Fun! Fun? Fun. An American weekend
Adventures in the Great Outdoors now more complicated for Camping Dad
Camping Dad has complicated feelings about the voyage on which he currently finds himself.
On the one hand, Camping Dad fondly remembers his own childhood hours in the back of a minivan, squabbling with his sister until the rolling nuclear family screeched to a halt and piled out to gaze across iconic vistas. Pitching tents in the middle of an army encampment, full not with soldiers but rather other minivan-borne families with screaming children and barking dogs, eating charred hot dogs and running terrified from bathrooms that housed insects the size of bats.
Well, maybe not so complicated.
Regardless, Camping Dad knows that time outdoors is part of the American Experience — or at least, not quite having the cash to go to Hawaii or Disneyland but figuring that a road trip to a state park might do the trick. So they went.
Camping Dad hadn’t planned for this, exactly. Kids had always been something of a pleasant abstraction, after he’d made it a few more rungs up in management and had time to concern himself with passing on genetic material. Seems like only yesterday that he was taking fishing trips with his buddies, just guys and a few six-packs and some smallmouth bass.
But the fishing trips shrank over the years, as the buddies paired off and produced young. And then, BLAM. Don’t you know male fertility declines too? she said. So, the kids arrived, demanding attention. After a few years of taking the toddlers to see family, where Grandma would take them off his hands for a blessed few hours of peace, the time came to strike out on their own.
There are things Camping Dad can get into. His gleaming maroon new Town and Country, for example, which he’d debated buying for weeks before deciding they could afford the lease payments if he got the year-end bonus he was expecting — an investment, he reassured her. Full of more gadgets than a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, including a surround-sound entertainment system (for the kids) and adjustable lumbar support (for his aching back).
It’s no super-luxe RV, but nothing to be ashamed of, should he run into Thorsten from Accounting while on the road somewhere.
And Camping Dad is not immune to the charms of the great outdoors. If he doesn’t drink too many beers the night before and patches the air mattress just right, he can put on an old T-shirt with his college logo almost washed out of it and go for a jog in the early morning mist. Puffing and red-faced but feeling like he’d look great if he could do this a few mornings a week, he forgets for a moment the pile of contracts waiting for him at his desk back at the office, the creeping feeling that his most recent promotion might be the last he sees in a long time.
And then Camping Dad returns to the campsite, where raccoons have gotten into the poorly strung-up garbage bag and little Billy has burned himself on a hot coal hiding in the dead campfire and Natalie is wailing about her mosquito bites and Camping Mom is wondering WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU don’t you know there’s NO CELL RECEPTION HERE what did you THINK I WAS GOING TO THINK HAPPENED?
Camping Dad wonders whether his own dad had to deal with this.
Kids used to behave, when he was young. Things were less crowded. Camping Dad isn’t partisan, exactly — he’d vote for a Democrat if he felt they could do the job — but he feels like life was just easier when he was growing up in the ’80s.
Then Camping Dad scoops up Billy and digs some burn cream out of a seat-back pocket in the Town and Country and the quiet returns, for a moment. Relax, he tells himself. After all, it’s the weekend.