Setting Up Camp and Staying Married

Chapter 3 of my work-in-progress camping memoir

Our first tent, set up on a trip to Nebraska, July 2003.

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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In nearly 20 years of marriage, I have determined that the two best activities for strengthening a relationship and bringing two people together are camping and home improvement. Both activities will either bring a couple together or tear them apart by revealing every single weakness in a relationship. They will demonstrate what your partner is made of and destroy every façade you put up to try to win over your significant other.

When my baby sister Johanna got married, one of the items that she and my new brother-in-law wanted most was a tent. Surprisingly, even after that disastrous family camping trip through the Black Hills, three of the four of us still eventually fell in love with camping, thanks to the encouragement of our outdoor-loving husbands. Nostalgic for the early years of marriage when we were childless and had the freedom to take off for adventures whenever the mood struck, we three older sisters were more than happy to make that our wedding gift to the young couple.

Jeff and I put ourselves on tent-hunting/purchasing duty, bringing back memories of when we first started making our own plans for married camping adventures. When Jeff and I spent that afternoon at a Denver area Target working on our guest registry, we were in the midst of camping-induced euphoria. We registered for nearly every item that we thought we would need for camping someday, or at least everything that Target carried at the time. We watched our gift registry with bated breath. We were only twenty-two and had very few of our own household items with which to start adult life together, but as much as we needed bedding, towels, and all manner of kitchen equipment, we wanted new camping gear.

Jeff’s aunt and uncle hosted a couples wedding shower at the tail end of my college Thanksgiving break, right before I would head back to Denver to finish my student teaching. We excitedly opened our Coleman grill/stove combination, convinced that the grill and single burner were all that we needed to cook on the road. We received our two bulky 20-degree, fleece-lined sleeping bags that we could zip together for a single king-sized sleeping bag, perfect—we had decided—for newlywed lovemaking and cuddling on cold nights like the ones we had experienced while camping in Colorado. We received a propane-powered lantern with extra mantles, so we were now ready for nights cooking in the dark and sitting at a picnic table when we weren’t gathered around a fire.

But we didn’t have the most important item: a tent.

As we got closer to spring and the opportunity to go camping together for the first time as a married couple, we started our search for the perfect tent just for the two of us. We made a withdrawal from our wedding gift money and found the perfect dome tent at Target, which had all the camping equipment we needed for just a fraction of the cost of standard outdoor stores. The Eddie Bauer tent from our registry would sleep six, which gave us plenty of room for a queen-sized air mattress, our sleeping bags, and any clothes that we would pack to bring along.

We thought that first tent purchase would last us quite a while, but we were always suckers for sale items, and a couple years after we bought our first tent, we saw a clearance sticker on the tent of our dreams. It was easy to justify a bigger tent with the potential of our growing family. With the addition of a puppy and dreams of eventually adding human children to the camping experience, we decided the bigger tent was definitely worth it. It could sleep up to ten people. It had two thin nylon curtains which we could hang to split the tent into three “rooms.” It had pockets and places to hang storage everywhere inside. And it had the perfect amount of room for us, our dog, and someday a pack-and-play for at least one little human. From the first time we staked it in the ground, we called it the “Tent-Mahal,” mostly because it was so large and grandiose in comparison to what we had before that we felt it needed a grandiose name. Yes, it was probably more than we near-newlyweds needed, but we didn’t care. It gave us—and our dreams—room to grow.

We hoped to pass those dreams along to my baby sister and her soon-to-be husband.