Nature's Call

Quick: What’s your most prominent family camping memory?

The sign pictured here is a composite of some of mine – names of the adults included. My mother is Florence, and my father’s name was Jim. And the rest of the image, well, it speaks for itself.

 Now, our family didn’t tent-camp. We used a tent trailer. You know the type. It had fold-out canvas wings on either side with a double bed in each one (ours had a third wing out the back, as my brother and I would just as soon eat live rats rather than share a bed).

 The whole mess could be neatly compacted into the trailer portion of the thing, which could then be pulled behind a regular sedan – theoretically, anyway. When it came to the neatly-folding-it-down part, the best thing to do, my brother and I discovered, was to be anywhere BUT near the trailer and leave the entire packing and folding to our parents.

 My father (Jim) was the labor. Mother (Florence) was the foreman. She and she alone knew how to get all the cooking gear, clothing, games, food and mini-bar (the key to my parents successfully staying married) into the contraption and getting it all folded down tight. My father’s job was to follow her directions no matter how many times they changed (hence, the mini-bar).

 It wasn’t until I was grown that I figured out that setting up camp did not require a whole slew of words you weren’t allowed to say in front of other people.

 Anyway, we loved being outdoors. My dad considered every walk a hike of great adventure, and it usually was. I recall a particularly adventuresome hike through the woods of Kentucky where my brother and I had a fabulous time scrambling over boulders and climbing trees. The treasure hunt for the chiggers in nearly every region of our bodies later that night wasn’t so fun, but it was definitely worth it.

And I was reminded of these memories and more when I spotted the sign posted above. It was hung just inside the entrance of the Museum of Family Camping, in Bear Brook State Park, just southeast of Concord, N.H.

The museum consists of an extensive, and eclectic, collection of camping gear dating back 100 years – including half a dozen travel trailers from the 1930s forward.

The heavy canvas tents, folding wood stoves and sleeping bags of yesterday will make any camper really grateful for the lightweight nylons and Gore-Tex of today. I have sofa cushions that would be easier to pack than that 1895 sleeping bag on display.

Curators of the museum, however, say their days at Bear Brook State park are numbered. New Hampshire state park officials want the exhibits packed up and moved out of the park’s historic Civilian Conservation Corps building by December this year. So better see it this summer.

Better yet, drop an e-mail to New Hampshire’s park officials and ask them to give this cool little slice of Americana a reprieve until other permanent digs can be found.

And then, make some plans to go camping with your family this summer. It’s cheap. It’s fun, and, best of all, it gets everyone outside – chiggers or not.

This may be the last post for a couple of weeks, as I am starting field work in remote Downeast Maine for graduate school. Stay tuned, however, as I may have a chance to upload some cool photos.

Embracing a sense of place

This is my home -- not my piece of property, of course. But it is a typical Utah vista, the photo of which I snapped during a recent outing with the Wild Bird Center of Layton.

The birding trip was a birthday gift for my other half, and it happened just three days before I left Utah to start my graduate work in New England. I will only be in Maine for a month of field work before returning home. Still, I will miss Utah's scent of sage and juniper, its vast sea of sky and its distant silhouette of mountains.

Many of us live our lives in the places chosen for us by parents or jobs. Still, some of us manage to find work in places we choose for ourselves because we love them. That is how I came to Utah, and I would not trade living here for any opportunity, no matter how lucrative. It is here, among the scrubby, dry high desert of the Great Basin, that I feel my sense of belonging -- my sense of place.

So getting the chance to explore the 250,000-acre Deseret Ranch -- a privately owned gem in northeast Utah -- was an opportunity not to be missed.

The leader of our daylong adventure was Bill Fenimore, author, naturalist and owner and the Wild Bird Center of Layton. Fenimore is the region's premier birder and could identify birds on the wing before I'd had a chance to lift my binoculars. John Belmon, a founder of Wasatch Audubon and expert birder, joined us along with his wife Carol.

We spotted some 114 species -- 34 of which I had never before identified. (Birders call these "lifers," which are added to one's "life list.")

They included burrowing owls standing on spindly legs atop abandoned prairie dog mounds, beautiful green-tailed towhees sporting iridescent emerald tail feathers and, my favorite, a pair of great horned owl fledglings and their mother. One of them was perched on the rafter of an old barn, and the other lay outside in the tall grass along the barn wall, snapping its beak at anyone who ventured too near. (See photos of the fledglings in the Nature's call photo section).

This was a grand trip and the memories of Utah's astonishing landscape will sustain me as I embark on this month's journey of personal and academic growth.

Growth is a part of nature, but it is not always easy. And you never know when it may happen. So spend some time this holiday weekend finding your sense of place to hold close in those times when everything around seems to be changing.