***Some artistic liberties may have been taken in writing this blog post. If you were on most of our family camping trips and remember little or none of these events, just enjoy it as a work of fiction interspersed with a fact here and there... But this is pretty much how I remember it.
I'm not sure if any of you are aware of this. But I along with other members of my family am somewhat of an expert on misery. We gained a lot of experience in this field in the 70's when we would spend long weekends and vacations camping at Shirley Creek on Lake Sam Rayburn in east Texas.
Those were the days before fancy campers or motor homes for our family. It was back when Coleman provided your shelter and that was only available after hours of sliding pole A into slot B and driving tent stakes into rock hard red clay that hadn't seen rain in weeks to put a tent up. I sincerely hope that I haven't led you to believe that I was in anyway a part of putting the tent up. I had nothing to do with that. I was probably sitting off to the side somewhere holding my Mrs. Beasley doll or down by the lake looking for some water to fall into. I never fell anywhere intentionally. But falling is something that I have perfected over the years using little to no effort at all.
I remember before a camping trip we would always spend days getting ready. We had this green wooden "grub box" that had to be filled before we would go. Dad had built it and it had a lock and everything. At the time I thought it was to keep bears out. Now, I'm thinking it was probably to keep three little kids out. (After all, it was east Texas, there weren't any bears.) He would put the "grub box" in his boat and then for a day or two before we left, we would concentrate on getting all of the food that we would need for our trip into the box. We would finish using the peanut butter for instance and Mom would have me carry it out and put it in the "grub box". It was an important part of the camping trip (the box, not the peanut butter). It was where all of the food that didn't need to stay cold but needed to stay dry was kept. It usually did stay dry until the 2nd or 3rd consecutive day of torrential rain during the trip. By then, the wood of the box would become soaked and water could begin to seep through the box and into the dry food. Let me tell you, if you have never had a S'more made from soggy graham crackers and gooey wet marshmallows you really don't know what you've been missing.
Moisture was only one of the enemies of a "grub box" another was ants. You see when a bag of Oreos is left open in a wooden box sitting on the ground near a campfire where various wieners, Fritos and hamburger buns have been dropped over a period of a day or two, it creates a good path for ants to follow. Ants don't seem to be phased in the least by a Master Lock on a pretty hand built green wooden "grub box". I don't recall any ants tapping me on the shoulder and whispering, "Pssst... little girl.... Ya know where they keep the key for the green box?" Yet, it was full of ants. Let me tell you, when my Mom discovers ants in the food during a camping trip, you don't want to be the only other human in camp. I had to cover Mrs. Beasley's ears....
The grub box was just one of the joys of the family camping trip. The real joy for our family was almost always the weather. I remember our family taking a number of camping trips to Shirley Creek as a kid. I remember very few of them in which the weather was tolerable for even a portion of the trip. I'm not sure how we chose our weekends and maybe I'm just remembering how uncomfortable it seemed to a small girl who wasn't used to dealing with the elements. But I only remember camping trips in which we got there the first day and the weather was really nice. Not too cold, not too hot - there would be a nice breeze, a few wispy clouds in the sky. This was a ploy of mother nature to suck us into believing that we had, in fact, chosen the perfect weekend for our camping trip and would lead us to leave a tent flap up or a window rolled down on the truck. That first night, as we sat round our campfire (there were practically never burn bans back then) you could look up and see a billion stars in the clear sky for about an hour. As the time grew later, more clouds seemed to come in and it grew a little chilly. But hey that was part of the adventure, right? Finally after telling jokes or stories around the campfire for a while, I along with my brothers would be sent off to the tent to crawl into sleeping bags which were situated comfortably on top of fold out cots that we brought along.
I would doze off with the wind blowing a little and various night sounds outside of the tent. It sounded like the sort of relaxation recording that people buy now days. The next thing I knew, I was awakened while it was still VERY dark to my Mom's near hysterical proclamation that THE DAMN THING IS GOING TO BLOW OVER!!!! This was in reference to the tent that we were sleeping in and I can only assume that she was talking to my Dad. The wind was blowing a little harder by this point. Did I mention the rain? Yes, it started just about the time that my Mom was convinced we were all going to be blown away wrapped in green canvas with the word Coleman stamped in the corner. I remember one such occasion when someone (and I don't remember who) said, I'm getting wet. Then a flashlight came on and started pointing around the tent to various points on the top and along the canvas walls until trickles of water could be seen running down the inside of the tent. Apparently the worst thing you could do to the roof of the tent if water was collecting on it was to touch it. For some reason this seemed to allow the water to come through the canvas and form a stream straight onto your sleeping bag. NOBODY was happy when that happened.
I always remember waking on Saturday morning and walking out of the tent remnants into camp with no fire because you can't start a fire with wood that is soaking wet from several inches of rain the previous night. On Saturday morning when you are camping for some reason the temperature is always about 25 degrees, but the sky is crystal clear and you can see icicles hanging off the trees and what's left of the tent as evidence that it really did rain the night before and it wasn't all just a horrible nightmare. The other evidence is obviously the soaking wet "grub box" and the Mom with an expression on her face that can easily be interpreted by anyone capable of the powers of reason to mean WE ARE NEVER CAMPING AGAIN. By mid afternoon, the weather would warm up. Dad and the boys would come back in the boat and we would all go out fishing for a while. The mood would lighten and by supper time, we were digging through the "grub box" looking for any food to eat that was semi-dry and had little evidence of the ant infestation. The lock on the "grub box" had long since been discarded (after all, who would want the soggy ant riddled food anyway?).
By evening the wood had dried out enough for another camp fire. Most of the sleeping bags had dried after a day of blowing on a makeshift clothes line in the breeze. The tent stakes had been driven back into the less rock hard red clay and spirits were up. Sure the temperature would drop into the teens overnight. But our bellies would be full of soggy s'more and we were Meyers.... we spit in the face of cold weather.... right? After all, you can't become an expert on misery without first experiencing it at it's worst.
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