Bad First Impressions

Chapter 2 of my work-in-progress camping memoir

Our family campsite for that fateful stop at Devil’s Tower when I was 15

I started working on a camping memoir five years ago but abandoned it after a year of detailed work because the time just wasn’t right. Now I am ready to get back to the work I started and turn it into a true memoir of the first 21 years of marriage and parenting. If you want to get regular updates on this project, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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I was a princess. No, I was an explorer. Nope, I was just trying to escape the noise and chaos caused by my two younger sisters.

I unzipped the front door and crawled out into a field of yellow dandelions, violets, and four-leaf clovers. I looked toward my flying horse, safely harnessed to the metal rungs of my playset and the expanse of smooth, fine sand hedged by the wooden boards forming my sandbox. I ignored the three-foot high chain link fence that surrounded our corner lot, the alley immediately behind our brick garage, and the neat rows of 1930s bungalows that made up our neighborhood in the middle of a concrete jungle.

Whether I was by myself or playing with my little sisters and neighborhood friends, the backyard was a tiny escape, a place where my imagination could run wild. And that playtime was enhanced by every play device we added to our backyard.

I got my first tent when I was about six or seven. It was a small, green, triangular tent, the type that would fit a single adult, a sleeping bag, and a small duffle bag. My maternal grandparents, the ones who would eventually purchase a popup camper once they were both retired, gave it to my two younger sisters and me. I have no idea what prompted them to buy us a tent. My parents weren’t campers. And while both of my parents grew up in country settings, during the first nine years of my life the only time our family ever got out into nature was the occasional visits to my grandparents’ farm just outside of Ionia, Michigan.

I don’t think that my grandparents ever believed that a single gift would turn into a family hobby of outdoor exploration, but we loved that tent all the same. We set it up in our backyard and escaped from the reality of our Detroit neighborhood to different adventures of our own making. Our skin baked in the tent as summer temperatures climbed, and we never could quite escape the distinctive nylon smell as we sat inside. We invited our neighborhood friends over to climb in and out of the single flap door, unzipping the window on the opposite end to allow anyone else to look inside and directly talk to those inside.

One night we irresponsibly left the tent outside and woke up the next morning to discover that our tent, stakes and all, had disappeared out of our backyard. Someone had climbed the chain link fence and decided that they needed it more than three little girls with imaginations running wild. At the time we were devastated, crushed that someone would steal something that had, in a short time, become integral to our playtime. I remember crying over something we had only owned a little while, but we quickly returned to our swing set and sandbox and moved on to tent-free playtime. For several years, tents and everything that they represented, would be nothing more than a brief childhood memory.

I grew up a city girl in nearly every sense. My earliest memories of outdoor play include riding my big wheel up and down the sidewalk on our street, spinning my plastic vehicle around the corner at the end of our block before heading back to our house on the opposite corner. Once I had perfectly flattened my front wheel, I moved onto learning how to ride a two-wheeler, the sidewalk on our street the determined boundary to the real estate I was allowed to explore. As a preschooler, I learned how to carefully cross our busy street so that I could play with those friends who lived only a couple houses away. Once I was in elementary school, my mom occasionally let me walk with a couple other neighborhood kids to the playground a couple streets away, but it was little more than swings and a merry-go-round on a concrete pad. My parochial elementary school in the middle of the city didn’t have a playground or green-space. When it was nice enough for us to play outside, we ran around on concrete and blacktop parking lots just outside of the building and within the surrounding tall chain link fences.

That’s not to say my parents didn’t think it was important to expose us to nature whenever they could. My mom grew a productive garden nearly every summer. We made trips to the zoo and school field trips to Belle Isle in the middle of the Detroit River. Every couple of years my dad would plan a trip to visit his Iowa grandmothers and the Iowa farms of his aunts and uncles. And whenever time would allow, my mom made sure that we took trips out to visit our grandparents on the farm where she grew up. We loved visiting our grandparents, but we didn’t know how to act out on the farm. Were the trees between the house and the field for climbing, or were we supposed to stay out of them? Were we allowed to play with the barn cats, or should we leave them alone because they weren’t house cats and they were normally left to roam free and catch field mice? What were we supposed to do with our grandparents’ large German shepherd, as the concept of a family pet was foreign to us? When we walked out into the woods just across from their house, how far were we allowed to explore before we had wandered too far from our parents? And when outdoor mishaps happened, I often wasn’t prepared for them. I remember one particular hike through the woods when I fell off a log and stepped into the cold creek running through the forest. It was fall. The water was frigid. I didn’t know how to handle both my wet shoe and the seeping cold that settled into my body, eager to finally go back to the house where I could put on dry clothes and sit inside.

Even with all of those experiences, nature was something to admire from a distance, not usually to experience up close and personal. We didn’t avoid the outdoors; we just usually avoided close interaction with the wild outdoors. As a result, it is safe to say that I did not grow up in a family that would consider camping for any reason.