Dusty tent? De-dusted. Vehicle? Three-inch crust of dirt chipped loose with industrial chisels and diamond-coated scrapers. Body? Soaped, scrubbed and exfoliated. But … still needs another 18 or 19 full washes, plus a professional-grade pressure washing. All to get the layers of grime, bug spray, sweat, dirt and other varieties of filth completely off.
And that was just from one night of camping.
What would it have been with two?!?
This was our big family camping excursion. The one my daughter has been asking to go on. The one my brother signed us up for, along with his wife, 7-year-old nephew and my dad. Dragged us all out to a Central Florida state park along a river with water the color of bad coffee. He picked it special because it’s also known for ensuring you get to see more dust than water.
The dust was everywhere. On the trails. The roads. The campsites. It’s one of the few experiences in the state where I can’t remember being swarmed by mosquitoes. My theory is particulates inhibit their ability to fly and they’ve all starved to death while lost in dust storms.
And if you didn’t get enough dust naturally, then my 7-year-old nephew was there to pitch in. He comes complete with a pick ax and professional dirt-digging skills. As this was my daughter’s first time camping, he deemed it necessary to give her the full treatment.
He loves camping almost as much as he loves dirt, and it horrified him that a 15-year-old girl had never slept beneath the stars. Or hadn’t woken up to the sounds of a 7-year-old plowing huge ruts in the ground next to the tent. You know, where we were sleeping. And trying to use our lungs.
“I can’t believe she’s never been camping before,” he told me as he drove the mighty pick into the ground, each strike sending plumes of gray into the sky that satellites were mistakenly identifying as volcanic eruptions in the middle of Florida. “How come you’ve never let her?”
Never let her?!? As if I issued some kind of decree: “I hereby declare, child, so long as I walk this Earth, ye shall never camp. Lest, of course, the Apocalypse is nigh and all Marriotts are booked.”
I tried to explain this to the boy: She has been up all kinds of mountains. Done a lot of hiking. Forged rivers and once carried a mighty boulder for 200 miles. But at the end of the day, she likes to put her head on a real pillow in a real bed with sheets that have a thread count somewhat higher than the number of holes he had in the knees of his pants.
This shocked him. So much so that he stopped digging. He just stared at me. I thought he might cry. How could someone willingly decide not to camp? I mean … there’s dirt, for goodness sake! How could someone not like dirt?!?
I believe this was the first time he really wondered if we’re all actually related.
I wonder this all the time.
I don’t remember much about the weekend that didn’t involve dust, or talking about it. A typical conversation would go like this: “Boy! Can you stop digging?”
Boy: “Uh … OK,” and then boy would start kicking dust. (Technically, and in his defense, my request didn’t cover that.)
I would then have a horrible choking fit, someone would run over to clear out my windpipe and then the whole cycle would start over.
My daughter found this all very amusing. “I didn’t know camping could be so much fun,” she said.
Oh, yes. Delightful! Like sleeping, if you can call it that. How at night the temperature in Central Florida can start out at capable of melting dust to glass, and by morning, it has dropped 20 degrees. It had me shivering and wondering why I left the rain tarp off so the mesh roof could be exposed to the elements … and the dust.
And when the temperature dropped into the 50s, the dew. It got dew-y.
“Dew-y” is a technical camping term that describes when you only bring sheets for your cots and the cold, moist air turns you soggy like wet cabbage. (Technical note: the thread count of wet cabbage is not nearly as high as you would think.)
But through it all, we always do find fun in experiences like this, don’t we? It’s never all bad. There was family. Yay! We hiked. We visited a botanical garden. We saw massive gators basking along the watery rim of Paynes Prairie. We ate some kind of pork pot pie my brother cooked in the converted sailboat stove attached to his tear-drop trailer. And we toured every single sink hole Central Florida had to offer. Because, for some reason, I come from a family who loves sink holes. Someone else explain that to me.
But I came to love them, too. Because it brought us together in a shared experience. And more importantly, whenever we were near one of the flooded, scungy holes, the dust struggled in the moist, heavy air. And the boy couldn’t quite kick up his volcano-like plumes. If not for that, I would still be scrubbing the dirt from my pores.