My earliest memories of camping are snapshots of travel, radio tower lights winking, red in the darkness, whispering to my dozy mind of strange and magical horizons.  These were our itinerant years, and camping was cheap.  Long stretches of Nebraska highway, straight through the cornfields, disappearing into blue sky.  Telephone lines dipping up and down, up and down, for miles on end.  Dead gophers on the road (there’s another one, there’s another one).  Paper maps, frayed at the creases, opening and closing in the front seat as my brother, preternaturally gifted at navigation, guided us on our way. 

Our tent was flattened by a mid-western rain storm in the middle of the night: thunder and lightning, torrents of rain, and us, tumbling out of the sagging tent to cram everything back into our tin-can Honda civic.  Away we went to dry off in some all-night diner.  Terrifying and wonderful. 

Donuts at dawn.

We came down into San Fransisco, saw the Golden Gate bridge, the black and white street signs with mysterious names, celebrated my seventh birthday at Bakers Beach.  I saw the ocean for the very first time. 

I have one recollection of staying in a motel during those long, cross-country trips, in a miniature, roadside cabin, left over from the forties when motor inns were a thing of charm.  It’s possible we lodged more often, but what I remember is the camping, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

We moved to Oregon when I was nine, and while we looked for a house to rent, we camped at a park on the outskirts of town.  It rained almost every day for two weeks until finally we found a small, white house on the west side of town with a grape arbor and an enormous, overgrown, secret garden.  Worn, linoleum tiles, a can-opener built into the kitchen wall — it was one of those thirties-era, Sears mail-order homes, back when even the cheap stuff was built to last. 

Love at first sight.

We camped in our new home too, set up our sleeping pallets in the living room, had our first Thanksgiving dinner on a table made from an old door.  We’d left everything back in Michigan to start over, and time was all we had.  We made the most of it with late night fires in the living room, books, charades, biking, hiking, and of course, camping. 

Our first adventure was by city bus, which traveled all the way up the McKenzie highway, an hour-long ride on a single fare.  I don’t remember how we schlepped our stuff from the bus drop to the camping site, but I do recall Paradise campground, aptly named — a haven of ferns and towering firs beside the icy, sparkling waters of the McKenzie river.  That first year in Oregon, we explored every inch of the wilderness that we could, our mid-western souls thrilling to the sight of such rivers and mountains and ocean and sky. 

Waldo lake during the meteor showers, flat on our backs by the lapping shore while fire fell from the sky.  Carrots baked in tin foil.  Long hikes as I fantasized about paddling out to one of the many islands to make my very own, small camp.  What would I bring with me?  Like a blanket fort, only better!

Camping.  The ultimate, inter-generational analog activity.  There are the obvious traits: the relative absence of technology, the connection to the basic activities of life, unfettered time, spent in relationship with nature and with others.  There are hidden lessons too.  We find, conversely, that effort and delay produce satisfaction.  The meal cooked over open flames tastes better; the tent you wrangled into shape seems cozier; the fireside beckons after a half hour at the campground spigot, washing dishes.  When we camped in my living room that first year in Eugene, each piece of furniture purchased after months of waiting had a value I never could have ascribed to it now, not in our click-bait, plastic-funded, insta-society.  Value, effort and time are connected.  And it turns out that the very limitations  our culture decries drive us deeper into reality, connect us to ourselves and others, and foster a kind of freedom that belies conventional wisdom.  Instant gratification, convenience and acquisition are good condiments, but make for a poor meal.

We have just returned from four nights in the redwoods at the campground we frequented when my kids were young.  They’re teenagers now, fourteen and sixteen, and as we sit around the campfire, we talk and laugh over campground memories — the time Jacob grabbed the hot fire pit with his bare hands and cried all night, the time Jacob tripped over the picnic table and did a face plant, the time Jacob… hmm, I see a pattern forming.  The trees, older than any of us can fathom, rise into the dusky mists.  The embers glow.  And I know we will come back here, next summer, in ten years, maybe with grand kids or maybe not.  Johnny and I may pull up in an Airstream, our concession to the march of time.  And, somehow, within the cupped hands of nature, shaped by experience, by layers of time, all the moments will be tumbled together — the rain storm in Nebraska, stars falling over Waldo Lake, my children, barefoot in a redwood stream — all together, all one.