Ever tried to mentally put yourself back in a particular place and time? Some events you can't forget. Whether they be for good or ill they are hung in your mind forever. Other occasions ‘not so much’ as that phrase is used today.
Today I tried to remember a specific camping trip but couldn't. There were so many outings to “the wild” that they all blend together. Thinking about life on a grand scale, having that many experiences in the woods with good friends (and these trips were always communal) was not really a bad thing.
Most camping trips I recall were up north. Up North for people who don’t live in Michigan is any place at least 5 miles north of your home and preferably on water be it a pond, creek, lake or one of the inland seas that touch northern Michigan (Huron, Superior and Michigan). For me Up North meant you had to at least pass Grayling before putting stakes into the dirt. Up North means an old CCC camp site or a state forest campground. Up North was synonymous pine smell and moving water.
I did not camp as a kid. As a result going camping was initially foreign. Camping trips for me began immediately after I moved back to Lansing after law school in Detroit. On any given weekend in summer we could jump into a car and head up north. It was a ritual that truly belonged to Michigan. New Jersey has a day trip to the shore. But Michigan is so big a trip to get out of the house that it requires a weekend to do it right.
Our camping tools evolved. Initially we slept inside a pup tent just big enough for two sleeping bags. It was only a couple feet tall and you couldn’t sit up inside. The tent was a leftover from our 1978 trip in a car named Thunder Road. We had gone to Oregon to find America. We still have that tan non-breathing nylon fire trap stashed up in the rafters of the garage.Bought it at Woolco, remember Woolco?
We also had cheap assed cotton batting sleeping bags. After one too many chilly nights, those were replaced with LL Bean sleeping bags. Just because something like a road trip is a spur of the moment decision does not mean it has to be uncomfortable, not when you have the right equipment and a good attitude.
From the pup tent we migrated to a Eureka dome tent for our accommodation. The dome claimed to comfortably sleep five. Three was more honest. The claim of five was only true if your idea of comfort is that everyone has someone else’s body parts stuffed up near your face I would draw a diagram but this is being created on Word and I don’t know how to do that. Instead I will describe the situation.
Imagine a circle. Place four bodies in it with the shortest campers being on the outsides and the tallest being on the inside. Running atop these four bodies curved to conform to the top edge of the circle is body five. Routinely body five would be at everyone’s heads. If this camper were at the foot of everyone they would get kicked repeatedly during the night.
Configured like this for sleeping the shorter people on the outside got zephyrs of halitosis or foot funk odors respectively. On camping trips personal hygiene standards are lax and generated these kind of smells. People forget tooth brushes. Meh. Feet get wet because it always rains on camping trips. Let me repeat that, it always rains on camping trips in Michigan. One of the two middle sleepers gets a strong intermittent methane breeze. Camping trip cuisine such as BEER, and BEANS elevates the chances of GI distress and gas production. Only one or maybe two campers (depending on how drunk the smelly person sleeping on that curved right angle from everyone else is) get a decent night’s sleep.
Finally we bought a big ass tent with poles that created a huge rectangle. I don’t think we've used it more than a handful of times. But the mega-tent fits four cots. This refugee from a revival will also provide a comfortable distance between all campers. This concept of personal space is a much diminished one when you are out on the weekend but on a camping trip you will take what you can get.
There are common elements to all the camping trips that cascade before my mind’s eye. Beer. Rain. Mud. Campfires. Boom boxes (first cassettes, then CD). Also there was usually a purpose tied to the trip most often a canoe excursion down one of the many rivers of Michigan. Every so often we would sleep out at the end of a small spit of land poking out into the Great Lakes and we would make our goal a winery tour on the Leelanau Peninsula. Those events often ended in a stupor, so they were limited.Wine and cheese and a long and winding road back to the tents don’t mix well.
On any trip we planned with more than an hour of advance notice, we did some prep work. On Thursday night the car got packed. A large Coleman cooler, a small Coleman stove, a Coleman lantern and some Coleman fuel would get smushed into the trunk. Packed in addition, sleeping bags, pillows, shorts, T-shirts, jeans and leather jackets.
If there was time we would make a quick trip to Meijer and buy some food. Initially it was hotdogs and bags of chips we would grab as foodstuffs. Later it became chicken breasts, greens for a salad and dried cherries to go with each. Nothing is quite as tasty as a chicken breast wrapped together with dried cherries in aluminum foil cooked in the coals of a camp fire. On Friday as soon as work was done we would jump into a snaking line of cars headed up north on the only freeway from here to there, U.S.-127. We would stop about 20 miles up the road and grab a burger, fries and a pop and we would boogie on heading up north.
Depending on where you were heading, you passed a number of landmarks. My favorite was Woodhenge. It was just a stone’s throw from the trip's start. This was a barn that somebody started (I have been told) and then never finished. A number of warped and twisted but rather tall polls stands to the right of the highway. There was a marker for the 45th parallel indicating that you were halfway between the equator and the North Pole. There was Big Buck Brewery, which was one of the first microbreweries to make a splash in Michigan. If you headed off to Lake Michigan you could pass the gas station where the guy had the bear chained out back as a tourist attraction.
In early summer it doesn’t get dark up north until 10 or later. If you got off right when work was over you set up your tent in the fading light. If you got there slightly late someone else was already making the fire. Hopefully this time they wouldn’t burn their eyebrows off when the white gas that soaked into the firewood caused a fireball. You swept the ground where you pitched the tent with your feet to ensure stones and sticks wouldn’t poke you all night. The tent popped up easily when the magically connected tent poles snapped together and were slid through the small flaps of nylon on the outside of the tent. You unrolled your Thermarest mats and let them inflate. You slung your sleeping bag in and grabbed a beer and pulled up a stool and sat around the fire.
Some trips were long, once we circled Lake Huron. Truly I once spent a Sudbury Saturday night. Another year we traveled across the top of Lake Superior to Thunder Bay and to the Valhalla Inn. It was there that I learned you shouldn't drink a beer in a hot tub when you are tired. Some trips took us back to the same campgrounds again and again. It was also there where we visited the birth place of the real Winnie the Pooh.
Some trip endings were pushed to the last hour of sun on Sunday because you were just having so much damn fun. Some forays were scuttled by rain on Saturday. There is a very clear olfactory memory for almost every Michigan tent camper.It is the one of pulling a damp hoodie out of a black garbage bag that served as your dirty clothes hamper for the weekend. The odor is stale going on mildewed. There are equal parts soggy wood smoke and Harp beer scents rising from the hoodie. Yup rain was the enemy.
Some trips were cosmic. Ain’t nothing quite like watching the northern lights kick up as you stand on a lake shore looking out into the blackness now growing into surreal light. The dancing green/green blue curtains sweep across you and keep you staring upwards for hours.
A camping trip made you drop the phone. A camping trip made you step away from the computer. A camping trip puts you in touch with real honest people. Sitting down on those small aluminum stools around the fire the second night of the weekend you talked about jobs, life, love, hopes and aspirations. Connections were restored in the dancing firelight and beer bottle clinking. Connections that would last a lifetime.
Honestly, I was trying to remember one camping trip. In the end, I will remember a lifetime filled with fun and joy.