I love traveling with a tent. It creates a sense of freedom, trust, and independence that is absent when I walk into a motel room, lock the door, switch on the air conditioner, and flick the remote. I have car camped, backpacked, and bike toured around Asia and the United States and all of these modes of travel bring me closer to people, closer to nature, and closer to myself than if I stayed in hotels along the way.
I recently returned from a car camping trip out West with my family. Most of the places that we went in West Texas, New Mexico and Southern Colorado were places that I wanted to show my boys since they had meaning to me from previous trips. We camped under the penetrating sun of the Guadalupe Mountains, beneath cool Pinon Pines near Santa Fe, within fifty yards of a 1200-year-old Anasazi ruin at Chaco Canyon, and ten feet from the crashing waters of Bear Creek at the Telluride City Campground -- and at each place we met and interacted with people and nature in a way that we couldn’t have if we had locked a motel door behind us. There was the probation officer we met at Hyde State Park who had bike toured from Chattanooga, our friends the McGraths with whom we rendezvoused at Chaco, and the Catholic Cardinal and his friend from Flagstaff who were four-wheeling around Telluride. Each morning we woke around sunrise and were in bed soon after sunset, reading either our individual books or our out-loud book, Journey to the Center of the Earth. Our rhythms quickly matched the natural cycles of the Earth, and it became more comfortable to sleep on the ground than in a bed. We made up games at campsites. I loved pinecone bocci ball, but my sons preferred throwing pinecone hand grenades. The boys whittled, chased small animals, and climbed rocks while Elizabeth and I made supper or read.
There was some whining, complaining, and restlessness -- but it seemed to diminish as we went deeper into the trip. The boys learned to be more patient, to manage their time, to find ways to overcome boredom, to deal with loneliness, and to be physically uncomfortable. They saw so much -- bats swirling out of Carlsbad Caverns, lush springs in the middle of the desert, blooming agave, 700-foot-tall sand dunes, tiny Permian fossils, Anasazi petroglyphs, hot springs, pronghorn antelope, thunderstorms racing across the plains, and a sky that never seemed to end. We were a family together every hour of every day for three weeks, rarely leaving each others’ sides.
I sometimes forget in the rush of daily life that being together as a family is more important than anything. As the school year progresses, and the stress of too much to do in too little time hammers away, I will be sustained by the memory of listening to the steady breathing of my family as they slept under the dome of our tent surrounded by the great Western night.
