Backyard Adventure

Sam and I had our first camping adventure on Friday night. It was in the wilds of our postage stamp- sized back yard. The planning for this started several weeks ago- on my part, that is.

I started by dropping a few hints that camping might be fun to try. These hints were met with deafening silence. It slowly worked up to the point of getting actual responses, starting with “Maybe”. Then “Maybe” started to give way to, “We’ll see”, and I felt like I was making progress. Finally, Sam started with his, “That sounds interesting” response, which can sometimes mean “I have no interest in this whatsoever”, but sometimes it doesn’t- so that was good enough for me.

I set a date. I told him we would aim for an upcoming Friday night, about three weeks away. Sam’s only concern was whether we would still have our traditional “Monk Night”, which of course, we would, so we were on our way.

Over the weeks, I scavenged together some items from the basement- a lantern, a travel clock, a radio and an air mattress.

When I got home from work on Thursday, I cleared away some stuff on a patch of our so-called lawn out back, making way for a place to set up the tent. Sam gently relocated a slug or two that he found after I had moved the other junk, then we laid out some plastic and began to set up the tent.

Sam’s pretty good at assembling things, so we got the tent up in good shape, which is to say, the door was facing the right way and it looked like an actual tent.

 On Friday, I stopped at the store on my way home from work and I bought a couple of sleeping bags. I’m pretty sure there’s at least one sleeping bag up in our attic, but finding it wasn’t going to happen. Not his week anyway. But that’s a whole other story.

Anyway, after getting Sam some dinner, we took turns pumping up the air mattresses using a foot pump and then we dragged the mattresses out to the tent and squeezed them inside. We brought out the travel clock and set up the lantern and our sleeping bags and then we went inside to take our showers, make popcorn and watch “Monk”.

After Monk was over, we got ready for bed, Sam grabbed an armful of his favorite “guys” and, flashlight in hand, we headed into the wilderness- fifteen feet from the back porch. Heading out the door, the motion detector clicked on and the flood lights filled lit up both the yard and the tent for the next ten minutes or so. The air outside was cool but the tent felt stuffy as Sam and I got situated. 

After a spell, the light clicked off and Sam and I lay there and looked at the shadows on the tent cast from some distant light shining through the trees. And we talked about how the noises from far away cars seemed so much louder out there. And then Sam decided that it might be a good idea if he went to the bathroom one more time.

He grabbed the flashlight and his slippers and I followed him into the house, the flood lights clicking back on as we headed toward the back porch. A few minutes later, with the lights still on, we climbed back into the tent and got situated once again. The lights clicked off and we resumed our conversation. And then Sam decided that perhaps going to the bathroom just one more time would be a good idea. This time, he wanted to head into the house alone.

Back at the ten, he lay down and we said “goodnight”, again. He patted the top of the travel clock over the next several minutes, lighting it up to see the time. I reached over and patted his hand, telling him if he needed anything-anything, to wake me up, that it was no problem. He patted my hand in return and we both drifted off to sleep.

I awoke somewhere around 3:30 to find that the earlier stuffiness in the tent was long gone and it was now pretty cool. I zipped the window panels closed as quietly as I could, and reached over to Sam, finding he was partly on top of the extra blanket we had taken along. I slid it out slowly and covered him up and lay back down to hear a whispered, “Thanks”.

Around 5:00 AM,  the tent was lit up bright with the almost dawn. From the small patch of woods at the end of the road, a bird was singing loudly, happy, I’m assuming, that he made it through the night. I blinked and looked over at Sam to find he was looking back at me. I asked him, “Do you want to go back inside and use the bathroom? Then you can climb back in your bed.” It sounded good to him.

We climbed out of you tent. I looked down at the heavy dew beneath my feet and Sam looked up at the sky and said, “Oh look! The moon’s still out!”. We watched for a second or two and listened to the bird singing, then we headed back inside.

Once upstairs, I covered Sam in his bed and he rolled over and slept for another three hours. Our adventure was over, for this night, at least.

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Today, we  took down the tent. We packed it away along with the air mattresses and the sleeping bags, the travel clock and the lantern and we put it in a tub and we're making a list of everything we'll need- for when we go camping the next time.