ShawneeDispatch.com

Several images on television have gotten me to thinking about the good times we used to have in the Great Outdoors. There’s an ad for the popular tent and lantern maker, of course, and I also watch “Man vs. Wild” from time to time, which shows Bear Grylls, an ex-special forces type, hacking his way through the jungle or surviving in a snow cave in Canada or somewhere.

When we take a vacation these days, we go from motel to motel, with maybe a time-share resort or a big-city hotel thrown in once in a while for good measure – or, every so often, a bed in a family member’s home.

But it wasn’t always that way. Like a lot of guys, I got an early taste for camping in the Boy Scouts. In addition to weekend campouts and summer weeks at Scout camp, we also took a few extended trips to Canada and to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico.

As a young man and as a young father, I also camped quite a bit. Especially when the kids were young, we took quite a few camping vacations. I fondly remember several trips to the mountains in Colorado, or to the Ozarks in Missouri and Arkansas.

I even did a few solo backpacking excursions through the Hercules Glades, a wilderness area 30 miles or so east of Branson, Mo. At the time I had visions of taking my kids on an extended backpacking holiday in Colorado or Wyoming, but that never came to fruition. The logistics of supporting young children (and keeping them entertained) in the wilderness were just too daunting, I guess.

Nevertheless, we did have some great times. I remember one trip to Colorado in particular. We spent a week in a tent in Rocky Mountain National Park, and we cavorted all over the mountains. We went on a couple of ranger-led activities and struck out on our own on a few occasions.

Sometimes now we reminisce about this trip, the older two and I – our youngest daughter hadn’t come along yet at this time. The general consensus seems to be that this was, in some fashion, a high-water mark among vacations.

Later, we gentrified our camping experience by buying a small pop-top camper, and we got good use out of it. Later still, we rented a larger pop-top for another trip.

Truth be told, my desire to camp didn’t survive two developments: First of all, we got comfortable enough, financially speaking, that we could afford to stay in motels for several nights in succession; secondly, I’ve discovered that as I’ve gotten older I can no longer sleep comfortably on the ground, nor can I make it through the night without at least one trip to the – er, facilities.

Still, they were good times. Once I took the older two off to southwestern Colorado to ride the old narrow-gauge train from Durango to Silverton, and we stayed at a National Forest Service campground a few miles from Durango. As we checked in, I noticed a sign on the bulletin board that the campground had just been reopened after several days’ closure on account of “bear trouble,” which I suppose can be loosely translated as bears eating or otherwise harassing the campers. Needless to say I made doubly certain we didn’t take any candy bars into the tent with us. As I remember, I think I woke up every time the wind rustled in the trees.

Before I retired, I had the idea that we might take to the road. We could sell everything, buy an RV, and just go where the weather suits our clothes. That idea still has a lot of appeal, but thus far I’ve been unable to convince the wife, who still has a few more months to work. It’s probably just as well, I suppose. I have a feeling that that’s one of the dreams that would turn out to be a decidedly mixed blessing. I remember, a few years back, a popular country ballad about unanswered prayers.

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