As I shuffle through a shoebox of snapshots, I feel a sensation of warmth that is at once comfortably familiar and slightly nauseating; faded black and whites of children scrabbling over smooth-faced rocks and playing in sand at various lakeshore locations…  Sioux Narrows, Kenora, Quetico, Grundy – the summers of my childhood were spent doing the rounds in Ontario’s provincial parks. As a geologist, my father made the most of the warmer months, engaged in fieldwork on the Canadian Shield. Regardless of where we were, Dad left the campsite each morning as the sun rose, taking the family station wagon into the wilds, leaving my mother with four children until sundown. The shores of Huron and Superior became my second home.

These were the camping years of dark, dank, teetering outhouses and evening fog machines meant to kill the mosquitoes. Naïve to the dangers of chemical inhalation, children from all sites danced along in the fog each evening, grubby-kneed rats after this toxic pied piper. It’s a wonder I didn’t grow two heads.

There were no showers, no laundry facilities, no campground convenience stores, no hydro hookups. I was the eldest of four; my sister was still in a stroller on her inaugural campout. To this day, I have no idea how my mother maintained her sanity.

The day we started out, we’d get bundled, jammy-clad, into the back of the station wagon well before dawn, zoned out on Gravol to pre-empt motion sickness, complete with pillows from our beds. I remember the dusty tang of the cotton-encased foam mattress and the faded curtains with tiny blue flowers that graced the side windows of the wagon part of the vehicle. This nest would cocoon us for the early hours of the journey; the baby smells of talc, ammonia, and milk-breath announced the installation of my little sister in the car. For me, it was a time-free experience, not marked in any way that a youngster’s mind could grasp, but not timeless. It was at some point.

At some point, amid the whispers in the grey pre-dawn, my parents had finished the packing, lashed the canvas canoe to the roof, and hitched the borrowed tent trailer to the car. At some point, I would wake amid a tangle of arms and legs and the measured breathing of my siblings. Sandy-lidded, I would come to as the sun rose over the horizon, my mouth glue-y and tasting like rubber bands. Our car would be the only thing moving.

Once we were all awake, the drive would consist of the usual, “he’s touching me,” “she’s got my book, my crayons, my toy,” and an endless barrage of “are we there yet. Can we stop for a drink, a snack, a pee?” My mother, in her civilized way, always reminded us that it was “may I” and that we were to ask for a “rest stop.” The drive felt endless.

I can barely believe that we managed every summer in that khaki canvas tent trailer, eating hundreds of hot dogs and bazillions of baked beans, beach sand cemented under our fingernails, blisters, scrapes, and sunburns a part of our daily existence. We virtually lived in our bathing suits. If not for the snapshots, would I remember these days?

I might not remember much, but I do remember that we always packed the iron. On one of the earliest trips, my mother insisted that we turn around and go back home after about three hours of driving. She was sure she had left the iron on. On the second trip, when the same panic gripped her, my father calmly pulled over to the side of the road, stepped casually out of the car, and went back to the trailer. He opened the tiny door, pulled out the iron, returned to the car, gently placed it in her lap, and started us on our way again without a word. On every trip thereafter, the iron was the last thing packed and the first thing unpacked. And none of us kids gave it a second thought. 

Occasionally, a camper from a nearby site would try to poke fun at the crazy lady who brought her electric iron into the wilderness. Mum would put on a good show by plugging it into the nearest shrub and going through exaggerated domestic motions of pressing a tea towel stretched over the end of the picnic table. If anyone asks, it was a currant bush.