So many of my childhood memories center around camping--especially since my parents came from families that were also crazy about camping (well, at least my dad's was.) My grandmother, after years of raising six kids, helped to run an RV store owned by my step-grandfather, so they spent most of their summer months in Wisconsin when they could get away. My dad owned a pickup camper I have vague remembrances of, then a large blue van we outfitted with a bed and cabinetry where me and my sister slept in sleeping bags on the floor. Later, there were tents. Then another pickup when I was in high school. We eventually migrated to cabins, then hotels, as we all got older, but a few years ago, we still went on some tent outings with my cousins for much raucous now-alcohol fueled fun.
The campfire, of course, was the center of all pursuits. Stoked up in the morning by whoever was up first and sometimes burning throughout the day. My mother had an ability to cook really elaborate meals using that and a simple camp stove in the tent years, though we did have a microwave in the later truck camper (also a TV/VCR). At night, we'd make smores and toasted marshmallows and try to get her and my dad to tell us ghost stories, only one of which I remember was scary. In larger gatherings, my parents would play cards til late at night under those plastic colored string lanterns. My sister and I would be tucked into the van with whatever spoils to keep us occupied--candy, coloring books, magic slates. I spent entire days in my dad's boat while my parents fished playing with cap guns, Go-fish with my mon, and reading Archie comics.
Camping or vacation was always this free time, in which all rules of life were suspended. Even my mother, who was not a big reader (and usually complained that the rest of the family was lazy for doing so much of it) would stock up on True Story magazines at the market which she would devour and then pass of to me in my teen years. It was meant for leisure, though what I remember of camping was also a lot of work--the cooking, the cleaning, the setting up and taking down. (esp, during the tent years.) We'd swim in the lake, ride our bikes around the campground, and make regular trips to the corner store for penny candy or ice cream. We'd shower in coin operated showers and fear the outhouse toilets every time for what might be lurking beneath.
One of my favorite parts of sleeping in the tents was many of the same things that led me to pitch blanket forts in the living room. Me and my sister would shut ourselves behind the zipper, where she would usually fall asleep fast and I'd be left to read or color or fill out word games under a battery operated flashlight or lamp I'd wield around periodically to look for wayward bugs. The last trip, in 2015, at 41 in the same tent with my parents, I awoke to a daddy longlegs crawling across my arm and did not freak out. This was a testament to how much I'd grown, though if it'd been an actual spider, I might have died.
I went camping a couple times for Girl Scouts (once in a cabin and once in tents. Also as part of a charity camp with cabins) but these are less memorable than our family trips. In the years before we lost my mother, we also regularly had gatherings at their house, where my cousins would bring their camping vehicles & sleeping bags for the living room and we'd hole up a couple days for a party where no one had to drive home (and which once involved a pan of weed-laced brownies that will go down in history.) Here, they'd gather around the fire pit in my parent's yard, play poker, drink and hang out on the deck late at night and it is almost like Wisconsin, though I could sleep safely in my bed.
Summer seems to hold these memories in focus every year and make me long, if not for camping so much, maybe a cabin stay of some sort---a getaway where time isn't exactly real and the rules of life suspended for a few days.
