Tent Musings

Max and Clover

It is a simple recipe for glorious and perfect frivolity:
1) Make your children hike all day in the glaring sun.
2) Feed your children a high salt dinner full of preservatives and nitrites.
3) Give your children a generous handful of M and Ms.
4) Instruct your children to brush their teeth (all of them) and spit the toothpaste a good distance from the campsite to avoid attracting bears.
5) Allow the sun to set and the stars to announce their presence and the nighttime cold to bite and pinch just a little, then instruct your children to bed down in the tent.
6) Tell the children to read for no more than 10 minutes then it's lights out.
7) Shush the children gently as they get settled.


So as your children settle in the tent, and you sit on the log outside watching the familiar constellations emerge like long-awaited friends walking up the front steps for dinner, you notice the silence in the tents and the hesitant turning of pages within as if the readers are really not that interested in reading. All creation awaits...


Then, as shyly as a mouse poking its thimble-sized head over a nearby rock, a hesitant little fuchi welcomes the night from within the tent. (Fuchi: Spanish, Mexican slang, noun or verb: stinky; flatus or the passing of flatus). Like counting the seconds after lightening strikes until the thunder peals, there is a brief pause, then an abrupt eruption of synchronized, diaphragmatic laughter. The silence around the campsite is broken and every bear, marmot, rodent and cricket in your Sierran quadrangle scatters for cover.


It's all over now. The fuchis follow in quick succession. Some are short and declarative like those airhorn blasts at Giant's games. Others are symmetrical and nondescript. Some are polite and demure like a slender bride mingling with her guests at the wedding reception. Some are like the wind through the trees. And still others are full of bravado and flare like an untied and over-inflated balloon which has been released from your grasp.


The laughter is now unbridaled. As you note the yellow star, Arcterus, coming into view, you realize you have lost all control of your children. They are now uproarious and hitting each other over the head with their pillows. Books are tossed aside and sleeping bags are hastily unzipped. The kids are bouncing up and down on their Thermarests. Their headlamps within cast raucous shadows on the tent walls.


The tents are wavering North and South and East and West as if battered by the wind at Camp IV on Mt. Everest and are precariously close to toppling. They seem to be shimmying off their tarps. A tent pole suddenly comes unsecured and the tent collapses and the laughter intensifies. The tent is now a rolling mass of nylon sheen migrating clumsily over the pine needles, across the campsite and toward the lake. The children seem to be wrestling inside. They are all wound up with their sleeping bags like towels which have twisted together in the dryer.


Sleep is long-off, you realize. There is too much adrenaline, the good kind of adrenaline, and you know the kids will have tousled hair, red faces and hot ears. "Settle down," you say pathetically, knowing that it is hopeless. Sleep will come only when the horizon greys with the approaching dawn. It will be a long night.

Henry Wide-eyed

Sammy Highlighted