Nostalgia Camping

Without my father’s encouragement, I never would have joined Cub Scouts as a child, and then never been a Boy Scout, and thus probably never grown to love camping as much as I do. So it is entirely appropriate, even necessary, that I head out for a roughing-it weekend at least once a year with Dad.

It’s been four years since our last camping trip, and before that it must have been at least two years. As we’ve both gotten older and our lives have changed (he’s retired, I live in Chicago), we’ve had less and less opportunity to pitch a tent, hike all day, eat hobo pies, and toast marshmallows over the pulsing coals of a campfire. But this year, despite our busy schedules (in his retirement, he works part-time for a former retail giant; after quitting a steady high school teaching job, I now work two jobs that keep me busy 24/7), we made the time for a weekend at Yankee Springs State Park in Middleville, Michigan.

My first hike in the woods was probably at Yankee Springs. I grew up in Hastings, which isn’t far from Middleville, and Dad still has, somewhere, a picture he took of me and my sister sitting on a carpet of brown pine needles near smooth trunk of a pine tree; an army-surplus backpack lies open at our feet and I’m holding a half-full bag of potato chips. Anne’s holding a half-full two-liter of Pepsi. In those days, I guess that was Dad’s idea of a good trail snack. I’m not sure exactly where in Yankee Springs Dad took that picture, but I’m sure it was at Yankee Springs, somewhere near Hall Lake, on the Hall Lake Trail, a hiking route Dad and I have trekked many times since, including this past Saturday.

We’ve upgraded our trail food in the years since then. I’ve always got at least two bottles of water and a couple of granola bars with me; Dad carried the trail mix this time. But one thing hasn’t changed: Dad still loves to take pictures. Years ago, he had a Minolta Maxxum 5000 SLR camera with a wide-angle and a telephoto lens. He took that thing everywhere, took pictures of everything: the scenery, his children, other people, his students (he was a sixth-grade teacher and then a principal), and he’d even set the self-timer and get into the frame once or twice himself. But as he got older, the camera got heavier, and I “borrowed” it for a photojournalism class or two in college. He stopped taking so many pictures. In some ways it was a nice break. In others, Dad just wasn’t Dad unless he was snapping pictures of everything that caught his eye.

A few Christmases ago, Anne and I went in on a Kodak digital camera for him: smaller, lighter, and with an almost unlimited capacity for pictures (sure, there’s a limit, but not even Dad takes 200 pictures on one trip). This thing fits in the palm of his hand, and has almost as many settings as his old Minolta (which is now sitting in my closet somewhere). He loves it, and puts it to use at every family function: his grandsons’ birthdays, holidays, when we built a retaining wall around the deck a few years ago, and, of course, whenever we go camping.

During this outing, not only did Dad take pictures of our campsite, our tent, our backpacks as they hung from two trees, various odd-looking trees around our campsite, a family we don’t even know as they fished from a skiff on the lake, but Dad took pictures of me, and of us, in the same spots, in almost the exact same poses, as he did four years ago. For some reason I have yet to figure out, Dad has a special affinity for old, large, many-branched trees that look like something out of The Wizard of Oz. As we passed one such tree, which I recognized as soon as I saw it, our conversation went something like this:

Dad: Let’s get a picture of us near this tree.

Me: You mean just like we did four years ago?

My smile as I said those words started out sardonic, but soon turned cheerful as the shared memory passed between us on the quick and good-natured you-smart-aleck-type-glance that Dad shot me as soon as the words left my mouth. Yes, we had taken pictures near this same tree four years ago. And yes, we’d do it again, because this was a new camping trip, and because taking pictures is what we do on camping trips, and camping is what Dad and I do together.

And when I camp solo, to wilder and rougher places than Yankee Springs, places too far out of the way for Dad these days, I take pictures of my campsite, and my tent, and my pack as it hangs from a tree, and strange-looking trees and vegetation, and every so often, I set the self-timer and get into the frame myself, because I know if Dad were there, that’s the kind of picture he’d take.