The Camper
(A True Account of Tents, Tang, and the Red Hand)
Every summer, we went camping.
Not sometimes. Not “when we could.” Every summer.
We started out with tents. The kind that punished you for not understanding physics.
If your sleeping bag touched the inside wall during a rainstorm, the water would come through — like it had been invited by your ignorance.
It rained a lot.
Or maybe it just felt like it rained a lot because our tents were always getting wet.
It didn’t help that water found us.
Even when the campsite looked flat, somehow, the water always flowed our way.
One time, my dad accidentally drove a tent stake right into the campground’s main water line.
We couldn’t figure out why the water wouldn’t just go around us.
It was like the tent itself offended it.
Eventually, we upgraded to a pop-up camper.
Not the kind with a crank — ours was simpler than that.
You popped it open by hand and locked the braces in with your body weight and hope.
It was still canvas, still vulnerable to weather, but it felt like progress.
A tent with metal bones.
That camper became something of a second home during the summer — at least for me and one of my brothers.
Not in the woods — just in the backyard.
We’d sleep out there for much of the summer, just the two of us.
No parents, no sisters, no grown-up bedtime.
Just the hum of the neighborhood and the thrill of not sleeping inside.
In the early years, our sister — five years older — camped out there with us too.
She was part of it.
We had a routine.
When one of us had to use the bathroom at night, we didn’t go inside — we had our spot.
Just outside the camper, same place every time.
Except once.
My younger brother went out and didn’t come back.
We waited. Then waited longer.
Eventually, our sister went out to find him.
She did — eventually.
Far from where he should have been.
Why he wandered, none of us ever figured out.
But that story became family legend:
The time we lost him on a bathroom break just twenty feet from home.
As she got older, she started working.
She’d come home late, still slip into the camper some nights.
And then, in ’82, she got married.
That was the end of her camper years.
Later on, my brother and I were gifted a black-and-white TV.
We ran an extension cord out from the house and set it up inside the camper.
It was our little slice of freedom.
We’d stay up late to watch Saturday Night Live — one of our favorites was Tom Hanks as Mr. Short-Term Memory.
We laughed like we were in the audience.
We weren’t alone out there, though.
Sometimes one of our cats would paw at the camper door in the middle of the night, scratching with that unmistakable “let me in” rhythm.
And of course, we let her in.
There was plenty of room — those campers slept five comfortably.
She’d find her place, curl up, and make herself part of the night.
When she needed to go back out, she let us know.
She was polite like that. Loud, but polite.
Mornings didn’t start with alarms.
They started with chirps.
And not the pleasant kind.
To this day, I can’t stand the sound of a Blue Jay.
Beautiful bird, awful voice.
They always managed to wake me up long before I wanted to be conscious.
Some people say nature is peaceful.
I say they’ve never been woken by a Blue Jay dragging its vocal cords across the fabric of your last hour of sleep.
Breakfasts had their own kind of charm.
We drank Tang — because it was easy to mix, and because the astronauts drank it.
It made us feel like we were fueling up for something important.
But even as a kid, I remember wondering:
If these were the heroes of space exploration… why were we feeding them something that tasted like a powdered orange regret?
And then there were the miniature boxes of cereal — the kind that came in variety packs.
The front of each box had a perforated panel.
If you followed the lines just right and cut it open like a door, you could pour the milk straight into the wax-paper lining and eat it right out of the box.
A cardboard bowl, a plastic spoon, and the thrill of eating engineering.
To this day, I’m still not sure why they didn’t feed the astronauts that way.
Though, I suppose cereal boxes floating through the cabin might’ve complicated the mission.
Our actual camping trips were usually to KOA campgrounds.
We weren’t out to rough it.
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But we liked… amenities.
Flush toilets. Hot showers.
If there was a laundry room, great.
If there was a swimming pool, even better.
And the rec rooms? That was where it really came alive — pool tables, air hockey, the clatter of paddles and pucks echoing off paneled walls like summer applause.
Sometimes — depending on the day of the week — there were even hayrides.
It wasn’t wilderness.
But it was something.
But KOAs had a catch: trains.
Almost every KOA we camped at was near a set of railroad tracks.
Not just “within earshot.”
I mean close.
There was a night I’ll never forget —
The headlight from a passing train lit up our tent so bright it looked like daytime under canvas.
The roar was seismic. The whole tent shook.
For a second, it truly felt like the train was coming through us.
We all froze, not in fear, exactly, but in that alert silence where you’re wondering whether this is about to become a story or a headline.
It became a story.
When it came to firewood, we never bought any.
That was part of the adventure.
We’d be driving along in our Volkswagen van — because we always had a Volkswagen van — and if we saw a stretch of woods, my dad would pull over.
My brother and I would jump out, head into the trees, and scavenge whatever we could carry.
Sticks, branches, sometimes actual logs that probably shouldn’t have qualified.
Dry wood was ideal.
We rarely found it.
Over time, we became connoisseurs of barely burnable wood.
We’d try to start fires even when it was raining.
There’s a science to coaxing fire from damp twigs and soggy bark, and we slowly learned it.
It took practice.
And patience.
And occasionally, an entire box of matches.
Once the fire was going, we’d gather around — sometimes as a family, sometimes just us kids.
And this was when my dad would tell stories.
He didn’t go in for ghost stories.
He didn’t need to.
He had movie plots.
The Blob.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
And one we called The Red Hand.
I still don’t know if it was a real movie or something he half-remembered and made better in the telling.
It had that kind of unfinished edge that made it feel truer than anything Hollywood ever shot.
He always sat on the same seat — his little campstool.
A compact marvel of rods and chains and canvas.
When folded, it was about four inches wide and half its height.
But when you flipped the legs into place and locked the tabs into the slots, it stood a good sixteen inches off the ground, solid enough to hold him steady while he spun stories under the stars.
And sometimes, as the fire crackled and the shadows danced, he’d take out his pocketknife and start to whittle.
Most of the time, nothing came of it.
Just bark curls and wood shavings in the dirt.
But every once in a while — maybe three times, total — he’d end up with something actually nice.
A small animal. A canoe. One time, a perfectly curved hook for hanging things.
They all started as sticks.
And maybe that’s how most things in our family worked.
Not polished. Not planned.
But carved slowly, with attention and time, until something useful — or at least memorable — took shape.
One of our favorite places to camp was up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
It was perfectly placed — close to hiking trails, waterfalls, and more than enough ways to wear out kids.
Within an hour’s drive, you could be on a trail, staring up at the tallest mountain east of the Mississippi, or flying down a concrete toboggan run on a plastic seat with wheels and your common sense left at the top.
But the best part came after all the adventuring was done.
At night, the world went dark.
Not “a few streetlights and porch glows” dark.
I mean dark.
The kind of dark that makes the stars look like they’ve been freshly painted just for you.
We used to lie there, staring up.
The sky was full — so full of stars that spotting satellites took effort.
But if you waited, and watched just right, you’d catch one —
a tiny dot with purpose, carving a quiet path overhead.
Even back then — in the late ’70s and early ’80s — they were up there, slipping between constellations like thoughts that didn’t want to be interrupted.
I wonder what the sky looks like now.
I wonder if the lights have drowned it out.
But back then, it was a canvas.
Black, deep, and covered in the fingerprints of God.
As I say that, I realize I sound a little like Pumbaa from The Lion King.
But you know what?
He had a point.
Unfinished.
