Camping and Memory

Ever try and put yourself back in a particular place and at a particular time? Some events you just can’t forget, they for good or ill are hung in your mind forever.  Other occasions ‘not so much’ as the phrase is used today.  

Today I tried to remember a specific camping trip but I couldn’t.  There were so many of outings to “the wild” that they all seem to blend together.  In thinking about life on the grand scale, having that many experiences in the woods with good friends (and these trips were always communal), was not really a bad thing.

Most of the camping trips I recall were trips Up North. Up North for people who don’t live in Michigan is any place at least 5 miles north of your home and preferably on water be it pond, creek, lake or one of the inland seas that touch northern Michigan (Huron, Superior and Michigan). For me Up North meant you had to at least pass Grayling before you put your stakes into the dirt. Up North meant an old CCC camp site or a state forest campground.  Up North meant the smell of pine and the sound of moving water.

I did not camp at all as a kid. As a result going camping was initially kind of foreign. Camping trips for me began immediately after I moved back to Lansing after law school in Detroit.  On any given weekend in summer we could jump in a car and head Up North.  It was a ritual that truly belongs to Michigan. New Jersey has its day trip to the shore.  But Michigan is so big a trip to get out of the house requires a weekend to do it right.

Our camping tools evolved. Initially we slept inside a pup tent just big enough for two sleeping bags. It was only a couple feet tall and you couldn’t sit up inside. The tent was a leftover of our 1978 trip in a car named Thunder Road. We had gone to Oregon in search of America.  We still have that tan non breathing nylon fire trap stashed up in the rafters of the garage. Bought it at Woolco, remember Woolco? 

We also had cheap assed cotton batting sleeping bags.  After one too many chilly evening those were replaced with LL Bean sleeping bags. Just because something like a road trip is spur of the moment decision does not mean it has to be uncomfortable, not when you have the right equipment and a good attitude.

From the pup tent we migrated to a Eureka dome tent for our accommodation.  The dome claimed to comfortably sleep five.  Three was more honest.  The claim of five was only true if your idea of comfort is that everyone has someone else’s body parts stuffed up near your face.  I would draw a diagram but this is being created on Word and I don’t know how to do that.  Instead I will describe the situation.  

Imagine a circle.  Place four bodies in it with the shortest campers being on the outsides and the tallest being on the inside.  Running atop these four bodies curved somewhat to conform to the top edge of the circle is body five.  Routinely body five would be at everyone’s heads.  If this camper were at the foot of everyone they would get kicked repeatedly during the night.

Configured like this for sleeping the shorter people on the outside got zephyrs of halitosis or foot funk odors respectively.  On camping trips personal hygiene standards are kind of lax and generated these kind of smells.  People forget tooth brushes. Meh. Feet get wet because invariably it rains on a camping trips.  Let me repeat that, it invariably rains on a camping trip in Michigan. One of the two middle sleepers gets a strong intermittent breeze of methane.  Camping trip cuisine such as BEER, and BEANS kind of elevates the chances for GI distress and gas production. Only one or maybe two campers (depending on how drunk the smelly person sleeping on that curved right angle from everyone else is) get a decent night’s sleep.

Finally we bought a big ass tent with poles that created a huge rectangle.  I don’t think we have used it more than a handful of times.  But the mega-tent will fit four cots.  This refugee from a revival will also allow room for distance between all campers.  This concept of personal space is a much diminished one when you are out on the weekend but on a camping trip you will take what you can get. 

There are common elements to all the camping trips that cascade before my mind’s eye.  Beer. Rain. Mud. Campfires. Boom boxes (first cassette and then CD). Also there was usually a purpose tied to the trip most often a canoe excursion down one of the many rivers of Michigan. Every so often we would sleep out at the end of a little spit of land and we would make our goal a winery tour on the Leelanau Peninsula. Those always ended in a stupor above usual proportions so they were limited events. Wine and cheese and a long and winding road back to the tents don’t mix well.

Before any trip we had planned more than an hour in advance we did some prep work. On Thursday night the car got packed. A large Coleman cooler, a small Coleman stove, Coleman lantern and some Coleman fuel would get smushed into the trunk along with sleeping bags, pillow, shorts, t-shirts, jeans and leather jackets.  

If there was time we made a quick trip to Meijer and bought some food.  Initially it was hotdogs and bags of chips we would grab as foodstuffs. Later it became chicken breasts, greens for a salad and dried cherries to go with each.  On Friday as soon as work was done we would jump into the snaking line of cars headed up north on the only freeway from here to there, U.S.-127.  We would stop about 20 miles up the road and grab a burger, fries and a pop and we would boogie on heading north.

Depending on where you were going you passed a number of landmarks.  My favorite was Woodhenge.  It was just a stone’s throw from the start of the trip. This was a barn that somebody started (I have been told) and then never finished.  A number of warped and twisted but rather tall polls stands to the right of the highway.  There was the marker for the 45^th parallel indicating you were halfway between the equator and the North Pole.  There was the Big Buck brewery which was one of the first microbreweries to make a splash in Michigan. If you headed off to Lake Michigan you could pass the gas station where the guy had the bear chained out back as a tourist attraction.

In early summer it doesn’t get dark Up North until about 10 or a little later.  If you got off right when work was over you were setting up your tent in fading light.  If you got there a little late someone else was already making the fire.  Hopefully this time they wouldn’t burn their eyebrows off when the white gas that had soaked on the firewood caused a fireball. You swept the ground where you were going to pitch the tent with your feet to make sure the stones and sticks wouldn’t be poking you all night.  The tent went up easily when the magically connected tent poles snapped together and were slid through the little flaps of nylon on the outside of the tent. You unrolled your Thermarest mats and let them inflate.  You slung your sleeping bag in and then you grabbed a beer and pulled up a stool and sat around the fire.

Ah the conversations that would build around the fire.  As the boom box was playing Joe Cocker, Tom Waits or something a little more esoteric like the English Beat the talk on the first night was of the chance of rain, which canoe livery to use and where might there be a party store that had some ice, meat and some good beers. (For non-Michiganders a party store is a beer and wine selling convenience store carrying also some basic food stuff, i.e., Pringles, hot dogs buns and pop. Good as we applied the term to beer back then was a relative term, Labatt 50 was an early favorite and then we moved to Harp and Guinness.  Eventually everyone had their own microbrew of preference.  Sometimes if we had ventured far enough we would go to the Beer Store in Ontario and grab some of their exotic brands.  Labatt’s Velvet Cream Porter stands out as a real preference.

Talking about the canoe trips is for another post.  The rivers like the Pine, the Au sable and the Sturgeon all bring back tales too long to tell now.  The bar on the Sturgeon and ca-nuding on the Au sable are particularly memorable.  But it is the camping experience that is what I was looking for, a particular one but I will have to settle or the blend.

Labor on these outings tended to divide effortlessly.  Some went and got the firewood or brewed coffee.  Some tended the campfire and still others cooked. Everybody helped with cleanup pumping water into pots to make hot water on the Coleman stove so as to wash the cooking and eating utensils.  

Some trips went long, once we circled Lake Huron.  Truly I once spent a Sudbury Saturday night. Another year we went across the top of Lake Superior to Thunder Bay and the Valhalla Inn on another jaunt.  It was there I learned you just don’t drink a beer in a hot tube when you are tired. Some trips went back to the same campgrounds again and again. It was also there where we visited the birth place of the real Winnie the Pooh.

Some trips endings were pushed to the last hour of sun on Sunday ‘cause you were just having so much damn fun.  Some forays were scuttled by rain on Saturday. There is a very clear olfactory memory for almost every Michigan tent camper. It is the one of pulling a damp hoodie out of a black garbage bag that served as your dirty clothes hamper for the weekend.  The odor is stale going on mildew.  There are equal parts soggy wood smoke and Harp beer scents rising from the hoodie.  Yup rain was the enemy.

Some trips were cosmic.  Ain’t nothing quite like watching the northern lights kick up as you stand on a lake shore looking out into blackness now growing into surreal light. The dancing green/green blue curtains would sweep across and kept you staring upwards for hours.  

A camping trip made you put down the phone.  A camping trip made you step away from the computer.  A camping trip put you into contact with real honest to God people.  Sitting down on those little aluminum stools around the fire on the second night of the weekend you talked about jobs, life, love, hopes and aspirations.  Connections were restored in the dancing firelight and the clinking of beer bottles.

Hell I was trying to remember one camping trip.  In the end I am remembering a lifetime filled with fun and joy.