A Camping Memory

Before summer ends you might want to consider reading The Shaping of A Christian Home by Elizabeth Elliot. She writes beautifully of her family summer cottage in Franconia, Maine. She mentions, as I recall, that every family should have a place to get away together.

The summer of my fourteenth year Dad and Mom planned a wonderful family vacation that I will never forget. We loaded up our 1969 Chrysler and took a road trip. We tented through the Great Smoky Mountain National Park and back home by way of Washington D. C. and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. To save money we stayed in a tent and cooked our own meals on a camp stove. That stove was a real life saver and it fit in our backpack, which made the trip so much more enjoyable, it really pays off to invest in the top tactical backpack for the money. It was a wonderful vacation. Whenever we could we talked Dad into staying at a campground with a swimming pool.

We tented in a large canvass cabin tent big enough to sleep eight average-sized people who didn’t mind sleeping close enough to hear one another breathe. I remember the night we bought it. It wasn’t a cottage in Franconia, but served a similar purpose for our family.

We got so we could get that cabin tent set up in minutes after we arrived at our campsite so we could cool off in the pool before supper. Most nights I slept in my own small pup tent, a tent I earned in a newspaper sales contest. It had no floor but I improvised one from thick plastic. Each night I inflated an air mattress, unrolled my sleeping bag on it, positioned my AM radio near my pillow and went to sleep listening to baseball when I was in range of AM 700 out of Cincinnati. If we were out of range or the Reds were having an off night I went to sleep to the sound of crickets and frogs.

One memorable night in Tennessee we camped at a State Park. We set up our cabin tent under a big white pine. I went to work readying my personal tent. I lay the plastic down first then set my tent up over it. I rolled the extra plastic up in a roll and used clothes pins to clip the rolls to the side of the tent. I tried my cool gel mattress, unrolled my sleeping bag, put my radio under my pillow and tied back the tent flaps so the breeze would blow thorough.

The breeze that made music in the pine branches crescendoed into a strong wind and blew in a storm. I unrolled the tent flaps and lay back down to listen to the rain on my tent. The rain ran down the sides of my tent and the plastic rolls created a gutter which caught the rain. The water was over an inch deep on the floor of the tent and I didn’t have any idea until one of my shoes floated past my head.

My family had the happy experience of my company in the big tent that night. It must have been like having a big, wet dog sleeping on the foot of your bed. I don’t think they were very happy about it. I don’t know how they feel about it today but it is a happy memory to me.

We didn’t have a cottage in Maine. We visited my grandparents farm in Ohio on special days and for a week or so in the summer but our family doesn’t own a cabin in the mountains or a house on the lake. I doubt if we ever will. I do speak and do ministry in some beautiful places – places with water and forest, kayaks and mountain bikes, great food, hot showers, comfortable quarters and rich Christian fellowship. And I have happy memories of a family vacation in the Smokys, food outdoors, gazing into a campfire, swimming and diving with my brothers and my sister. I have memories of walking under the stars, sleeping on a picnic table, even treading water in my tent one night.

Ken Pierpont
Granville Cottage
Riverview, Michigan
May 12, 2008