When I was growing up in Brighton, Illinois, I watched as my father fell in love with the idea of camping. As a sportsman, his love of the outdoors was an exceeding one. Fishing, hunting, he loved it all; in fact, he might have taken to the woods with nothing more than a canteen of water and a blade had there been a permit for it. My great-uncle David shared his passion for anything outdoors, and it was from him that my father developed a fascination with extended stays in the wild.
David and my great-aunt Juanita owned a camper, and every so often they would take it up to a campsite at Greenfield Lake, just a few short miles outside of Rockbridge and Where The Hell Are We? Though I didn't have a lot of experience with these kinds of establishments, the first time I went it seemed slightly downgraded. I saw it as something more akin to a Motel 6 than a Hyatt, and it had a lot to do with the clientele present. My aunt and uncle got a free pass for the fact of our relation, but a good portion of the others looked as though they'd been pulled straight out of the movie "Deliverance." Pickup trucks abounded, most of them with attached trailers, empty of the boats now bobbing down along the lakeshore. Generic country music seeped from unattended radios like broken barrels left abandoned as dogs with names like Rascal and Cooter barked halfheartedly at passers-by.
The scene around everything had a kind of unspoiled beauty to it, except, of course, for the rows of eggshell white and yellowish campers lined up in a rough grid. Everything else, though, would have made for a nice, if somewhat generic, postcard. A breeze ran through the lush trees. The water glistened, golden with the afternoon sun. Empty cans of Bud Light lay half-crumpled and just a lazy toss from each fraying mesh folding chair.
After we arrived, my father split off to talk with my uncle and cousins. Meanwhile, my mother, my brother, and I planted ourselves at the wooden picnic table with my aunt and grandmother, who were sitting there with my cousin Tammy and her daughter Stacey. They all started talking as I looked around, surveying the place, already trying to figure out how long I would last if I made a run through the cornfields at my back and tried to get back home. After a while, what surprised me most was the overall quiet of things. Every so often one might hear a car crunching gravel as it made its way down the makeshift road or the whine of a little three-person fishing boat cutting its way across the water. There were no car horns, no trains or airplanes, and no television.
The silence was intriguing at first, but then as it grew longer and longer I realized that there was nothing to distract me. No video games. No cartoons. "How," I wanted to ask, "are you supposed to make the time go by?" It never occurred to me that this was the whole point of camping: an escape from the daily grind of work and life. What made no sense, when I thought about it, was what a person got in return. Sure, paper plates could be used instead of dishes, but there were numerous times when our family did that at home. And how was catching and gutting a fish easier than ordering a Fillet-O-Fish at a drive through window?
The answer came to me when Aunt Juanita invited us to see the inside of their camper. She opened the dinky screen door and we climbed up the two metal steps after her. Inside lay all the wondrous inventions and technological marvels that made modern life worth living, all conveniently packaged inside what amounted to an oversized U-Haul. My eyes grew wide as they gazed upon the two-person couch, the small-basin kitchen sink, the fold-away dining table, and (Lord, God, hallowed be thy name!) the television. To the left of the TV was a smaller room occupied by a short, squat bed just big enough so that three fifteen-year-olds could lie down side-by-side and just barely have their feet on the bed. But that paled in comparison to the television.
I sat down on the couch, relishing the soft, cool purr of the air conditioner and the warm glow of the TV. It didn't even matter that I couldn't explain the first thing about home runs or switch hitters, my eyes never left that soccer game.
Eventually my dad and Uncle David came inside, and when my father saw me sprawled out on the couch with my mouth agape, he must have mistaken my relief for enjoyment. That coupled with my mom's very interested examination of the midget-sized refrigerator sealed the deal, and by the same time next year we had our own camper.
I was eleven when my parents, brother, and I took a trip to a local RV and camper dealership. The parking lot reminded me of the lake, except where there had been grass now we had smooth asphalt to walk on; and instead of trees offering shade, I looked up to see a billboard promising guaranteed financing for a St. Louis used auto outfit. While the lot was nothing to scoff at, it was eclipsed by the main building, which basically doubled as a single massive showroom. Inside were open displays of all the latest models of campers and RVs. The concrete floor was covered in patches of fake grass to help sell the idea that, to be living in this dream, all one had to do was sign a few papers.
After making the rounds and looking at vehicles which appeared to be nothing less than mobile palaces fit for a third-world ruler, we moved back into a more realistic price range. Ultimately, my dad had the decision narrowed down to two campers: one which was nearly identical to my uncle's, right down to the "Mallard" printed in blue-green letters along the front, with the namesake duck flying beneath it; the other one was more or less the same, just a little longer to accommodate an additional set of bunk beds at the back.
After some deliberation, and under the coda of "bigger must be better," my parents walked away with one new camper and the promise of many adventures to come.
Our first trip out, we took the camper to Greenfield on a joint venture with my Aunt Juanita and Uncle David. After going through the lengthy maneuvering process of what amounted to a school bus squeezing into a spot the size of a Smart Car, we set up our plot with folding chairs and coolers full of soda. After a full afternoon of lounging around, snacking on the camper's stash of candy, I ate dinner, which was the haul from any number of fishing trips down to the lake. Later, as the sun set, Uncle David started a bonfire, and under the assumption that hotdogs and marshmallows make for a fine late-night snack, like stereotypical Midwesterners we ate again.
That night, as we retired to our beds, I listened as the first rumblings of a thunderstorm rolled in. Within a half hour the sounds had become a presence, rocking our little plastic box like an annoyed child with a broken toy. The rain fell hard, making a cacophony of noise against the roof and the sides of the camper. Things got so bad that my parents got up to check the weather on our own little TV, which we'd taken out of my brother's room for the trip; but the camper's antenna was little more than a piece of wire taped to the roof, and so none of the local stations would come in.
Finally, after a full twenty minutes of us not having died, my parents went back to bed. This left me huddled in my bottom bunk, built into the back corner so that my legs lay between the outside wall and the bathroom. Lying there, I felt like I was in a coffin, and when the next clap of thunder struck, I dug myself out of bed and went over to the couch, right next to the little room where my parents slept.
I fell asleep sometime after, and the next morning I swore that that would be my last time camping.
From then on, whenever my parents would arrange for us to go, I went so far as to stay home by myself. My father tried to dissuade me by telling me that, if I stayed home, I'd have to cut the front and back lawn while I was there. I think he expected me to relent, but he underestimated by desire to never be in a camper again. I gladly accepted the task of mowing the lawn in the middle of the summer in exchange for not having to spend another day kicking around a lake and trying out every folding lawn chair ever manufactured to see which one made a body of water most entertaining.
My parents' fascination with camping dwindled out as the years went on. I'm not sure if it was the hassle of hauling it back and forth, the arduousness of stockpiling everything one might possibly need for a weekend, or the frustration of setting the thing up. Maybe the luster just wore off after my mother and father had tried it out a few times. By the time I learned how to drive, the camper became nothing more than a shape in my father's garage, a silent testament to my dad's adventurous spirit and my lack thereof.
