This past weekend was Memorial Day Weekend. So, Isa and I decided to take Johnny, Isa’s adorable 5 year old son, on his first ever camping trip! We planned it all out, made our reservations at a campground in the Meramec river area, only about an hour and a half from our home, and reserved a raft for Sunday to go on a float trip. Isa made a list of things we would need, and we went shopping for our camping supplies. We got two coolers, (one for the float trip, one for the food), a small grill, camping food, rope, emergency supplies, and we borrowed a tent and some camp chairs from Isa’s mom.
All of this was to go into a Honda Civic, an excellent and reliable little car, but not known for it’s spacious third-row seating like an SUV. We managed, by some clever packing and breaking a few laws of physics, to cram everything in and have room for Johnny and us to sit.
We watched the weather closely the days before our camping trip, locked on like some new brain-sucking reality show, following every newly reported air current. We were worried about the forecast, which called for spot rain and thundershowers. But we figured that since it probably wouldn’t be raining constantly we could deal with a little rain for an hour or two here or there. And so, on Saturday morning, with the sun out and shining on the earth damp from the night before, we got in the car and drove to our campsite.
When we got to our reserved spot, it was of course wet and muddy from all the rain before. One of the first things we did when we got there was to get our car stuck in the mud trying to park on our lot. Fortunately, another camper helped me push while Isa manned the steering and we got it out of there with not much hassle. Still, it was a bad omen we should have heeded.
Some nice fellow campers, also with a little boy just a little younger than Johnny, let us park on their lot, so we now had a firm foundation under our wheels, and we could pitch tent and setup camp. Once the tent was set up, we took Johnny down to the river to play for a couple hours along with his new playmate. Eventually, as it started to get late, I started getting hungry and decided I would go back to the camping spot and get the fire started.
In short order, I had set up not only the charcoal grill, but my first-ever solo campfire. Sure I had taken part in a lot of campfire startings, but never had I from start to finish and with no tools save the firestarter logs, some paper, and a long-handled automatic lighter, started my own fire–on purpose. It was a triumph of Man vs. Nature, and of modern tools being easy enough for suburbanites to handle and avoid setting themselves on fire. Needless to say, it was a proud moment.
That’s when the rain started. Only a few minutes after I just got the fire going, and Isa and Johnny just got back from the river to congratulate me on successfully setting the fire and avoiding third-degree burns, the first drops started to fall. The lightning flashed and the thunder boomed, ominously. Well, yeah, we were expecting rain, no problem. Just pop on over to the grounds office and pick up an extra tarp or two to hang between the trees, and the party can go on. But the rain was no little pitter-patter. And the office was out of tarps. All they had left was picnic table covers. By the time we got back to our campsite, the torrential downpour had already put the fire out, and water was starting to fill our tent through the front screened-in porch area. We immediately started trying to salvage our stuff, pulling sleeping bags and clothes out of the tent and packing it as quickly as we could, laying down tarps for especially muddy and wet items. That’s when we realized that our super-tight packing job that we were so proud of was working against us. Some items were simply waterlogged and unsalvageable. Our Harry Potter book was one of the first casualties. Some items simply wouldn’t fit back in, certainly not full of water and mud and with our haphazard and hurried packing job, things didn’t seem to fit so well. We ended up having to abandon one of our coolers. Fortunately, we found some guys who were more than happy to take a cooler of food and drinks off our hands.
The big problem came when we got everything else were were going to fit inside the car and found ourselves facing the tent with over a foot of water inside. We started disassembling it, pulling down the poles and pulling up stakes. But now we were faced with a muddy tent that was now more like a giant water balloon. We set the sloshy mass up on a picnic table to try our best to drain it. There was no easy way to get the water out, short of slicing it open, and the rain was still coming down. Faced with the continued rain, and the rising water that was now in places about two feet deep, we made the hard choice. The tent had to go. There was no way to get it back in the car in any kind of usable condition, and we couldn’t take the time with Johnny in the car, unless we wanted to see if the car could float. So we left the tent there, the picnic table trying valiantly to hold it above water.
When we got home, we immediately went online like good children of the 21st century to find a new tent for Isa’s mom and ordered it before we broke the news to her. We figured it would help the healing begin to know that a replacement was already on its way. Her mom wasn’t upset at the news, but was more relieved that we didn’t float off with it.
Johnny was a very good boy though the whole thing, and didn’t complain, even being stuck in the car for a couple hours while we ran around tearing things down frantically in the rain–thanks to the Nintendo DS. We figure we’ll try again with the new tent, on a sunny day without scattered thunder showers, so we can take Johnny on a slightly less soggy camping trip next time.
