I bought this tent I’m falling asleep in nine years ago this month. I had just finished up co-guiding a two-week trip around the South Island of New Zealand and I hadn’t slept more than five hours a night for that time. I was fit and grimy and all of my clothes smelled like sunscreen and citronella. I had a $1,600 wad of tip money and nowhere to really be for 13 days until my next trip. Bedding from my last apartment I had occupied was still tucked into the trunk of the 1994 Toyota Starlet I drove everywhere in those years, with a chandelier Christmas ornament dangling from the rear-view mirror.
I remember going out to breakfast and ordering something really expensive to eat. Then I went to chain store called The Warehouse – the equivalent of a Walmart – and picked up this tent in the outdoor aisle, just over from the gardening section. I set it up in the front yard of the farm where all of the hiking trips were based out of; where all our packs, food and trailers were stored between trips and where the guides often crashed on floors and in twin bunk beds, with outdoor gear laid out to dry.
The blue tent was like a safari photograph, with blankets and pillows from the Starlet arranged. I read a borrowed Hunter S. Thompson book all week and figured out the new laptop I had also purchased, starting my Homefires blog with the thin flap unzipped, and a view of the dairy cows grazing as I lounged on throw pillows and tried to describe my life at that time, going into the staff kitchen every so often to brew another cup of tea to take back out to my space.
That tent would get pitched in the back yards of friends all over the island that summer. It wasn’t hardy enough for big, high altitude, multi-day trips, but for what I needed – a small space of my own to block out the rest of the world – it was perfect.
Two years later I would take it with me to Spain when I walked the Camino de Santiago for two months, quickly learning that it was unnecessary weight to carry when I could just stay in the convents and guest houses along the thousand-year-old pilgrimage path for about six dollars a night. So I sent it to my parents’ house in California, where it would live in a closet for another four years, forgotten.
The blue tent was discovered and loaded up in the green Saturn I bought when I came back to the U.S., later in my 30s. I had one car-less winter in Big Sky, where I met my now-husband. Packing up the leftovers in my childhood room that late April and driving north and east back to Montana was a risky move, but it felt right – more so as John and I would unfold and pitch that tent by rivers all over the West that summer and fall. Each time I rolled it out I felt like I was coming back to an old, familiar room I had once lived in. It was a piece of myself I was returning to, only now I was learning about sharing it with someone else.
Two years later it would go up at a sandy campground at Refugio Beach for me and my friends to sleep in, the night before John and I got married. And we would break it out on our honeymoon back to Montana through Big Sur and the Lost Coast in northern California, Oregon and Washington.
Tonight, the blue tent is pitched beside the East Fork of the Bitterroot. The sound of the creek is deafening. There is a large stone holding down the right corner of the tent where it has ripped – but other than that the canvas walls are still in good shape. In the morning, we will go on my first float of the season, in the spring sun, stopping at a river island for John to grill the antelope tenderloin we’ve defrosted for this trip, as our dog runs up and down the banks, in and out of water and we will have strawberries for dessert.
But right now, listening to the spring runoff outside, wishing desperately that I had thought to bring my water bottle in the tent with us because I’m so thirsty, I just think about every kind of soil these tent pegs have been hammered into. Our dog, smelly with river brine and dirt, nestles between us, buried in blankets. And I am strangely comfortable, even at 8 months pregnant, though every time I turn on my side I feel like a rotisserie chicken, with each move needing careful planning and a strategy.
When I do make it upright and then outside, the stars are bright and there is a layer of ice on the flap as my headlamp scours the picnic table for my water bottle. Nine years ago was another life. Sixteen hundred dollars in a wad of cash. That is so much to me right now, I think, as I chug water. And I wish I knew what I had done with that chandelier Christmas ornament that dangled from the rear-view mirror from that long gone Toyota Starlet on the other side of the world, because that chandelier seems ironic now. I was obscenely wealthy and I didn’t even know it back then.
But I remember that this tent made me feel rich in those years when I’d crawl into it. It still does, I think, as I settle in. There isn’t much to these canvas walls, but it’s ended up being a tent for all seasons.
