Julia Rajagopalan | Second Generation Campers

Short nonfiction from the coalitionist mixed bag.

My parents received camping gear as a wedding present. It was not on the registry. It was the 1970s, and the tent was Army surplus green, meant to vanish into the forest.

They were city kids, first-generation Americans, and it took them two hours of arguing to set up camp. The third hour, it started raining, and it continued to rain for the rest of the night. In the morning, soggy and miserable, they gathered the gear and threw it in the campground’s enormous dumpster, bonding over the fact that they were not campers.

As a child, I went camping with youth groups and friends, relishing the freedom and ingenuity of making a home in the woods. Cooking over a campfire. Swimming in the lakes. Listening to the forest.

I was a strange and lonely suburban kid, always out of place, but in the woods, I found companionship without judgment. Trees don’t ask what brand of jeans you’re wearing, and birds don’t care if you say the wrong thing.

When I married, I registered for camping gear. The waterproof kind rated for blizzards, typhoons, and probably a nuclear holocaust. When we went camping for the first time, my husband and I set up camp with minimal arguing, thanks mostly to the fancy gear, and maybe a little to our quiet natures.

It was a beautiful campground, not too crowded, with sites tucked away in the trees. Our spot was snuggled onto the top of a small bluff, pillowy soft hills of pine forest in the misty distance. It rained the first night and continued into the next day, foggy and gorgeous yet steadily wet. So we went to brunch at a diner and then to a movie. When the rain refused to stop, we packed our gear into the back of our SUV and checked into a local motel, not fancy, but clean and, most importantly, dry.

We haven’t camped since, but our gear is in the shed, dried out and neatly stored, waiting for better weather. Someday we’ll try again, because my husband and I have bonded over this: We don’t give up on what we love even when it seems like the easy thing to do.

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JULIA RAJAGOPALAN is a writer of speculative fiction who lives just outside of Detroit, Michigan, with her husband and their very grumpy dog. She has upcoming pieces in Club Chicxulub, The Lorelei Signal, and AntipodeanSF, and she has a Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan.