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

Beware the Kitchen Cupboard

Every family designates a kitchen cupboard for cleaning products. Ours contains Windex, shoe polish, 409, Ajax, Soft Scrub, Murphy Oil Soap, Pine-Sol (I love that smell!) and hidden in the rear of the cupboard, unused and untouched, a canister full of Raid Wasp and Hornet Killer. Printed on the can are dire warnings like "do not spray into eyes" and "do not use for unintended purposes." I'm sure Sam, Max and Henry could think of many unintended uses for this spray. It's a good thing, therefore, that it remains concealed and out of reach.

As an aside, pest control has always interested me. In fact, I took an aptitude test in 9th grade, and the results said I should either be a french horn player or a pest control specialist. I would love to drive one of those pest control vans with the big ant on the roof or a black widow spider painted on the side flashing its red hourglass at passing cars. Now to do so while playing the french horn? That would be really cool!

Anyway, growing up in Santa Cruz many years ago, our friend Steve was asked by his mother to use the dust spray to clean the beautiful, black, shiny Yamaha grand piano in the living room. Steve reached up into the kitchen cupboard and unwittingly pulled out the canister of Easy Off Oven Cleaner rather than the Endust dust spray. Not really looking at the spray canister, he asked his mother, "So how do I use this stuff?" His mother was folding clothes in the next room. "Just spray it all over the piano, dear, wait for 15 minutes, then wipe it off with a clean cloth," she answered.

Truth be told, Steve was simply following directions. Within moments after Steve sprayed the oven cleaner onto the piano, its surface started making a crackling sound like Rice Crispies. The piano finish was soon warping and bubbling. It dripped a thick, black fluid onto the shag carpet which coalesced and oozed its way into the den like a lava flow inching down a road in Hawaii. A mist formed and hovered over the floor at knee-level.

I will spare you the details of what transpired afterwards, but suffice it to say, the laundry remained unfolded, the family dog, Scruffy, developed a incurable skin ailment and Steve never had to dust again.

Ants and Amigos

"Do you have anything else besides Mexican food?"

(Dusty Bottoms, from The Three Amigos)

"The bird will work!"

(Flick, from A Bug's Life)

I suspect that my blog followers (all two of them) have seen the movies The Three Amigos and A Bug's Life. Today while I was flossing and staring at myself in the mirror, I realized that these movies share identical themes.


In both movies, the small town characters (the people of Santa Polco in Amigos and the ants in Bug's Life) are terrorized by bullies (El Guapo in Amigos and Hopper, the grasshopper, in Bug's Life). The bullies demand payment from the town characters. Otherwise, there will be mayhem and destruction.


Along come performers (the silent movie stars in Amigos and the the circus performing insects in Bug's Life) who agree to protect the town characters, unwittingly thinking they are performing, but later realizing that they are actually not performing. It is all real. ("They're real," the Steve Martin character whimpers in Amigos when he realizes the truth after being shot, "The bullets are real.") Instead of trying to escape unscathed, they all decide to remain, using their performing skills and risking their lives to save the townfolk.


These themes are wound around superb acting, and one can't help but rejoice while experiencing the pathos and the redemption embodied in the characters. These elements are highlighted in the climactic scenes of both movies: in Amigos, when Ned Nederlander, played by Martin Short, exclaims "Sew very old woman! Sew like the wind!" and in Bug's Life, when the paripatetic pill bugs point at the attacking bird and hysterically warn, "Tweet tweet! Tweet tweet!"


My life-long friend, Clifford (not the Big Red Dog), was also flossing recently*. As he stared at himself in the mirror, he realized that the plots of Hamlet and Disney's The Lion King are also similar. Imagine that! Or how about Bambi and King Lear?

I have also backpacked with Clifford, and one of our trips shared thematic elements with both The Titanic and Tora Tora Tora. On this trip, among other things which went catastrophically haywire, we ran out of food. For our last dinner we enjoyed the remnant crumbs of six Ritz Crackers.






(*Clifford has all 32 of his teeth. This includes his wisdom teeth! Also, he has never had a cavity or a bad hair day)