Tents

Here it is the end of July and I haven’t gone camping yet. The kids and I will next week.

Sometimes I think I could live in a tent.

In the early 90s I traveled to a lot of small airports around the country to skydive. I never had money, but there was always somewhere to pitch my tent. There were usually water and electric hookups too.

I’d be snug in my sleeping bag with an electric blanket on an air mattress in the middle of Tennessee in December. Sometimes I had a TV. The only problem was running through the snow to the showers in the morning.

My friend Benet and I used to go camping so he could spend quality time with his blond lab Mel. I tried sleeping in my hammock on one of these trips. It rained but I stretched a tarp over a rope for protection. I remember reading about Simon Bolivar when he was first traveling through the jungles of South America. He’d sleep on a hammock. I wanted to know what it was like. I don’t recommend it. That was twenty years ago and I still haven’t made up for the lost sleep.

In the early 80s my girlfriend Pam and I spent a week camping just before she would leave forever to join a theater group in Milwaukee. We camped on the top of a hill. One night a bunch of kids came into the valley below. They were blasting Dark Side of the Moon. Listening to the music drifting up through the woods was a good as listening to it on drugs. We moved our camp to a private place somewhere farther up the Jack’s Fork River. We were trapped in our tent for days as it rained relentlessly. At one point I was afraid we were going to be flooded. I got out and dug a trench around our tent. When I finished I was so covered in mud I looked like something out of Quest for Fire. I threw off my clothes and walked into the river. It was warmer than the outside air. I had an incredible sense of well being that I’ve been trying to relive ever since.

My friend Sharon, her daughter, her ex, Dominic and I went camping once. We went to Clearwater Lake which was flooded at the time. Dominic and I found a tree that was several feet under water. We dove into the lake from its branches.

I was a vegetarian even back in the 80s. Sharon reminded me I brought a can of veg hot dogs. They tasted like Alpo. Things have improved greatly for vegetarians since then. They were too soggy to hold together on a stick.

In the early 90s I was practicing formations on creepers in a parking lot in Sparta, Illinois with my skydiving team Muffy and the Divers. It was always an event when a jumper had to cut away their main canopy and deploy their reserve parachute. Those of us on the ground would try to watch the main as it descended so it could be retrieved.

I remember the four of us looking into each other’s eyes as we practiced. My friend Laura told me to hold still as she took her fingernail and picked a piece of spinach from my teeth. You have to be a real friend to do something like that. Jumpers get incredibly personal with each other. A lot of social barriers seem pretty petty.

All of a sudden Muffy pointed up. “Reserve, reserve!” she shouted. We stopped what we were doing and watched what looked like a cut away main canopy float to the ground. We ran out to the middle of a corn field to retrieve my tent. I hadn’t staked it down yet when I set up camp. A strong gust of wind took it way up into the sky.

When I first began to camp as an adult my girlfriend Joanie and I bought a 2 person tent. We left the Broadway Oyster Bar around 3:00am after our shift and drove down to the Black River. We pitched our tent in the dark in the middle of a dry creek bed. It wasn’t long enough for me to fully stretch out on. I awoke to the most sever back pain I’ve ever known. The combination of lifting cases of beer and sleeping on rocks threw my sacroiliac out. After a chiropractor slipped the joint back into place I was on a cane for 2 weeks. I bought an 8 person tent and have been sleeping on an air mattress ever since.

First pic is at Mike Mullin’s dropzone in the middle of Tennessee. I’m with my buddy Pat Harrington. The airplane is Mullin’s King Air. It’s the fastest jump plane in the country. This is the airplane I was married from in Vandalia, Illinois. The other pic is from one of my camping trips with Joanie.