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Morning Open Thread. Labor Day weekend. Heh heh, "...wanna go camping?" [1]

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Date: 2022-09-03

“It’s impossible to go for a walk in the woods and be in a bad mood at the same time.” – Unknown

“...wanna go camping?” is the punch line to a crude raunchy joke, which I’m not repeating here. If you recognized that punch line then you know the joke, and if you don’t you can find it if you want. I’m not going camping this weekend anyway.

Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum. This is a post where you can come to share what’s on your mind and stay for the expansion. The diarist is on California time and gets to take a nap when he needs to, or may just wander off and show up again later. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug. Grab your supportive indulgence(s) of choice and join us, please. And if you’re brand new to Morning Open Thread, then Hail and Well Met, new Friend.

Labor. From the time of my first real after-school job as a janitor in a small mercantile store to my last job with a landscape maintenance company, labor has been how I earned my way in life. The closest I ever came to “white-collar” was computerized drafting, meaning there was little sweat of the brow involved.

From memory, a chronological list of my occupations:

Gas station (full serve) attendant (high school)

Forklift driver

Choker-setter and knot-bumper; logging

Sawmill worker

Delivery truck driver (soft drinks)

Sawmill worker

U.S. Navy aviation electronics technician

Sawmill worker

Electrical panel builder

HVAC controls application engineer

Truck driver; freight and log truck

Warehouse worker

Landscape maintenance laborer

I squeezed in some college during that time, earning an A.A. and an A.S., but the B.S. degree I pursued never came to fruition. I do regret that somewhat, but my last stab at it was for the purpose of having an edge (because I would have been about sixty years old) to apply for the Peace Corps, and if that had worked out it was going to be two and a half years of serious labor. I truly believe I would have loved it.

*****

Labor Day camping trips were something I did a lot, first as a kid with my parents and sisters and usually another close-friends family or two joining in. Dad was a “truck-camping” aficionado, and we had all the necessary accoutrements; it took both the pickup truck and the station wagon to get all our bodies and gear to our campsites. Later, when I had my own family, my pickup truck had a back seat so we didn’t need a second vehicle, but the bed of that pickup was stacked tall and full, that’s for sure. Pretty much all the comforts of home.

These days camping for me means solo backpacking. But dismal thanks to the pandemic, I haven’t been out since July of 2020.

One of my fondest memories isn’t that far back. Around 2006 (and I do believe it was Labor Day weekend) I took my then-wife and son up to a lake only a few miles away from town and “camped” in a fully developed campground, but we did use a tent. A buddy came up and joined us for an afternoon and he played a camping game, one which I had not known of, a very silly game but lots of fun because you have to figure it out. My friend’s name was Danny, and he started the game something like this:

“I’m going camping, and I’m bringing a dishpan. If you want to go camping with me, you have to bring something too. What are you bringing?”

Well, when it came my turn I said something like “I’ll bring the tent”. “No,” Danny replied, “you can’t go camping.” Huh? So it went around a circle of six of us (and the more the merrier for this game), with some coming up with the right answer (by mistake, or by figuring it out) and it took me a couple of rounds to figure it out. When I did, I said “I’m bringing a fork”. “All right,” Danny said. “You can go camping.” Ryan (my son) got to go camping when he offered to bring a radio, Greg (another friend) got to go camping when he said he was bringing a garage door opener. My wife (her name was Pam), puzzled beyond all understanding, was utterly befuddled: what the heck use is a garage door opener for going camping? So, if your name was Wendy, you couldn’t go camping if you were bringing, for example, a stove, but you could go camping if you brought a wagon.

You got it yet?

Poor Pam. She never got it. Oh, she was furious when we told her the “secret”. But oh lordy did we all uproariously laugh (at her expense, I shame-facedly admit) when we spilled the beans and she was so embarrassed to realize that all she would have had to bring was, say, a Pen.

*****

funningforrest, circa 1970

My current tent. Rain fly not in place. Air mattress inside. I’ve used this ONCE, dammit! I really need to get out again.

My previous tent that I utterly wore out. Rocky Mountain National Park, June 2017. Note billowing rain fly flap. Very windy that afternoon and evening. Note I have it well guyed-down.

And this is what happens when you don’t securely tie a tent down in very windy places:

NOT my tent! ha ha ha ha ha!

How about you folks? Any favorite (or better yet, disastrous) camping tales? Your best/worst jobs?

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