I remember standing on the campground beach beside my new friend Rosa. We gazed across the lake, both of us fixing our eyes on the little boat that was steadily moving further away from where we stood, and closer towards Rosa’s secret island.
Taking a step forward, I raised binoculars to my eyes to get a closer look. My heart sank as the jumpy, too-close images in the lenses began to reveal figures that looked familiar to me. I counted the people shapes out loud, “one, two, three, four…” oh dear, there were five people on board! Standing on this shore, I was the missing member of my six-person family. It HAD to be them on that boat!
I looked over at Rosa who was looking over at me, I could tell we both knew that boat was full of my family looking for me. We also knew that we had to get back to that island quick before they could reach it because I needed to meet them in the water, arresting any attempt by them to disembark or explore some of the secrets of the island. Rosa had made it very clear to me that everything about her must be kept secret.
You might wonder how we could beat them to the island if they were already almost there, with them in a boat, and us just standing here on the beach they were motoring away from? Well, I had a pretty good idea how we would do it, but I don’t want to give it away in the telling of this story just yet…some details can wait until later. After all, this is classified stuff you will be reading about here.
Again, I glanced at Rosa. As her calm, dark eyes met mine, I thought back to the perfectly average way this whole adventure I was having with Rosa began.
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It was just a regular camping trip that took place very early in the new century of the 2,000’s. Our family never took expensive holidays, it was always camping, and in those times, it was always roughing-it-camping.
Like every other time we went camping, we had left home just before 5am that morning, having spent at least ten minutes settling our sleepy bodies on top of, underneath, and in the middle of the softer supplies that Mom had carefully arranged like Tetris pieces in our small family vehicle the night before. Dad and Mom liked to do the driving very early in the day so that we wouldn’t get too hot in the car, and we’d be able to enjoy a long first day at the campground.
At about halfway through the trip, 7:30 or so, Dad stopped the minivan at a service station to top up the gas and buy us all a very special drink from the hugely popular Tim Horton’s restaurant. Ordinarily, we rarely bought coffee shop treats because Mom would bake bran muffins and fill three thermoses with tea, hot chocolate and coffee. So that morning, knowing our parents were planning to buy us all a treat and having thought it carefully through for weeks, I told my Dad that I wanted him to buy me a French Vanilla Cappuccino and a large peanut butter cookie.
My older brother needed the washroom and luckily, he was not in the way-back like my twin-sister and I were, so he could just climb over stuff to get to the front seats and exit out the passenger side. On previous trips, we had learned the hard way to keep the sliding door closed until we reached the campsite, many things were leaning against it and if we opened that door, they would slide out onto the parking lot! Then Mom would get frustrated while she carefully would load everything back into the van. Mom had spent hours at it that last night, carefully wedging our supplies into every available space, and it was going to be difficult to replicate that without unpacking everything and starting all over again.
I just want to emphasize this to make sure that you understand how small our mini van was, how carefully chosen our minimal camping supplies were, how we would rough it for three weeks, and how snugly everything, including our bodies, fit inside the -not extended- minivan. We packed light, but there really wasn’t much space.
As we approached the campgrounds, Mom, Joey and Dad discussed the clouds in the sky, predicting when it would rain. From what I could hear in the way-back of the car, it sounded to me like we could expect a dry set up and evening.
It was just after 10am when my family arrived at campsite number two-two-seven, our campsite and home for the next three weeks. When Mom opened the sliding door, our bodies were stiff and sweaty. Camping gear slowly tumbled out in what felt like slow motion, and we allowed our bodies to tumble out along with the sleeping bags, tarps and other supplies, laughing as we all landed, gear and all, gently on the still slightly dewy ground of our campsite.
Crawling out from the debris, we walked stiffly and clumsily around our site, stretching our aching limbs, and discussing where we would put the sleeping tent, where the vehicle should be backed in, where we should put the games tent, and whether we should move the picnic tables or not. We were lucky this year because we had two tables which meant that one table would be for sitting at to play games or eat together, and the other table would hold our hand washing station, our activity boxes, our snack boxes, and our drinks refill station.
I still remember those post-trip planning sessions to be possibly the best part of the whole camping trip.
First thing, however, was to walk to the comfort station, find some relief, and wash up a bit. On the way, we walked past the fire pit, I glanced at it with anticipation because I knew that what we all were looking forward to lighting the campfire, sitting around it, singing songs, and telling stories to each other while sloppily eating delicious, scorched food that Dad will have cooked right on the open fire.
Though comfort stations were powered with electricity, had flush toilets and sinks and showers with hot running water, and were kept clean by the campground attendants, they still always had kind of a strange smell. Pit toilets obviously had a strong smell, but these comfort stations smelled almost like a pit toilet, but with a bit of campfire smoke, strong bathroom cleaners, and the lingering scent of sunscreen and shampoo left by previous users. And something else that I could never quite put my finger on. Returning home at the end of three weeks of this, our simple house always felt like the height of cleanliness, convenience and luxury.
One by one we returned to our campsite, ready to create our holiday home the way we liked it to be. Over the years, Mom and Dad had taught us how to do every aspect of setting up; not just things like hanging tarp or how to assemble a tent, but also prediction skills like guessing where the puddles will be if it rains, or where the sun will be shining during the hottest part of the day, and privacy. We each had our assigned tasks, and we knew exactly what to do.
Mom had laid out a quick snack to fortify us before we got to work: water bottles and fresh fruit and carrots. She had bought a case of 48 water bottles, which meant that for the three weeks of camping we each got 8 water bottles for ourselves. She had labelled the caps with the first letter of each of our names: C1, C2, C3…etc., and we were expected to clean them out and re-use them. For the first few days, we could enjoy fresh fruit and vegetables. Mom never packed a cooler; instead, she packed cool food in bags or plastic bins that, when emptied and cleaned became used for something else. Our fresh food was only intended to last for the first two to three days.
The planning continued as we bit into our apples or carrots and sipped from our water bottles.
