Both my parents grew up in the Depression and carried all the baggage of frugality that went along with that. If you’re my age and grew up in the U.S. you’re probably also familiar with reused plastic bags from bread loafs drying by the sink, getting ready to be packed with lunches and then brought back and washed and reused again. The twist ties were saved in the cutlery drawer. My father would pick up usable nails if he saw them on the street and bring them back to his workbench. My mother, beaming, would present us with a penny she had found on a dog walk. “You can put it in your piggy bank!”
Mom and Dad found joy in their frugality. My two brothers and I found it embarrassing.
Particularly their penchant for finding ways to spend family time together on the cheap. They may have even been the originators of the “staycation,” in which we all got a chance to catch up on our reading.
This was not the way we pictured family holidays. We lived only three hours from the ocean, for God’s sake! At least once we wanted to be able to answer the question “Are you going to the beach this summer?” with “yes, all of August!”
Our family spent a lot of time outdoors, hiking in the woods and national park near our home outside of Washington, D.C. That was fine, as far as it went. An afternoon soaking up Vitamin D and walking briskly—good for the soul. As long as we were home by dinnertime. But as we grew older, had more stamina and slept reliably through the night, my parents’ ideas grew more ambitious. And not in the direction of a week in the Caribbean.
Camping.
I don’t know where my parents found our first tents. They may not have even been sold as tents and had some other purpose entirely, but my parents felt inventive. And thrifty. They were like huge orange plastic garbage bags, slightly heavier than a Hefty bag, cut open at both ends, about 10 feet long. You ran a rope through the tube, tied both ends of the rope to a tree, and, voilà, there you had it. Two to one tube, three to the other, lying side by side. A plastic tube tied with rope to two trees. A sort of triangular shape, a sort of shelter. Without a rain fly or zipper. Open to all weather elements. To be enjoyed with flannel Boy Scout sleeping bags.
We tried them out at a campground somewhere in West Virginia during a 24-hour downpour. My parents had reserved a spot for two tents (“and four trees, please”) for a long weekend. And then presumably forgot to check the weather report.
We drove up there in our Opel squareback, which was listed as “comfortable for 4 occupants”. We had started out about half-way through the storm and learned on the drive that the defroster didn’t work, so my mother wiped down the windshield for 3 hours.
Remarkably, the campsite was not empty, but it was devoid of tents, and especially our special type of tent. All the other families were in warm and dry vans or RVs, eating their meals which they prepared in the RV or under a canopy. Hell, they could have gone out for takeout and eaten it at their table, dining at the same time they could be endlessly entertained by the sight of my family trying to cook and bed down in a deluge of rain that lasted all night and soaked us through and through.
Pitching your tent is the first order of business. Amazingly, we discovered our rope length and tree distance apart worked well together. Easiest tents in the world to set up. String your rope through, tie two basic knots and you’re done. Unroll the sleeping bags in preparation for dark and set a flashlight by each tent opening.
Second order of business, “go find dry kindling, kids.” Yes, my parents were planning to cook dinner over an open fire.
We came back with very wet kindling to put on top of the logs we had brought from home. My father added wet newspaper to jumpstart the process, then lit a match which stayed lit about one second. My parents thought lighter fluid was environmentally unsound.
There was no fire. We ate crackers and cheese for dinner.
It was getting dark, so we started preparing to settle down. I looked over at the closest tent and saw two steady streams of water dripping from the edge of the tent onto my sleeping bag. We bedded down in full rain gear, spent a sleepless night, and woke sodden.
We had become the human version of reused plastic bags.
“We’re leaving, right?” we asked at dawn, stunned by the misery of the night.
“We have two more days,” our mother answered. “That we’ve paid for.”
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Julia Wilson lives outside of Washington, D.C. She is a retired lactation consultant and recently received her M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. She has been published in Bethesda Magazine, The Baltimore Review, A Plate of Pandemic, 101 Words, and the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop blog.