How to camp
You don't need a black hole, only spreadsheets
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There’s a story my mother likes to tell about why we never went camping when I was a kid. My parents had been big campers, backpackers even, before I was born. I’ve seen pictures of them in the woods in cut-offs and leather hiking boots, their color high, looking sweaty and vital. But when I was a baby, my mother balked. “I said, Not until she’s out of diapers!” she reports. If my mother tells this story within earshot, I like to add that I must not have been potty-trained until age 14, ha ha, because that’s when we went on the first and only camping trip of my childhood, at Lincoln Creek, in Colorado. We must have been in Colorado for some other reason, I don’t know. My parents were no longer campers. I neither liked it nor disliked it. It was fine. What I remember most clearly is that, thanks to puberty or something, my scalp itched horribly. After a couple of days in the woods, back on the grid at a roadside motel, I found washing my hair to be a near-holy experience. I can still picture the shampoo I used, pink as cheeks, in a squat jug with the word JOJOBA on the side. I told my mother that it was the best shampoo, that we had to look for it at the store back home.
My first camping trip as an adult was in 2017, a total disaster that Ash and I can only now joke about, featuring my accidentally freezing our entire cooler’s worth of food, a hike that was touted as “great for kids!” but was actually a death march with scenic vistas, the dry and punishing almond-butter sandwiches that we ate on that hike, the creek that June fell backwards into while perched on a log to eat her dry and punishing sandwich, and all the poorly muffled crying I did in our borrowed tent at night, because of the above and also because of my newly-finalized divorce and the fact that the riptide that was my life seemed then that it would only continue to pull me further and further from shore, from everything I wanted, for all eternity, farewell.
But that Christmas I bought us camping gear. Somehow, I wanted to learn to camp. Car-camp, I should specify. To keep the stakes low, I bought us in at the budget level: a Coleman 6-person tent and some bulky but cozy flannel-lined sleeping bags (ours are made by Wenzel; here’s something similar). I love our tent and sleeping bags, even seven years later, and have no plans to replace any of it. Though the sleeping bags, even rolled tight and stuffed in their sacks, do take up more car-space than a beer keg, and we have three of them.
We also bought basic cots from REI, which are okay? They squeak a lot. We’ve accumulated a couple of inflatable sleeping pads too. We also now have a secondhand camping stove, a Coleman 2-person tent, this 2-room mansion that Ash found for $100+ less than its normal price, and two large storage bins with lids that I’ve slowly outfitted as a dedicated “camping kitchen.” Turns out, we already had most of what we needed for the camping kitchen in our actual kitchen-kitchen: extra aluminum mixing bowls, a wooden spoon I never liked much anyway, old and stained and/or fraying dish towels, a commercial-grade anodized aluminum saucepan from my childhood, a bag of old silverware that had been my ex-in-laws’ set when they were first married, and two small cutting boards emblazoned with a Cabot cheese company logo, sent to Spilled Milk for free, back when Cabot advertised on the show.
The rest we’ve picked up piecemeal, like a set of Hellerware melamine plates and mugs bought for $1 each(!) at a church(!) rummage sale on Lummi Island. And — wow, hey, seems like I am into writing about camping gear — you would NOT BELIEVE the pile of cheap riches to be found in the camping and household sections in the basement at Fred Meyer. There I have bought a collapsible dish tub, a nonstick griddle sized especially for a camp stove, a laminated tablecloth, a measuring cup, a box grater, a simple can opener, marshmallow roasting forks — Fred Meyer, sponsor me. Finally, we use a cooler that I think was my parents.’ I don’t remember buying it, and I don’t remember ever not having it.
By 2019, I felt like a real camper! I, Margaret Lawrence Wizenberg, know how to camp. Every time we load up, I wish we had less gear, and every time we unload at the end of a trip, it was exactly the right amount.
This past weekend was our fifth annual camping trip with a bunch of families we know through June’s school. This year there were eight families, comprising 16 adults and 18 children. One family was new to the trip, and new to camping in general; the other seven had been there for most years, if not all. We stay at the same campground every time, where we reserve the same group camp site, with a dozen secluded tent sites and a large picnic shelter that is always set with two rows of tables, enough space for us all to cook and eat. There is a rocky beach. Most of us stay for two nights, some for three. There are so many children, of such a broad span of ages, and they’ve known each other for so long, they form their own free-ranging nation-state. The adults cook meals, feed each other and each others’ children, have long conversations about everything and nothing, and lie on the beach like we’re dead. At some point every time I think I might cry, I love it that much.
Of course, Ash and I have ruined it for ourselves by having a baby. Last year’s trip was our first time with Ames, who was then five and a half months old. Typing this, I notice what I’m saying: not only are we a camping family, we camp with a BABY! I delight in this fact about my adulthood, and I also am baffled by it. Friends had assured us that camping with a baby would be easy! It is not. The problem isn’t diapers. Diapers are whatever. The issue is sleep. This past weekend was our third camping trip with Ames, now 18 months old, so I am confident in my assessment. Camping with a very young child is only for the desperate, for those who so badly want to be in the wilderness with their friends that they are willing to suffer gravely.
Before last year’s excursion, we were hopeful. We bought this little baby-tent that a friend recommended, that you set up inside your own regular-sized tent. It was called a PeaPod, and it looked roughly like a nylon duffel bag with a doggie-door. Nylon, as everyone knows, is very loud. Bedtime arrived on the first night. Ames was half-asleep in Ash’s arms: how were we supposed to insert him into the tent/bag without making a racket? Ash slowly lowered themself to a prone position, still holding the baby. Then they sort of shimmy-slash-army-crawled forward until they could extend their arms and eject Ames through the doggie door, into the darkness of his special enclosure. It was just like in Battlestar Galactica, when they’d throw someone out the airlock. Ames did sleep, briefly. Then he did not, and then we did not. The second day, we packed up and drove home.
We attempted a second camping trip later in the summer, but it too ended in an early evacuation.
This year, I faced the annual trip with dread. A couple of weeks out, Ash and I had a meeting to discuss exactly what we were afraid of, vis-à-vis Ames and nighttime sleep, and how we might avoid it. We decided to take the Pack ‘n Play portable crib, the ole tried-and-true. And, from a different friend, we borrowed a blackout canopy called the SlumberPod, which looks even more like a tent than the PeaPod. It’s so massive, we had to take the mansion tent in order to use it. You put the SlumberPod over the Pack ‘n Play, and the idea is that it’s nice and dark in there and your child will sleep no matter what. The SlumberPod promises to block “95%+ of light” — only 5% less than a black hole, I noted.
We used the SlumberPod over Ames’s crib at home for a few nights before the trip, to get him accustomed to it. No sweat! And it did work on the camping trip, too, in that Ames napped well. But at night it did nothing to muffle the nylon and zipper noises that we inevitably made as we got ready for bed and into our sleeping bags. Ames is not used to sleeping in the same room as the rest of us: while he is one of those coveted “good sleepers,” he must be in a crib, alone, in his own room, door shut, with white noise on. The SlumberPod could block light, but it could not change the fact that we were all in the same tent. Ames, upon waking and seeing us, not only cried; he brought out the guttural scream-cry he usually reserves for cutting molars. Ash and I tried co-sleeping with him, but it only made him more awake. Now he wanted to play, have fun, party all night baby-style because he must have known that a few paragraphs up I did compare our sleeping bags to kegs.
The next morning, our friend Matt, who has successfully raised two children to the ages of 12 and 15, asked if we’d happened to bring a second tent. Yes, we said, we had a 2-person tent in the car, in case June wanted to sleep on her own or with a friend. Then I highly recommend, Matt said, that you use that second tent. We set it up behind our larger tent, in the quiet shade of the woods. Then we decided to exile the baby to it. It fit the Pack ‘n Play perfectly, with mere inches to spare. (We had to forgo the SlumberPod because it was too tall, but a 2-person tent is basically a SlumberPod.) That night, we ALL slept. Matt won TIME’s Person of the Year. Now I am typing this here so I won’t forget what worked.
Still, I cannot wait until Ames is, maybe, I don’t know, five?
Anyway, I love to camp. I love camping because of the people we do it with. I don’t know that I’d ever want to camp with only my family, though I do love them. The fun is in doing it in community, being outdoors with friends and nothing to do. Hours go by, days. There is always someone napping, someone heading to the beach with sandwiches, someone slicing a watermelon, someone caring for a child. I love watching my friends parent. I love washing my face in the cold cold water of the communal spigot, knowing there’ll be a hot shower at home on Sunday night.
Fittingly, I think, what most contributes to making camping enjoyable for my household, baby or not, is something that was shared with me by a friend. It is not gear or a device or even advice, really: it is a pair of spreadsheets. They were made by my friend Natalie Riha. Natalie was among those with us on that fateful, tearful trip in 2017, and though I sort of loathed her for it that weekend, she is an A+ camper and outdoorswoman, the Mary Poppins of camping. After the trip, she shared with me two spreadsheets she uses to organize her household’s camping meals and equipment. I have adjusted them over the years to work for my household’s tastes and needs, and every time we go camping, I print them out and use them to guide me as I pack. Because of them, I never have to think about what we’re going to eat — we eat pretty much the same meals on every trip, and we all kind of love that — and I almost never worry about forgetting something.
You can VIEW the spreadsheets here: camping meals and equipment
And for paying subscribers, HERE is where you can make a copy of the spreadsheets to alter and adjust to your own uses, or share with friends:
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