I baled hay well into the night when the conditions were finally right and I still had windrows of hay needing to be wrapped up for next winter. I got home and my oldest son met me with a downright sad look and said, “So I guess we won’t be camping tonight.”
Call it a case of father/son miscommunication. I don’t remember talking to him about camping that night, but when he asked his mom about doing that and she said “maybe, you can ask your dad if he can,” I think he might have skipped over the asking me part and started packing up the tent and sleeping bags and sat there waiting for me to come home from the field.
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I told him I was sorry, but I didn’t really know he had his heart set on it. I said, “tomorrow night,” and promised him I’d get back from the field early enough to find a prime tent spot and build a campfire in one of our pastures.
And I did. He had the sleeping bags, the tent, a brother, a cousin and a dog packed up and ready to go when I got home.
I added a few provisions—a big can of beans, hot dogs, marshmallows, fudge stripe cookies, and, selfishly, a coffee pot and some coffee grounds for my morning joy and addiction.
We drove off toward the setting sun in our trusty side-by-side UTV and found a spot about a mile from home with plenty of firewood and a stock tank with a water valve to fill the all-important coffee pot.
After we pitched the tent, I dug a fire pit and used the old time cowboy fire-starting method. I rubbed two sticks together and then I piled a bunch of newspaper under those sticks and flicked my handy butane lighter.
I watched it come to life with the same satisfaction that the caveman who invented the controlled warmth of flickering flames must have felt.
We cooked up some meat and marshmallows and, knowing that a third basic food group of camping existed, I peeled open the can of beans with my Swiss army pocket knife and put it on some coals of the fire to heat up.
I pulled it out with my pliers and the four of us stuck our spoons in.
There, as the sun set in the west and the fire flickered in front of us, we watched the biggest, brightest moon you ever saw come up in the east.
It was a “blue moon,” the second full moon in a single month, a phenomenon not seen since 2012, and it was spectacular. We spotted the dippers, big and little, and tried our best to find Orion’s belt in the starlit sky.
Three sleepy young boys and one rather stiff, sore, uncomfortable old dad fell asleep in their sleeping bags on the not-so-soft ground in a big, roomy tent. Coyotes howled and kids snoozed.
In the morning, I made the best dang coffee I’d ever had. Well, it was the best coffee for at least a mile around, and it tasted pretty good sitting on a hillside while the sunlight woke my camp mates.
When the boys peeled out of their sleeping bags and came to the fire, we threaded some bacon onto our marshmallow roasting sticks, ate the rest of our beans and broke camp.
Their smiles were as wide as the space between the blue moon rising and the west sun setting of the night before when I asked them how they liked their camping trip.
It was simple satisfaction from a campfire instead of a microchip. We need to do it more often and we won’t be waiting for the next blue moon.
Camping with kids is as special and beautiful as a blue moon, but it shouldn’t be as rare.
