Wimp spell finally broken
There’s a kind of outdoorsy person who will ride 75 miles on a bike trail, but must sleep in a hotel bed that night. The other kind of outdoorsy person considers that cyclist a wimp because she won’t sleep in a tent.
I am the wimp.
In all my years and many thousands of miles of cycling, I’ve never slept in a tent along a trail. In fact, I’d gotten to this advanced age having never spent an entire night in a tent anywhere. That would include the tent we pitched in the backyard of our house in Finleyville – a large canvas thing down under the trees that we used mostly for daytime play. The few times we ventured down there at night in our pajamas with flashlights to “camp out” with our dad, we barely made it to 10 p.m. before we were all homesick, and so back up to the house we went.
A few weeks ago, the wimp spell was finally broken, not along a bike trail but in a campground. A friend, best described as wonderfully earthy, suggested I give it a try. He’d camped in national parks and along trails all his life, carrying everything he needed on his back. This night in a tent would be, in his estimation, the bed-and-breakfast version of camping, something fit for a wimp. We carried the tent and gear not on our backs but in our cars.
Things were already set up when I arrived to the campsite, an orange triangular tent sitting on a patch of bare ground with woods all around. We attached an air pump to the car’s electric to inflate our beds – two air mattresses. When they were fully puffed up, we slid them into the tent.
The next hours were filled with woodsy things: hikes to the lake and sitting in sling chairs and eating mountain pies and hot dogs roasted on sticks over a fire. And then it was time to test my outdoorsy mettle. I loaded in all my accoutrements: water, bug spray, inhaler, chapstick, phone, hand cream – and crawled in after it.
One of the mattresses had sprung a leak, leaving it shrunken and withered compared to mine.
“You can have the good one,” my friend said.
And so I climbed aboard a mattress so fully pumped it was shaped like a dome. I perched atop it like the Princess and the Pea, looking down upon my kind, expert camper as he lay on his sinking ship, which was becoming nothing but a rubber tarp.
Here’s the thing about air mattresses: they are slippery. Each time I moved, I would slide off the dome and land in the space between his mattress and mine. As I struggled to stay aloft, I thought about the people in the neighboring sites, sleeping in their tricked-out campers with air conditioning and TVs and real beds.
“I don’t see the point in that,” said my earthy tent mate as he pushed me back up my mattress hill.
I could not sleep – a combination of falling into the crack, all the foisting back up, and the noisy campers, who by midnight were not heeding the 10 p.m. lights-out rules. My tent mate unzipped the tent window and yelled out.
“Sweet dreams!”
Then, all was quiet except for the squeak of my mattress. I think I finally gave up and wedged myself between the mattress and the back tent wall and fell asleep. I woke to birds singing, and the sound of breakfast sizzling on the campfire.
We had s’mores for breakfast.