Last night, way later than either child’s bedtime, we returned home from a camping trip with friends. It was fun, exhausting, thrilling, and exasperating.
Pretty much like parenting, right?
The amazing thing is, my kids are ten and six, and this was the first time I’ve gone camping with them. I have lots of excuses. Bad back (x-ray techs and MRI operators probably use my films as a gag gift for their friends), difficult kids (overcome for at least part of the time by giving in to DVDs in the car), a love of clean beds and well-cooked food.
But my kids love camping, and I wanted to go to places you can’t really get to know without camping in them. I love getting to know a place in depth, rather than the surface-scratching you do from car windows and vista points. I’m the sort of person who hates traveling but loves having traveled. I love getting home and thinking about the place, the experiences I had, and how it affected me.
So away we went. We had pretty much no gear but what my husband had left from his backpacking days, so I borrowed bits of this and that from family and friends. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to put up a tent. I spent untold hours trying to figure out the dinner I would cook (we each took one evening of our three evenings at camp), deciding on something then changing again and again.
There was a lot I wasn’t going to get my head around until I got there. I’m a spectacularly bad packer, having ended up in the high desert without a light long-sleeved shirt, in hotels with pools without my bathing suit, and in San Diego and Florida without a sweater (air conditioning and heavy fog not anticipated). This time I swore I would get it right, and going in the car does give you the advantage of being able to (theoretically) pack everything but the kitchen sink. They said it would be hot, so I packed shorts for the kids (but forgot them for me). They said it would be freezing at night, so I packed coats for us all (they stayed in the car the whole time). We were warned of flash thunderstorms, so my friends assured me that the emergency ponchos we hauled around in our backpacks for three days kept them at bay.
We ended up having a fabulous time. The kids got unbelievably dirty, and I let them be dirty, though at one point I did find a baby wipe and put each one in a headlock so I wouldn’t have to look at their schmutzy faces. We enjoyed the unfamiliar flora and fauna, especially the cute little mountain chipmunks that would stand up and look at us with great interest. We swam and hiked and climbed. My son cut his ankle. My daughter got eaten alive by mosquitoes (I tell her she is the world’s sweetest 6-year-old, and apparently mosquitoes agree!).
My friend laughed and said that she had discovered my secret, that I’m a clean freak. But when I offered her the bucket stocked with shampoo and conditioner and pointed her toward the faucet I’d found that was a comfortable height off the ground for bending one’s head under it and washing, I noticed she didn’t hesitate! My other friend said she’d just take the bucket to rinse herself off, but didn’t protest when I gave her the shampoo, too.
The things I liked about our trip was the intimacy of being with my kids in a tent. The newness of a lifestyle that we were borrowing for a few days. The longer periods where the adults could actually talk without a kid interrupting, needing something. Kids need less when there’s a lake, interesting bugs, friends, kayaks, dirt between their toes, funny chipmunks, tents to hide in, logs to climb on.
The things I didn’t like were pretty much the stuff of life: never having exactly what I needed when I needed it, wishing I’d bought a different water jug, the many little disasters that are strung throughout a child’s day that we needed to patch over and make right. And yes, there was the dirt, but today we spent much of the day disposing of that, getting our stuff separated from our friend’s, cleaning out the car, rinsing off dusty shoes. Someone once said to me that every time she goes on a vacation with her family, she needs another vacation after it to get over the family vacation. One of my friends is on summer holiday, so she got back to a laid-back life. But the other friend and I were back to work today, shuffling our kids’ needs between what we had to do and what we wanted to do and what we were trying to avoid doing.
It’s a funny thing to do: you throw aside everything that is your life, all the stuff you think you need every day, pack together the necessities (along with the warm jackets you’ll not need at all), and head away to someplace you know little about. You pitch your tent and find yourself with new neighbors, new dirt, an air mattress that leaks, disappearing forks, a smoky fire, and someone tramping by your tent, back and forth, all night long.
I can’t help but wonder what the chipmunks think. I guess they think we’re jealous, and we’re just trying to get a little piece of what they have every day.
