I always like the day before a camping trip. The house is clean, laundry done, we make lists and stacks of stuff we think we will need.
This is our 3rd trip of the season and since the first 2 were several days each, I have culled many things we have been bringing. The camper makes a big difference in comfort and so several tent-camping standards have fallen by the wayside. Going with friends each time has ensured I am more lax about going over my lists-if I don't have it, Gina will, or Cathy. Is it lazy? Communal thinking? Either way, when I had a pan full of pancakes somewhere in South Carolina and not a spatula to be found, Cathy came to the rescue.
I love camping, it's a glorified version of my favorite game as a child. I had 2 versions, an indoor one where my room flooded and I had to live on my bed and an outdoor version where I would pile toys and gear into a wagon and head west, in any direction. Blanket tents under the fig tree, stockpiling pine cones and twigs for a fire 'later', eating the rarely bought fruit leather that sometimes appeared in the cabinet during my provision-stocking raids.
As I got older, I would spend the week at school making lists of what I needed and early Saturday morning, get up and load an old rucksack with rope, water, a sandwich, a book, a knife. I ranged several miles a trip, once I came across a red dirt wash filled with slash pines that grew right through the tops of several abandoned cars. As I walked through the cars, I heard a moaning voice call, "Little girrrrllll, help me little girrrlllll." Of course I ran. I had spent most nights reading ghost stories and knew the signs.
Years later, I would think back and wonder what that really was. My idiot older brother trying to scare me? Someone dumped for dead in that place of abandonment calling for help? An actual ghost?
There was a pasture a couple miles from my house with a huge tree in the middle. Vines grew around it top to bottom, in a swirl, swallowing the whole trunk. I would head there and climb to the lower limbs and push through the vines where a natural nest was formed that had ledges and spiraled up the trunk higher than I wanted to go. It was cut down one day when I went to seek refuge there, that haunts me more than the voice in the pines.
So tomorrow we head of to camp, just 2 nights this time, but with dear friends again-who will have a cup or a spatula or a lighter if I don't. I wonder what my childhood self would think of my latest version of the old game. Making lists and throwing toys and gear into my 'wagon' and heading west. In any direction.
