Camping Stuff

A couple weeks ago I went through some of my gear, mostly in an attempt to consolidate and organize what I have. It's not a whole bunch but it's enough to take up a fair bit of space, and it's not all new or top-of-the-line but it all works well enough. Despite having enough good-enough stuff, my Amazon wishlist has plenty of links to my Backcountry.com wishlist and I can't help but check out new stuff when I'm close to a gear shop. It didn't really sink in until fairly recently, but my interest in camping equipment-- from the cheapest to the elitist-- goes back years.

My earliest memory of any sort of camping gear of my own was a toy camp folding spoon-fork thing when I was about four or five. I'm not sure why I remember that specifically, nor do I know why my parents got it, but I thought it was cool because it was a spoon and a fork that folded up. For camping! I remember my mom not letting me eat anything with it, which I felt was really unfair. Like, if you give me a spoon-fork combo, I expect to be able to eat my Berry Berry Kix with it, but since Mom got the final say my camping utensils went unused for anything more than pretend meals in the back yard.

As I grew up I wanted real gear of my own. I got the Campmor catalog delivered to me regularly, and there was one thing I wanted out of it more than anything; the Wenzel Starlight tent. I don't really know why I wanted it so bad. It probably had something to do with it being cheap enough for a kid without a job to theoretically afford on his own after a few months allowance. It was circled in almost every catalog I got from Campmor, along with different backpacks, sleeping bags, and cook sets for the least weight efficient but coolest backpacking setups my kid brain could dream up, but I never got that tent (or anything else from that catalog for that matter).

Time passed and I still didn't have a tent of my own. When I went camping with my dad we'd always share a tent, but something in me wanted my own independent sleeping space, a little slice of heaven in the form of a little cloth shelter, but I didn't have the forty dollars to shell out for the tent I wanted. One day, though, while looking around a yard sale, I found an old, stale, dirty green canvas pup tent. It had to have been decades old, with patches and stitching all around it keeping what was left of it together, stains from leaky storage and god-knows-what scattered around it.

I loved it. It was only five bucks, too! I bought it without a second thought, though later on I did have second thoughts during that one time with the bear, but that's neither here nor there. I don't remember what happened to that tent, but I think I tossed it out after the splitting headache that came from trying to sleep in the moldering green tube. Of course, it wasn't the last tent I'd get-- not even the last tent I'd pick up from a yard sale for under $10-- but it was definitely the last canvas relic of a bygone era I ever attempted to sleep in.

I now have a lot of stuff for car camping and backpacking, some of it name brand, some K-Mart quality. I want to build an ultralight backpacking kit under seven or eight pounds, but I've also been eyeing a tent-cot and queen size sleeping bag that'd probably be closer to 50. Maybe it's the variety of options that fascinates me. It could be a callback to childhood curiosity of camping and getting outside. It's probably at least partly because I work at a desk most of the week and daydream a lot. Whatever the case may be I think gear is pretty cool, and I may not go camping as much as I'd like or have much room for new gear but that won't stop me from ogling at shit.