Camping With Kids. Goldie Silverman

      Preface

      I did not grow up in a camping family, but the seeds of an outdoor life must have been planted somehow, because as a young girl I loved no play activity so much as running through the trails at a city park near my home, Elmwood Park in Omaha, Nebraska. My friends and I raced along the dirt paths, back and forth on either side of the creek, crossing at creek level on stepping stones or high in the air on fallen trees or big metal water pipes.

      In college, while other couples went off to the movies, the young man who later became my husband and I cooked our dinner in a park or beside a lake on the small, portable grill we always kept in the trunk of his car.

      So it should come as no surprise that eventually we should become campers, and when we had children, we camped with them, too.

      When my husband was a medical intern and we were new to the Pacific Northwest, his department organized a campout on the Washington coast. We had limited funds. A local store advertised a special on Coleman stoves and lanterns, and since we could afford only one, he asked a coworker which we should buy. The lantern, he was told. Big mistake. We thought we could cook over a fire, but the wood we collected was damp. We never got our fire going beyond smoke. I remember our son Jeff in his red pajamas, sitting in the borrowed tent in a makeshift bed of old comforters over thick layers of newspaper, eating dry Cheerios while we tried to get a breakfast fire started.

      A few years later, we were spending all of our family vacations camping with our three children in a rented trailer on the Oregon coast. Our favorite park was Jesse M. Honeyman State Park, a magical place with huge sand dunes almost three stories tall that slope down into clear, ice-cold lakes. We rolled down the dunes, dug in the sand, and hiked across the dunes to the ocean beaches. We told Jeff not to lose his shoes while he was playing in the sand, so he carefully buried them at the side of the dune; we never saw them again.

      Sometime along the way, we became backpackers, leaving the car behind. I wrote a book called Backpacking with Babies and Small Children. Like this book you are reading, it was based on interviews with many people.

      Years later, we went back to Honeyman Park with Jeff, his wife, and our two grandchildren. We set up four tents in two tent sites—each grandkid had to have a tent of his or her own. The grandchildren were much more interested in riding on the dune buggies than in digging or hiking. Daniel, who was 8 at the time, told me he did not like to go places “where you had to walk to get there.” Both of the kids preferred going into town for fast food to eating meals cooked outdoors.

      Today, all of my children and grandchildren camp. Jeff’s family camps in tents next to the car; Judy and John are backpackers. Last summer, our grandson, Daniel, 19 and home from college, accompanied my husband and me on a three-day backpack near Mt. Baker. Daniel carried all the food, the lunches for our dayhikes out of base camp, and he even carried my backpack across the skinny tree that served as a bridge over a wild and rushing stream.

      What can you learn from my story? That while it helps to grow up in a camping family, you don’t have to camp as a child to be a camper as an adult. That reluctant children can grow up to be enthusiastic campers. That some of the lessons you try to instill in your children don’t show up until many years later.

      I am a camping grandmother, and I have no intention of quitting. Every Wednesday, I lead an informal group of my friends on a hike somewhere near Seattle. I love nothing so much as a day in the woods or at the beach. I believe that food cooked outdoors always tastes better, and a sleeping bag under the stars is the best of all beds. I am writing this book in order to share with others my love for a simple life spent out of doors, and in the hope that others will learn to share this life with their children, as I have done.

      In preparation for writing this book, I talked to a lot of people. I was fortunate to be invited to speak about my work to the sixth- and seventh-grade classes of Assumption St. Bridget School in Seattle. As an assignment following my visit, the students wrote essays about their lifetimes of camping experiences, and they shared their work with me. I also interviewed a number of parents, members of my Jazzercise class, writers from my writing group, and readers from my reading group. I talked to strangers at RV shows and telephoned forest rangers, safety experts, and salespeople at outdoor stores. Altogether, I talked to more than 100 people.

      You will notice that throughout the book, I use only first names. I have tried to indicate which comments come from adults and which from students, but in some cases it will not be easy to tell the difference; not surprisingly, children and their parents often shared similar values.