The Tent

When I was sixteen we threw away our family tent halfway through a camping trip.

The tent was one we’d had my entire life and had seen campgrounds all over America. Some sites were concrete pads surrounded by floodlights in South Carolina. Others were crowded quarters in The Badlands of South Dakota. But most were tree-filled wilderness in the Rockies.

The tent’s final day started in the trunk of our late-70’s Chevy Nova when my dad and I made a Memorial Day weekend trip to the mountains. Having just been issued my driver’s license the month before, I was confident I could handle a little cliff-side driving. Mountains are just big traffic cones, after all.

And yes, it’s a big deal to be given responsibilities like driving your father around hairpin turns as a teenager, but I remember that picking out the food for that trip as being substantially more important.

At the time, I was starting to realize the value of food as a way to connect with people and wanted my dad to see that I could take care of us. Which is, of course, why I picked canned Campbell’s Chunky Soup with Hamburger as the majority of our meals.

So we headed to our campsite in Rocky Mountain National Park and — it being Spring in Colorado and an elevation of over 8,000 ft. — the weather was, well, palpable. We set up camp in the rain, barely able to see what we were doing and after a [something] night’s sleep, we woke in the morning to about an inch of snow on our tent. Two, if you count the amount inside the tent as well.

So, after a few microseconds of debate, we used our primitive cell phone to call my mom and tell her we were going to a motel in the nearest town. Being the Great Indoorsmen that we were, we had our limits… like being inconvenienced by weather… while outside. As we left the park, we tossed the memory-filled pile of canvas into a dumpster, told the park ranger not to spend it all in one place, and drove to the cozy inn.

Not wanting to waste the camp food, and now having spent a bit more money on the weekend than we had expected (the majority of which went to the mid-1990s 30-second cell phone roaming charge), we cooked our soup - still in the can - on the next best thing to a campfire, a shoddy motel kitchenette stove.

I learned that weekend that being flexible can open you up to adventures you may never have had otherwise. And even if watching the Indy 500 on TV in a rainy mountain town motel while slurping canned soup isn’t exactly adventurous, that weekend has become one of my favorite memories I have with my dad.