Words Cassidy Nunn
“Apparently we’re not really camping people,” I said to my cousin with a sigh as I stared at our massive tent that apparently could sleep nine people. Instead, it held a queen-sized air mattress, a crib mattress for our three-year-old and a foam couch cushion for our six-year-old. Tonight, it would only be sleeping two adults and two kids and we’d packed it full. We didn’t own any Therm-A-Rests, and our sleeping bags were too old and musty, so we’d ditched those and brought up our regular bedding. My cousin’s tent, in comparison, was neatly lined with Therm-A-Rests and sleeping bags. It was the August long weekend – the one weekend a year my little family slept in a tent in the front yard of our family friend’s house at the lake. So really, it was hardly camping. Even glamping didn’t feel like the right term for our situation. We were yard tenting – a far cry from the camping I’d grown up doing.
As a child, my family spent many a summer camping in my Dad’s VW camper van – we even drove all the way across Canada one summer, which was also when I became a skilled tent camper, as I refused to sleep in the van with my parents and younger brother. Instead, I’d pitch my own tent nightly beside the van and hand pump up my air mattress; I was at the height of my teenage stubbornness and independence. In my early 20s, many summer weekends were spent in a tent, and I loved a good camping adventure with friends. So, it’s not that I’d never been a camping person, but now with young kids and running on years of exhaustion and deprived sleep, my desire to sleep on an uncomfortable mattress in the cold of the night with kids who were guaranteed to sleep even fewer hours than their already low number … the magical element of camping had lost its appeal.
After hours of first-night-at-the-lake excitement for the kids, playing with their friends, bouncing on the trampoline, digging in the sand, riding the swing, racing from the lake to the hot tub, blowing bubbles and now pretending to be wild cats, it was time for bed. My husband and I managed to wrangle each “kitten” into their pajamas but as soon as we released them, they began to leap around the tent, scratching at the sides, bounding onto and off of the air mattress, rolling around in the bedding, yowling and howling and meowing for the whole neighbourhood and all our fellow yard tenters to hear. After we calmed the wild cats down, they eventually fell asleep.
By now it was very late, and the forecasted rain began to fall. I crawled into bed and had just drifted off when I heard a loud “crack!” I jolted upright and looked to my husband. “What was that?!” He unzipped the tent and peeked out. One tent pole had snapped – not at the elastic connecting joint: it had broken completely in half. The tent was still standing and we were exhausted, so we shrugged it off as a “we’ll deal with that in the morning problem.” The rain continued to come down in the next few hours and the wind picked up. By now my youngest daughter had crawled onto the air mattress with me, and my husband had switched to her tiny mattress. Then, at 3:30 a.m. a series of “snap, snap, snap” in quick succession pierced the air and I watched as our soggy tent imploded onto us. My husband and I both started laughing and the girls somehow continued to sleep soundly. I lay there, the soggy tent fabric touching my nose, and pondered what to do as the rain continued to pour outside. In the end, we scooped up the sleepy and confused kids and shuffled our way into the house, setting up a new camp in our friend’s living room.
I’ve never been more thankful to have been yard tenting rather than actual camping in my whole life! We woke up the next morning to a stream of other tenters coming into the house for morning coffee, all eager to hear the story of our tent collapse. There happened to be one spare bedroom left in the main house, just big enough for the four of us to sleep in, and we readily accepted the room. We’ll wait another year to attempt any more camping adventures, and a new, higher-quality tent is definitely in our future!
