Here it is only the middle of February and all I can think about is "I want winter to go away". Well that and I spend a lot of time reminiscing about growing up and stuff, which means reminiscing a lot about various camping trips as we did a lot of that. I've talked a bit about backpacking with my dad before, but I haven't mentioned the other type of camping we did - trailer camping. For various reasons Mom wasn't into playing pack mule and hiking ten miles to freeze to death sleeping on the hard ground at some god-forbidding alpine puddle. She did, however like camping in the trailer.

The notable thing about these trips - and there were several - was that they always seemed to include a mishap or three. Often these mishaps centered around bodies of water - water and Mom were something of a bad mix. Now I'm not saying Mom was bad luck or anything, but it did seem to know where to find her.

I think it was the very first trip after my parents got the first trailer that we were tooling down the highway when someone started ramming into us from behind. The culprit was our very own newly aquired trailer. It seems Mom didn't get the hitch on the ball properly, and moreover, she tied the chains to the truck with string! This was our first clue that maybe trailers and Mom were not a good match...

Mom and bodies of water weren't a good match either. We figured this out rather quickly when, on her very first ride in my brother Dirk's new boat, she knocked him into the lake. Another time, the details of which I think I've mentally blocked, she found herself paddleless floating downstream in a canoe. She of course yelled for my dad for help. Alas, Dad never learned to swim, so he had to resort to running down the bank along side of her. So for about half a mile they went downstream together, yelling "Frank!" "Barbara!" "Frank!" "Barbara!" back and forth to each other until finally the current carried Mom up against the bank.

Not that Dad didn't have his own problems with bodies of water, nor was this the only time he ran down the bank chasing after something. Like the time he lost his "coffee pot" in the White River. He followed it downstream to where the water slowed and looked only to be about a foot deep, and waded in after it. Well, the White River is deceptively clear - he went in over his head! Luckily the current was in his favor.

I put "coffee pot" in quotes, by the way, because what it was was a three-pound coffee can with a baling wire handle he rigged up. This was his usual coffee pot, except sometimes he didn't bother making the handle. He'd dump a couple cups of coffee into the can, fill it with water, and bring it to a boil. Talk about your road tar! The stuff was darn near lethal! But what really amazed me beyond him actually drinking the stuff, was the way he'd reach into the fire and snag out this boiling hot can of "coffee" with his bare fingers. But then he could never fathom how I could stand there talking to someone for fifteen minutes or so with a handful of ice cubes melting away in my hand, so I guess we're even.

Another one of Dad's body-of-water mishaps found him drifting across the lake trying vainly to paddle back to shore with his hands. Now how this came about I haven't a clue. I wasn't along on this trip, and my brother Colin seems to be as good at blocking unpleasant details from his mind as I am. What he does remember is Mom sent him out to rescue dad, so he started swimming out after him. Hearing Mom screaming from the shore, he turned to see what she was screaming about, only to be hit full in the face with the life jacket Mom threw him. By the time he recovered from that Dad was out of reach, so he returned to shore. Nothing to do then but wait for the wind to propel Dad clear across the lake, through the midst of the power boats and water skiers, to the safety of shore where he could begin the arduous task of dragging the raft back halfway around the lake.

Our longest and most significant trailer trip was the three-week trip to Mazatlan, Mexico. There were too many mishaps on this trip to begin to tell them all, but the highlight was probably when Mom & Dad left Dirk & me in a little town in Mexico. The name of the town I can't remember how to spell, but it sounds a lot like "hot-on-the-beanpole". Dad stopped to get some cigarettes. Dirk and I got out to see why we stopped just in time to turn around and watch the truck and trailer take off down the road. Luckily for us they only went another two hours down the road before stopping at a campground. Also luckily for us we had the sense to stay put right on the corner where they left us. When Colin discovered we weren't in the back of the truck and told our folks, my Dad just looked at Mom and said "You Drive". Dad was a pokey driver: Mom was the speed demon. They dropped the trailer and took off like the proverbial bat out of hades to come get us. Having a couple kids lost in Mexico motivated Mom to make the trip back in just over an hour!

Of course, almost as amusing was the rainy night they unknowingly left the road to drive half a mile over a rock shelf - gaining about 300 feet in elevation in the process - to come to a screeching halt at the edge of a sheer cliff. After figuring out their mistake, they drove back down the shelf and found the road. By then it was raining so hard they were inching along looking for a place to pull over for the night, finally deciding to pull over pretty much on blind faith hoping we didn't drive into the ocean or something. Well, we didn't drive into the ocean, but we woke the next morning to find we'd parked in some Mexican family's front yard. Boy, were their kids ever staring at us when Dirk and I climbed out of the camper shell...

Anyway, this is pretty much how it went on all the trailer trips. If it wasn't trailer mishaps, driving mishaps, or water mishaps, then it was ghosts or something (See for example my Poltercamp blog entry) Ironically, all these trailer trips, including the one I went on with friends last summer, and I've yet to spend a single night in a camping trailer. I always ended up in the camper shell or in a tent.

Late one such night, when Dirk and I were relegated to the tent, Mom decided she'd had enough of sitting around the campfire and decided to head into the trailer and go to bed. Somebody at some point must have told her about a straight line being the shortest distance between two points, because that's what she took - straight into the campfire! Much screaming and highly-energetic dancing ensued before we were able to drag her back out of the fire. We even managed to rescue one of her shoes from the fire before it burned up. But her other shoe we didn't find until the next morning, some 30 feet from the campfire. Now, I'm not going to come out and say that the copious amounts of bourbon and coke she had been drinking had anything to do with her deciding to try firewalking....

All these trips taught me something very important about parenting - not that I'll ever be a parent - but important still. It's not the gifts you give your kids they'll remember, though one or two they might (like the geology pick Dad gave me for my 8th birthday that I still have), but the things that you do with them that they'll remember and cherish forever.

P.S. - The big news: Colin just got picked up by a literary agent! Way to go little brother, you rock!