Going Outdoors

A few day ago I disposed of some of my 50-year-old camping gear (all still in excellent condition, if well-worn) as a gift to a friend. While we were sorting through the gear he asked, “When did you start camping?”

The answer depends on what you call “camping.”

His definition was “Sleeping outside, overnight, in a tent or on the ground.”

That would be my answer, too, but that puts my solo camping age at about 13. My parents were fairly fundamentalist Methodists and insisted that their motley hoard of kids and step-kids to go church every Sunday for a minimum of 3 painful, pointless, irrational hours. I was functionally an atheist from about 9 on, after my mother died painfully and terribly from liver cancer at 34. I particularly disliked my parents’ church because the members were absolutely cynical about the contradiction between the “money-changers in the temple” and the cars, appliances, houses, and other crap that was being bought-and-sold before,during, and after the services. Kansas Christians are, at best, a confusing lot.

Not long after my family moved to a new development in the north end of town (the far north at the time), I discovered that the two “adults” in our family were what I would later learn are “classic Republicans.” They had, literally, no sense of proportion; especially when it came to punishment. From being beaten to being grounded to losing various privileges (of which there were few-to-none), the punishment was pretty much uniform relative to the crime. Leave a sock on the laundry room floor, get smacked, screamed at, and banished to your room. Skip school for a day, get smacked, screamed at, and banished to your room. Run away to Kansas City for a long weekend to watch jazz bands on 13th Street until the cops caught me, called my parents, and put me on a bus back home,get smacked, screamed at, and banished to my room. I learned fairly early, might as well go big if I’m going at all.

There were a collection of the remnants of abandoned and demolished buildings, from the Saint Mary of the Plains College that was destroyed by a tornado in 1942, across the highway from our development. One side of the highway was a bunch of middle class houses and the other was a field with some scrubby cottonwoods and lots of weeds and a scattering of exposed basements from whatever building was there before a tornado ripped it down to ground level. Once I discovered those hiding places, it was only a matter of time before I decided to risk the uniform-punishment-treatment for a peaceful evening and a day without religious nonsense. My room was in the basement and I could easily scramble out my bedroom window late Saturday night, shut the window from the outside, sneak into the garage and snag my Boy Scout sleeping bag, my binoculars, a flashlight, and a canvas tarp/ground cloth, and run down the street and across the highway where I hopped the fence and headed for one of the basements that I’d previously made ready for habitation. Earlier in the week, I’d scavenged a short wooden ladder and an end table from a neighbor’s trash and a bunch of candles from our garage and had set out a pile of comic books for entertainment.

I’d spend the night reading comics until I fell asleep in my bag. The sun or cold would wake me up in the morning and I’d watch the street in front of our house until the family station wagon rolled out of the driveway and headed south to church. After a safe margin of time, I’d sneak back home, put away my gear, have breakfast, mess around for a couple of hours, and go to bed and pretend to be asleep when the crowd came home. When one of the “adults” wandered down to look in my room, I’d get smacked, screamed at, and banished to my room. Sometimes there would be an additional chore added to my long list of tasks. No matter what the punishment, it was never as bad as going to church would have been. Over the years it turned into a game, but I could usually outwait my father; and my step-mother didn’t really care if I ever came back. Eventually, they gave up, allowing me to stay home if I cooked Sunday dinner; usually fried chicken.

The summer I turned 15, I had found a farm job that gave me a whole summer’s cover and a place to stay for the first few weeks of spring. I’d be at the farm for winter wheat harvest and spring planting and guys from the band I was in could come by around mid-May and pick me up for the summer’s tour. During my senior high school year, I stayed in a collection of places from my step-grandparents’ basement to the 20’ trailer I rented when I was working road construction, to a lean-to I built about 5 miles west of Dodge on the Arkansas River. Being underage, I was occasionally hauled back to my father’s home by the cops, but I wandered off fairly quickly and found a new place to hide out during the brief hours the cops would bother looking for me. After my senior year, everyone quit worrying about me and I was on my own from then on.