Into the Woods

Tent-ventures

My boy emerged from the woods this morning. After 4 days camping with a few buddies, Billy loaded all of his gear — and his filthy self — into my car and I brought him home. We live in the age of cell phones, and even though he didn’t always have a signal he did manage to check in with his dad or me at least once a day. Still, this is the longest he’s been away from us, “roughing it” with no adult supervision. He had the BEST time.

My first camping experiences were with my dad and his brother, my Uncle Johnny (not to be confused with my Uncle John Pancake, my mom’s youngest brother). Uncle Johnny has a daughter my age, my cousin Chloe, and the brothers decided that a camping trip was a great summer activity for the four of us. We ended up going three times — three summers in a row — and my dad said it was in the late 80s, so we must have started when Chloe and I were 9 or 10 years old. Pretty brave, right? Both brothers grew up learning to camp and canoe through the YMCA: Camp Widjiwagan for Johnny and Camp Miller for my dad. These camps taught them “The Widgi Flip” — a technique to get a canoe up and on the shoulders of the camper. Luckily, our dads did not demand that we learn this particular technique.

My mom says that one of our trips happened when I first got my period, and she remembers driving up and down the road near the river, worried that I didn’t have supplies with me. I believe that was the same year that the swarms of mosquitos were so thick they looked like fog in front of us walking down a trail in the woods. (Insert inappropriate bleeding joke here.)

My memories of the division of labor in camp are of my dad being in charge of fishing and my uncle being in charge of cooking. Chloe didn’t mind touching leeches, so she would bait our hooks as we fished off the rock outcropping. There were many times, actually, when we “switched dads” and worked on projects with our uncles — it helped head off any father/daughter frustration.

The first year we all slept in one tent, and it turns out that my dad snores when he has to sleep on the ground. Or maybe he had a cold. Either way, we cousins brought our own tent on subsequent trips. It was around Uncle Johnny’s campfire that I learned to love Tang, that legendary orange drink, hot from being made with the water boiled over the fire to kill any bacteria in the river water. To this day, the only time I really like oatmeal is when it is made with that campfire-boiled water, in a tin cup, in the early morning wilderness.

As I grew older, I had two types of camping experiences. One was a 10-day camping trip into the great Boundary Waters Canoe Area with a small church group. Our extraordinarily patient youth leaders, Tom and Nancy Horn (not to be confused with Tom and Nancy Saxhaug, my parents), took four teenagers into the BWCA. All of us had varying levels of experience — mine was the lowest level. Our canoe was usually far behind the other two (sorry, Terry), and I managed to get myself into a few scrapes from which I needed to be rescued. Nancy’s favorite moment was when I was double-packing on a portage (a trail between water sources). I wasn’t strong or fast or tall enough to help carry a canoe on the trail, so I wore two packs, one on my back and one on my front. At some point, I tripped over a root or a stone and fell… but because I was couple packing I couldn’t quite get purchase from the ground to get myself back up. Nancy laughed and laughed and said I “looked like a woodtick,” splayed out on the ground with my arms and legs waving helplessly. Eventually she got around to helping me up and we finished the portage.

The other type of camping experience in high school is closer to what my Billy just did: camping with high school friends. We started with just the girls — Becky’s parents owned some property about an hour north of town, which was smack in the middle of nowhere. I believe there were 7 of us that first time, and mostly I remember Becky trying to teach me how to smoke cigarettes, and waking up in the morning to find that a bear had attempted to get into our food bins, evidenced by the big, drooly teeth imprints in the plastic. In later summers we added the boys in our friend group to the excursion — the core memory there is Lehto frying bacon in the morning with some leftover Jack Daniels. Classy.

Of course, the major difference between my camping trips and Billy’s camping trip is the existence of cell phones. I cannot imagine telling my nearly-15-year-old, “Ok, see you in a few days, be safe!” and then not hearing from him until he was out of the forest! It was one thing when I was with my dad or adults from church, but quite another when we were just a group of teenagers off on our own. I can’t imagine how my parents dealt with the not-knowing, except I suppose when you don’t know any different, you just accept it as reality.

The one trip when we really could have used some kind of communication device was the time that we girls decided to take Kristen’s dad’s boat out to a tiny island in the middle of Pokegama Lake to camp for the night. I don’t believe I actually told my parents the whole plan, because I can’t imagine my mother giving permission. At any rate, we were experienced campers and everything went off without a hitch… until about 2:00am when a giant thunderstorm hit. It was scary being on that little island with raging thunder and lightning, but we were doing ok… until the main tentpole snapped. Maira and I still reminisce frequently about fixing that tent in the rain and wind in the middle of the lake… with duct tape. Thank goodness for duct tape.

These kinds of experiences were character-building for me. They showed me that I could do hard things. They taught me that I was capable of fending for myself. One of the many reasons I’m so glad to be raising my family in Northern Minnesota is because these adventure opportunities are literally right out our front door.

But oh, thank goodness for cell phones.

Thanks for reading.

Love, Susie