My Early Years Camping

I am 48 years old now, with a husband and five children. Three of the children are still at home. We have spent many of our weekends and all of our vacations camping with our children. We travel in comfort in our 32 foot 5th wheel trailer.

My camping adventures started many years earlier, as a very young child. My memories of the early years are fragmented, although I have seen the photographs that my parents took on our trips across the great Midwest, from our home in Iowa, out to the wilds of Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and Utah.

In the early years, my parents loaded my older brother and sister, and me, into the backseat of their Rambler station wagon. For three days, the three of us would fight as we drive across Iowa, Nebraska, through Colorado, and into Utah, in a station wagon with no air-conditioning. Having a seat next to one of the 2 doors in the backseat was considered premium real estate, worth fighting for. And fight, we did. For days on end, we fought, until my father would turn around and look at us over the seat, and shout "Do you want me to stop this car and come back there and give you all something to cry about?" I am much wiser, now that I have passed my fortieth birthday, but I still wonder what answer he was actually looking for. What would have happened if one of had actually responded with a courageous "Yes" to his question.

In these early trips out west, my parents fed us pork and beans, right out of the can, everyday for lunch, and often for dinner. "This is Rocky Mountain Steak," they would tell us. Even then I was certain that those beans had nothing to do with steak. When we complained about the beans, we were given a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, usually on old smashed bread. It was survival.

We had many adventures, and I do have great memories from the earliest of years, of roaming though Arches National Park when it was just a National Monument, climbing under the great arches and filling my little white sneakers with red sand. The arches were phenomenal, and made a great and lasting impression on me. On these early trips, I was allowed to run free and wild, drinking in the beauty and the landscape that was so different from my native Iowa.

When I was 7 years old, my father purchased his first of many travel trailers over the ensuing years. A travel trailer was deemed necessary for our family to continue camping, as there were now 5 children in the family. I had become a middle child, with 2 new younger siblings, ages 4 months and 14 months. We packed our trailer for an extended vacation and adventure of 5 weeks, leaving Iowa far behind.

The design of this new trailer had a significant design flaw, one which we would not discover until we reached the higher elevations of Wyoming and Montana. The heater for this small travel trailer discharged directly into the top bunk, located over the small dinette that converted into a bed at night. My older sister slept in the small dinette bed with the 2 babies. My brother and I, a 7 and 8 year old, slept in the bunk overhead. My parents, concerned for the health and warmth of their 2 smallest children, cranked the heater up, hoping to heat the area in which the babies slept. It was to no avail. The heat that was generated by the heater blew directly into the bunk, and there it stayed.

Hot air filled the bunk, where my brother and I were required to sleep, for many nights to come. My siblings, below in the small dinette, were cold. That caused my parents to raise the temperature on the furnace even higher. I was suffering in the bunk with my brother. We were sleeping head to foot in the bunk, so as not to fight head to head with each other, and his hot feet were in my face. I spent entire nights, with my small bunk window wide open and my face smashed up against the screen trying to catch a whiff of cool breath of air. The nights were oppressive, and I slept very little.

During the days, on this fateful maiden voyage with the new trailer, my father drove endlessly, wanting to view and remember all of the incredible scenery of the great western U.S. Having been up all night in my hot bunk with my brother, I fell almost instantly asleep as my father began his scenic tours. I slept, and my father kept trying to wake me up to see the scenary. In Yellowstone National Park, we ran into snow. My parents turned the heater up even higher, trying to keep my young siblings warm. I slept even less.

From Yellowstone, we traveled on to Glacier National Park. It was colder in Glacier, and the heater was higher. It was there that my parents decided that we all needed showers, and they sent us out of the trailer to use the outdoor showers, complete with cold running water, to clean our cold bodies. To this day, I still remember the cold of that shower, as I ran to and from the trailer through the light snow that had fallen the evening before.

My father loaded us into the ford station wagon and set off to drive the "Going to the Sun Highway" through Glacier. I slept. He tried to wake me up. I slept. He complained that he had driven us all the way out to Glacier and he didn't want us sleeping through it, but I slept.

We continued these annual trips out west, visiting the western mountain and desert states with the family. As children, we found many unique ways to keep ourselves entertained. My parents liked to sleep in beyond 6:00 am on these trips. My brother would wake up early, and drag me with him on many death defying excursions. One adventure, in particular, led to the two of us trying to hop our away across a raging mountain torrent, in the early hours of the morning. We became stranded on boulders in the middle of the stream, unable to successfully jump forward or backward. We remained stranded until our parents rounded up a rescue for us, hours later, worried about the fact that we had not showed up for breakfast.

One fine evening, on one of our many trips out west, my parents felt it necessary to have some time alone. They left together on a walk one evening, with the parting words that we were to stay away from the creek. My brother rarely followed direction, and this was to be no exception. As soon as my parents left the campground area, my brother immediately ran to the bridge over the creek and swung upside down from the rails. He fell in. He then ran back to the trailer and shed his wet clothes. He stuffed them in the back area of the bunk, where I slept, and threatened me with great bodily harm if I were to tell my parents what had happened. I slept on the wet mattress for 3 nights until my parents, wondering about the musty wet smell in the bunk bed, discovered the wet clothes stuffed in the corner of the bunk bed.

There is also the story of the gum in the campfire. My parents had left us to sit around the campfire on another evening when they were going to go for a short walk, with just the two of them. The five of us children sat around the campfire, bored, until my brother produced a package of gum and we began to throw gum on the fire and watch it burn up. We passed our time away for at least an hour, throwing the gum on various parts of the fire, first on glowing logs and then directly into the fire, all the while watching the gum burn. We were so absorbed in our activity that we never heard when they returned an hour later.

The evening my parents left us by the fire to again entertain ourselves while they walked, we produced popcorn. We excitedly loaded the popcorn into a pan, with some oil, and set it directly on the fire. We were excited as we anticipated the popcorn that we would be soon eating. The popcorn never popped, but it did burn quite well in the overheated pan, and soon the entire campground was filled with the horrible smell of burning popcorn. My parents knew it was their children that had produced the burned popcorn stench, long before they even arrived back at the campsite.

I continued to join my family on great camping adventures until I graduated from college and moved from Iowa. We traveled the Western U.S, and the Mid-West. Over the ensuing years, I have often brought my own family and joined my parents camping, and I am grateful for the many adventures that we have shared throughout my life.