff your pillow.

But I didn’t always camp like this. In the 50’s and 60s it took so much preparation to camp that you just had to love it – or clearly need a get-away, not able to afford any other type of vacation. I always thought it was because we loved it. 

Then when I was the one who had to pull the whole house together for a week of camping I learned: No wonder people just stay home to mow the lawn and plant flowers when they had a few days off work.

My family camped a lot. We camped with other families or without. My brother and I would hang out the car windows the closer we drew to the lake, our camp destination. We never fell out or got scraped off by an overhanging tree branch, even as half our bodies hung in mid-air. 

When the car doors opened, so did the sock of sulphur–a powder-filled sock to kill the chiggers that would eat us alive. A good dusting over our legs, before the day was out it would be washed off in the lake seven times. By the next day our legs and arms would be bloodied from night-time scratching.

My mother always strung up a clothesline first, then arranged a picnic table with rocks to weigh down the tablecloth. My brother and I had to walk a wide circle to stomp down grass higher than my head, while Dad gathered wood for a fire. Any time of the year.

There were always towels hanging, always smelling of smoke. Our bathing suits never quite dried because we were constantly jumping in and out and back into them, an escape from the hot Texas sun. It was squeaky, pulling that wet bathing suit on, but we only had one.

The cooking took place over the fire. We had a kerosene stove, but my mom  rationed its use to preserve the integrity of camping, whatever that was supposed to mean. She saved coffee cans all year long for this occasion. Back then coffee came in squatty tin cans sporting tight tin lids. 

Dad did a lot of the cooking when we camped. He never opened as much as a drawer at home, but he really surprised us over a fire. Especially with the  TV dinner he invented practically before the TV!

He’d place a large hamburger patty into each tin, stack onion and potatoes on top of that, salt and pepper it and put the lid back on. Then he’d bury them in the coals to bake. Wow, it smelled wonderful and we waited, all stupidly hungry. We each had our own.  

We fished, we swam, we shot leaves off trees with our BB guns, declaring that the leaf we hit was just exactly the one we had intended to shoot. We slept on Army cots, rolled in a sheet.

Times got better, I guess, because my family started toting a boat. Instead of a packed trailer, we had a packed boat. And, now we owned some ski equipment as well. Thinking back, it might’ve been more a fishing boat than recreational, not powerful enough for a skier. Try as we might to stand on those skiis, pulling with might we didn’t own, it dragged us through the water rather than pulling us up. By the end of the turn we’d be half drowned in lake water and still hanging on, too dumb to just let go, or unwilling to relinquish to the one next waiting. We slept well at night.

When dad took off to fish, mother’d yell, “Don’t come back without supper!” We knew he’d had luck when the woods smelled of fish frying. 

Those were wonderfully awful, and awfully wonderful days. I wish them for you.