Location: Unknown, maybe Mount Adams
Date: Unknown, but I was very little and I don’t think my brother was born yet so maybe 1987?
I woke up in the tent in the middle of the night. It was raining and water was pouring in from one corner. My mom and dad were frantic, yelling at each other while trying to fix the situation. My mom saw that I was awake and told me to go back to sleep. This is my earliest camping memory.

Location: Canada?
Date: 1988?
We drove somewhere far away and it was the first time I had seen weeds growing in a lake. We had a little inflatable raft my sister and I rode in on the water and I would reach down and touch the lake weeds. I think this was the same trip when I found a “secret spot” in the woods behind our camping site and would go there to play by myself.

Location: Mount Adams
Dates: 1984-1999?
Every year on Labor Day Weekend my mother’s extended family went camping and huckleberry picking on Mt. Adams. My little nuclear family didn’t go every year, but we went often.

The children didn’t have the same patience to fill old coffee cans full of huckleberries like the older folks did, but we would wander along behind them in the fields while they picked huckleberries and laughed together. My grandparents and great aunts and great uncles cooked huckleberry pancakes for breakfast and played horseshoes and card games in the afternoon.

There was a swampy area not far from the campground where we caught huge numbers of frogs. One year we decided that breathing in the campfire smoke turned us into dragons. Another year my sister and I found an old tree stump that reminded us of a throne and we took turns sitting on it pretending to be the queen. My sister got stung by a soda-pop-loving wasp on one of these trips, right on her mouth.

One time we slept in someone else’s camper instead of our usual tent. I woke up in the middle of the night and was alarmed at the complete darkness of the little alcove I was in and thought I had gone blind.

Grandma taught me the proper way to eat a Pop-Tart on one of these trips.

It was on one of these camping trips, during a rare trip to the nearest convenience store down the road, that I heard the unbelievable news that Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash.

Location: Lake Chelan, various sites
Dates: 1993-1999?
We camped at boat-in-only campsites with my dad every summer for a while after my parents got divorced. At the time, I did not realize how special the boat-in sites were or how formative these memories would be. We camped variously at Deer Point, Graham Harbor, Refrigerator Harbor, and Mitchell Creek. The campsites were maintained by the Forest Service and had a dock, picnic tables, fire rings, and often just one pit toilet. We hauled in all our water and food and firewood for the week.

Deer Point was on the north shore, very sunny. I saw a rattlesnake here once. A very large boulder sat half-submerged in the small swimming bay, and we spent all day swimming back and forth to the boulder. We quickly learned to wear water shoes or else our feet would get ripped to shreds by the rough edges of the boulder and the surrounding cliffs.

Graham Harbor was my favorite of the places we camped. The water was very cold this far up the lake, and we swam in the little harbor next to the boat dock. Graham Harbor is all granite cliffs and chipmunks, and in retrospect I’m not sure how we stayed so entertained up there for a week but we did. We had campfires constantly and told ghost stories and one night I stayed up super late while my dad told me his life story.

Refrigerator Harbor was the furthest uplake we ever camped. This is close to the public boat landing at Lucerne and the trail to Domke Lake so there was a ranger station not far away and a trickle of hikers always coming through. Not far from our tent there was a small cave carved out by miners which we enjoyed exploring. One of us drove the yellow RC truck off the edge of the dock here and my dad had to quickly run to fish it out (it survived!). I believe it was here that we tried to sleep in the boat once. My not-yet-step-sister ended up puking in the small sleeping area and we all evacuated from the smell and slept on the dock instead.

Mitchell Creek was the last place we ever camped uplake. We brought the jet ski. I can’t remember if someone drove it all the way up to Mitchell Creek or if we towed it. My dad had remarried by now and my stepmother didn’t much enjoy camping uplake. But I was getting older too. This is the first time I remember feeling bored on a camping trip.

After my dad was dead and we were searching through his stuff, I found the old Coleman cooler we used to always bring on those trips. So much was tied up in the feel of the textured green plastic under my fingertips. I wish I had saved that cooler.

Location: The Selway River, Idaho
Date: 1994?
My mom brought us on this trip. Our campsite was right on the Selway River, and we spent most of that trip jumping in the river upstream and letting it carry us downstream as far as we could safely go. I would open my eyes underwater to see the rocks flying by below my feet. I understood how the current would pull me under and keep me there if I were to get a foot caught in a waterlogged tree root or between boulders. This is where I learned the power of moving water.

My mom got sick a few days into this trip and we ended up packing up and heading to a hotel in town. She was very ill and needed a thermometer, so I was tasked with going to the nearest pharmacy and purchasing a thermometer for her. It is–I think–the first time I went out and made a purchase by myself and I was much more scared doing this than I ever was swimming in the Selway River.

Location: Mount Rainier
Date: 1995?
My dad took us to Mt. Rainier National Park. It was the first time I remember having a shower house with running water while camping. I was also unaccustomed to the big, crowded National Park campgrounds and got lost one night trying to come back from the bathroom by myself. My sister made friends with a local chipmunk and by the end of the trip the chipmunk would sit in her hand to eat peanuts. He only bit her once. Yes, my sister is the reason all the National Parks have the “don’t feed the wildlife!” posters now.