The first attempt

My relationship with camping is the equivalent of a “I know by sight”. I remember setting up a tent with my cousins in our grandmother’s garden and the intention of spending the night there, I also remember that we invariably ended the night in her kitchen drinking milk with Suchard Express and eating cat tongues.

My friends were big attendees of summer camps (in the world of betos the summer camp is the big event of the year) and I even tried to join them, but I never entered. And so I grew up, without tasting the supposed wonders of sleeping on the floor, in contact with nature.

Later, as an adult, I went to climb a volcano in Indonesia for four days. From the thermal experience of sleeping in a tent, I only keep the memory of visiting Iceland at night and waking up in Dubai.

Already with children, I discovered glamping, a sport that we practiced a few times. It’s good for those who want to say they like to go camping, but don’t dispense sleeping in a bed. We have the status without the discomfort. Finally, I also indulged in the motorhome, a version of which I became a huge fan, so much a fan that after three years renting a motorhome, I got it into my head that the ideal would be to buy one. It was the shortest dream I had, it lasted the time to open the computer and research the prices.

Last week, on a visit to the basement with my children, I came across a tent that had been offered to me by my brother a few years ago. There it was, brand new, still in the bag. “Do you want to set up a tent in the garden?” she left me with the enthusiasm of mothers who give everything on vacation.

I remembered my brother telling me that that tent was one of the “easy to set up”. The problem is that an object that I consider easy to assemble is yet to be invented. Not even the dolls that come inside the Kinder eggs are simple for me.

As soon as I come across assembly instructions, my brain immediately gives up. I have chests of drawers that never had handles, drawers that never opened and shelves with screws pointed at me coming out of my back because I missed the wooden beam when hammering them.

I started by placing the stakes in the four corners, to soon realize that what I had hammered were not the stakes, but pickets. I took everything out and replaced it with real stakes. The tent was effectively easy and it was just a matter of filling it with a pump that came inside the bag. Another three hours looking at some sticks that stuck into each other, until I realized where to put them and another stick of the same nature, whose function I never got to unravel, and as such, returned to the bag. To finish, I put the pickets back in, this time in their proper place, since they were already crooked from the force that had been made to put them in place of the stakes. Our tent was ready! It was huge, a real T2 with a room in the middle. Something of that size in the center of Lisbon should yield a good 1500€ per month.

We prepared everything for my children’s big night at their house in the open. As my youngest son had a fever, I could not join the others (needless to say, my sadness was not great). We took mattresses, duvets and pillows. I made them dress as if they were going to spend the night in Alaska and read them a story with the flashlight. It was ten o’clock at night when I left them, ten and ten when the first returned home, ten eleven when I received the last survivor. My children’s experience with camping managed to be even shorter than mine.

The tent stayed there for a few days until the grass started to dry and it was time to go back to the bag. I dismantled it without realizing that the floor of the “living room” was wet and that the mattresses remained in the “bedrooms”. It was too late, I would not raise it again. While some stretched out their arms to hold the roof of the tent and I cleaned the water with the mop, another removed the mattresses and toys that had ended up there I don’t know when.

The time had come to fold the tent and return it to the bag. Herein lies for me perhaps the biggest problem of camping: nothing fits in the bag from which it came out. It’s as if things grow when in freedom. There were four attempts. Three times we folded the tent to unfold it again. With each fold we all dipped on top of the fabric to remove the air. But how much air can a tent have? I felt myself losing my breath along with the tent, as I sprawled and made little snow angels to make sure I reached everywhere and that not a molecule of oxygen survived in the middle of all that fabric and plastic. The fourth time the tent got into the bag, but the zipper was far from closing. The air, it could only be the air. I realize that the pump and the bags of the pickets and stakes are still on the grass. I give up, so it goes to the basement, like a Berlin Ball overflowing with cream. And there the bag was in a corner, with as much material inside as outside.

Three years from now we will remember it again and, who knows, we may not sleep there a whole night.