Six years ago, we bought a pop-up off my husband’s friend. After two inauspicious trips (one in which we baked in the hot sun of an Outer Banks campground that was more parking lot than campground and one in which we pulled the blasted tin can all the way to Illinois and used it only once), it sat in the back corner of our yard for awhile enduring the humiliation of mice and tree sap.
That was when the kids were practically babies, and being cramped into a room at the Econo Lodge felt like camping, and camping – an activity I thought I loved and remembered fondly from my own childhood – felt less like an adventure and more like the seventh circle of hell.
Now, our oldest cranks open the pop-up, and the twins snap the smaller pieces into place under Dad’s supervision. The literal back-breaking work once left to my husband is now done – almost entirely – by the children, who by no small miracle, are actually helping rather than hindering.
We’ve also gotten smarter about where we go. Like most people who camp, we prefer wooded lots with plenty of privacy to the open fields of some campgrounds, and we’ll give up amenities like a swimming pool and a laundramat in exchange for quiet nights and scenery with nearby hikes. After all, we’re not here to swim and launder; we’re here to listen to the crackle of the campfire and watch its flaming fingers reach up toward a night sky filled with stars we may not normally notice.
The kids and I played Go Fish with an actual deck of cards yesterday morning at the picnic table. They’re only familiar with the picture version on their kiddie cards, so I got to teach them the different suits. There are no glowing screens at our campsite, and it feels good to drop off the grid at an elevation of 1,632 feet where the text messages accumulate in your box, and you can’t check your Facebook account unless you drive down the mountain for groceries at the local Food Lion.
There’s a purity in the earnest work of making a meal and cleaning up your site that I can no longer find in housework at home. I suppose it’s one part playing house and one part survival. At home, if we don’t feel like putting much effort into dinner, we use the microwave or the oven to heat up some frozen food, or we just order out, but when we’re camping, it would be wasteful if we didn’t use what we packed into our cooler of melting ice, and it would be cheating to dine out.
When we’re camping, it doesn’t matter how my hair looks or that I don’t have makeup on. On this past trip, we pulled into our site, and I realized no one had packed for our youngest son. He spent the next day and a half in the only clothes he had until I got out to a local store that sold some basics. Honey badger don’t care what you wear when you’re camping.
Maybe acceptance of self is what we gain when we give up the rest of the world. Every normal day we’re concerned with social propriety: returning phone calls and texts, responding yes or no to invitations; even our daily grooming is done not so much because we’re dirty and we need a good wash, but so that we look good and smell shower-fresh to others.
When you’re in that tiny pop-up, you really peel back all the layers of modern living. You go to bed all at once like the Waltons, and you wake up in the same space to the singing of birds and that whispering sound the breeze makes blowing through the trees. If you’re lucky, like we were a few nights ago, you even get to hear the pings and plops of raindrops on the aluminum roof and the canvas siding that keep you dry.
Those sounds of nature keep me grounded in the moment without distraction. Camping deconstructs the walls we live behind the rest of the year. I wish we could learn to replicate even the smallest part of this wall-less joy when we’re in the thick of our creature comforts at home.
Like many moms, Kathy drives a mini-van full of booster seats and Disney/Pixar DVD’s. When she’s not chauffeuring her kids, ages 11 and under, to activities, she teaches for Prince William County Public Schools, writes fiction, poetry and this column about the challenges and rewards of being a mom to young children.
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