Camping, Episode I

Film and TV star Henry Winkler, who happens to look EXACTLY like Whitney's Dad.

Thanks to heavy traffic leaving Portland, we arrived at Boardman Marina and RV Park at around 8:00 in the evening as the sun took a nosedive behind the hills. This led a certain frenzied atmosphere to our preparation of the campground – with diminishing light and in some cases nonexistent instructions we put together a jumbled mass of nylon and tent poles to create shelter. All around us, retired couples peered through the windows of their RVs at these five fools trying to set up a tent on a campground and quietly snickered over white wine and JAG reruns.

The Girlfriend and I had gone camping with our friends Whitney and Collin, both of whom were unfortunate enough to be involved with Writers, and Whitney’s father Dave, who you may remember as The Fonz in Happy Days or, more recently, Barry Zuckercorn on Arrested Development.


They’d selected a campsite in Boardman, Oregon, a positively microscopic town of some 1500 people situated about halfway down the Columbia Gorge in Eastern Oregon; a location more commonly known as The Middle Of Nowhere. To give you an example of how isolated we were, on our second day in Boardman we ran out of propane. After trips to both of Boardman’s stores, we found out that the entire town of Boardman was out of propane as well, requiring us to drive for half an hour to a Home Depot in Hermiston. Those of you who aren’t familiar with Oregon may not understand the severity of this situation, but let me be frank: When Hermiston makes the town you’re in look primitive and isolated, you know you’ve definitely fallen off the end of the Earth.

As previously mentioned, I’ve never been camping before, so when we arrived at the campground and were confronted with dwindling daylight, strong winds whipping out of the Gorge, and an army of oncoming mosquitoes, I felt a bit helpless. The people running the campground had seen fit to provide us with a spigot and a picnic table; other than that, all we had was a gravel patch on which to park an RV.* We had to hit the ground running in order to create shelter before we ran out of light, the sort of situation that for me has never been any closer than an episode of Survivorman.

*We were not allowed to pitch our tent on the grass, which was considerably softer than the gravel. The gravel poked through the tent’s thin nylon floor and made it unpleasant to walk around without shoes when inside the tent, and also was a terrible surface to hammer a stake into, to the point that upon returning from Hermiston we found that our tent had blown over and collapsed in on itself, unceremoniously eating our belongings in the process.

Once the tent was constructed, we settled in for an improvised dinner of vegetables dipped in Greek tzatziki yogurt sauce. It was pretty tasty, and the mosquitoes agreed, as a few dozen of them made kamakaze runs into the dip. We lit a bunch of citronella candles to try and ward the mosquitoes off, but all the repellant smoke seemed to do was get them drunk, because not long after we’d set up the candles we had mosquitoes flying headlong into our faces and ears, after which they’d land on the table to crawl around in squiggly circles while calling their ex-girlfriends to demand sex.

Working by the flickering light of our one lantern, we dug out the air mattresses and vacuum pump from the truck, only to discover that the pump’s battery was low and needed to be charged. We plugged it into the electricity hookup that the campground had thoughtfully provided and then dragged our air mattresses out to the pump to be filled up. The vacuum pump, however, was not really jazzed about doing its job until it had a full tank of electricity, so we spent about half an hour pumping the mattresses full with about three farts’ worth of air while mosquitoes crashed into us, giggling and singing “Just A Friend.”

Waking up the following morning was easy for two reasons: The mattresses slowly deflated during the night until at around eight in the morning our spines were flush with the gravel driveway, and the bright shine of the high desert sun turned our tent into a hotbox – not the kind you make when you and all your friends smoke pot in your stepdad’s Acura; the kind they have in prison movies set in the South.

It was yet another blustery day, with stiff winds whipping through the tent, carrying evidence of which RVs needed to empty their waste tanks. For breakfast I was overjoyed to discover a large carton of vanilla yogurt, which I proceeded to calmly work my way through each morning for the rest of the trip. Once we’d eaten, we attempted to set up an awning over the picnic table. At the outset, the task seemed simple enough – we had a bag filled with numbered poles and a canvas to be draped over the pole skeleton, the end result of which would be an awning to give us shade during the heat of the day.

The problem was that the instructions for the awning were nowhere to be found and that the numbers on several of the poles had worn clean off, leaving us with no directions and only half of the poles identified. The missing instructions was definitely a pisser, but the incomplete numbering was really just a case of straight up dickery on Fate’s part – it meant that even with the instructions we’d be screwed, and without them, we were double screwed.

We spent the next hour mixing and matching pole combinations until we finally assembled the skeleton and draped the canvas over it thanks to nothing more than luck and the process of elimination. This, I realized, could be why camping was so popular – it provides a means to assert oneself over the elements or, barring that, shoddy camping equipment.

Truman Capps advises you to tune in for Part 2 on Sunday!