Humor:

A daddy confronts the Tent Commandments

I am not a happy camper. Heck, I cannot remember ANY good camping experiences. Never, ever.

So why oh why did I agree to take my five-year-old son Jack camping this week?

Um, I remember why now.

"Please, daddy, please take me camping," Jack had pleaded and I guess I am just a sucker for punishment.

In mitigation, I say: how could any father deprive his young son of his first camping experience?

My first camping experience was with my father.
I was about Jack's age, too.
I remember bawling my eyes out because I wanted to sleep in the caravan with some other children, getting my way, then bawling my eyes out again because I changed my mind and wanted to sleep inside a tent with my dad.

When I was a young teenager, I went camping one Easter on the banks of the Supply River in Northern Tasmania with a cousin and a friend about the same age.
It poured for three days and nights.
Everything in the tent - our clothes, our sleeping bags, even our secret stash of cigarettes - got saturated.
A stray dog adopted us and moved into our tiny tent. He was a soggy doggy who smelt and we were three very miserable boys who were also on the nose but were too full of teenage rebellion and stubbornness to ring our parents from the nearest phone box and ask them to please, please come and get us.

When I was in my early 20s, I bought an old army surplus tent from a basement shop in the Plaka in Athens.
It was a heavy canvas tent, probably left over from World War 2.
Heck, perhaps it was army surplus from World War 1 or even left over from the Peloponnesian War.

I did not get the chance to try it out until I arrived in Grenada in Spain.
It rained! Yes, in Spain.
And it turned out that the heavy canvas tent had hundreds of tiny holes.
It rained for several days at Camp Grenada and once again everything I had became saturated and I became miserable.

Stupidly, I got the camping bug again about seven years ago.

My wife, Katherine, and I went camping on a tiny, tropical island in the Pacific.
It seemed to be a very idyllic location when we were dropped off there by boat during the day. It was uninhabited by humans, it had coconut trees, little golden beaches and a circle around us of blue, calm, warm sea.
But at night the island became a giant disco for rats.
Katherine and I huddled inside the tent as they hissed and fought, danced around the flickering campfire, with its strobe light effects, and ate whatever they could find.
I was positive they would have tried to eat us, too, had not the tent been zipped up.

We found out later that not all islands in that chain were rat infested - and decided to give it one more try.

We invested in a new three-man tent.

Katherine became pregnant with Jack, though, and we never got around to even unwrapping it.

I found the tent, still like new in its bag, in our garage in Canberra last July.

"Oh goody," said Jack. "Please, daddy, please will you take me camping?"

"When?" I said.

"Tonight," said Jack.

"Oh, no, not tonight," I said. "It's winter. It's much too cold for camping. I promise we will do it in summer. Okay?"

Well, it is summer in Australian now, Jack is on school holidays, and I no longer had any excuse.
So this week, reluctantly, I did it.
It's weird. We had never used the tent because of Jack but here I was now agreeing to use it because of him.

I can honestly say that I had not lost any of my old camping know-how.

I still do not know how to put up a tent properly.

Jack, understandably, wanted to know why I had poles and pegs left over after it was erected.

"Listen, son," I said sternly. "It goes with the territory. We're roughing it now, living on our wits. I think we have enough to worry about to bother ourselves about a few left-over poles and pegs. Trust me. I have done a LOT of camping."

Thankfully, it did not rain.

I hardly slept a wink though.

Oh, I nearly drifted off.

But Jack shook me out of my early slumber.

"Daddy, I need to do a wee," he said.

"When?" I said, rubbing my eyes. "Now? We haven't even been to sleep yet. Why didn't you go BEFORE we got into the tent?"

"I didn't need to then," said Jack. "I do now."

So, wide awake again, I supervised as Jack, torch in one hand, watered a nearby tree.

After he returned to the tent, I do not think I slept at all.

I kept hearing strange noises.

Jack went to sleep but not me as my paternal instinct kicked in.

I felt the need to stay on guard.

I thought about all the wild animals that might be outside.
Lions.
Tigers.
Bears.
Wild boars.
Tasmanian devils.
Snakes.
Mossies.
And yes, rats.
Really big rats probably lying in wait until I needed to do a wee next.

What they might have been doing in my back garden is a mystery. Um, did I mention we pitched the tent in the back garden close to all our mod cons? I did not mind roughing it (cough); I was only thinking of tenderfoot Jack.

In any case, Katherine is convinced the night was a good test run for the real camping thing.

Jack agrees. Apparently, he is willing to give me a second chance. He has the camping bug.

But not me.

As I said, I am not a happy camper.

And I have just remembered what I tried so hard to forget.

©January 11, 2002 John Martin. All Rights Reserved

NB: I called this site Dunno because I kept drawing a blank when I had to put a name to it