We needed a break one year but had no money, which was a common
theme for young marrieds like us. So, Rob and I borrowed his parents fancy
green tripped out travel van. I forget what kind and he’s not here to ask, so
that’s all you get. But trust me. It was fancy. It seemed fancy to us, anyway.
He had a few days off from work. Maybe it was just a weekend, forty-eight hours
away from the fire department. But on weekends we were super busy, especially
on Sundays, with church. Not this weekend. This time we needed a break and we
planned for it.
We had a toddler on our hands, and we were both tired.
And, as I said, broke. Hence, borrowing the fancy camper van. But we had camping stuff.
Tents and tarps and sleeping bags. We even had a zip up ramada thing (again –
Rob’s not here to give me the right words and I don’t feel like googling right
now) to keep the bugs off and keep us dry in case it rained. Remember that
part, about the rain. It was summer in Florida out in the woods. It rains.
We cleared our calendars. Found people to cover for us and our various responsibilities. And then with two heel clicks in the air, we hit the
road with our eighteen month old son, Lee. We drove about an hour away to
Osprey, Florida, to Oscar Scherer State Park. It had camping areas and bathroom
facilities that made camping feel more civilized, especially with a toddler
around. The day was warm and humid, but there was a breeze which made it pleasant
while Rob set up the zipper ramada thing. Or, more accurately, while Rob
attempted to set it up. I tried to help, but a toddler in the woods near a lake
with alligators known to climb the low, no-climb fencing requires all of a mother’s
attention.
The enclosure’s instructions were vague and we needed
to position it ‘just so’ over the picnic table at our campsite. Poles didn’t
line up. And when they did, he was only one man and I was MIA chasing down a
giggly baby boy. While he tried in vain to control three sides of the
enclosure, poles fell down, collapsing the netted structure, and Rob’s
practically perfect phacade phailed.
There were very few times when I saw him lose his
temper in all the years we were married. I could count them on one hand.
Honestly. This was one of those times.
Remember the rain? We moved to my home state of
Arizona ten years after we married, leaving the Sunshine State to raise our
family in the desert instead. It never rains in the desert. I grew up here and
I can attest to that. Of course, that’s not entirely true, but it feels true.
Therefore, it must be true. To this day, whenever the weatherman predicts even a
fifty per cent chance of rain, it means there’s a miniscule chance that half
the state might get a shower. For the rest of us, if a drained-out thundercloud
floats wearily across the sky, dripping the remnants of whatever it dumped
somewhere else, we count the drops on our windshield and thank God that the
drought is over.
That’s rain in the desert.
Rain in the tropics is different. Especially when one
man singlehandedly attempts to erect a flimsy structure which straddles a large
picnic table while dark, menacing, storm clouds gather from the west, which is
the Gulf side of the state. There’s a lot of water in the Gulf. You could even
say it’s a bottomless supply that a thunderstorm sucks up like a vacuum. When a
summer shower is on the move, you might think you have plenty of time to set up
camp and pull this miracle off. You don’t. You might think fifty per cent means
the storm will slide to the south and baptize Naples instead of Osprey. It won’t.
You might think the lightning flashes you notice are further away than the
twenty miles of buffer you need right now. They aren’t.
Our camping spot was surrounded by mature pines a
hundred fifteen feet tall that swayed in the wind like lightning rods. In no
time at all, the distant storm clouds blew in over us, the sun disappeared, the
zippered ramada thing betrayed us and fell down, and terrified animals raced by
us, two by two. None of that was the problem.
Lightning. That was the problem.
As a bolt found its mark somewhere in the park, the
ground shook and our ears hurt from the thunder’s shock wave. Rob dropped the metal pole he held and yelled, “Get in the truck with Lee, NOW!”
I didn’t even think of arguing. I told him to come
with us, but he shook his head and kept fighting with the popup enclosure. Lee
ran off, chasing a rabbit or something not green like an alligator. I raced
after him, grabbed him around his scrawny little waist, and carried him crying
and wiggling back to the fancy van. We jumped inside and, soaking wet, plopped down in the relative safety of its dry interior, watching Rob fight against
failure, refusing to give in to the wind and heavy downpour. Soaked to the bone
and backlit by explosive lightning and terrifying thunder, the man would not
quit.
Here's another thing about Rob that most people didn’t
know. His spiritual gift was stubbornness. He hated giving in. Hated losing at
anything, especially playing Scrabble with me. Fortunately, he was also a
really smart man who eventually admitted he was no match for a Florida
thunderstorm in the woods. He threw down the soaking wet popup in disgust and
raced over to where we sat inside the fancy van. He jumped in, slammed the door
shut, steam rising off his head—not from the elements, but from his own anger.
Lee and I didn’t say a word. I’d never seen him mad
like that before. There we all sat, in silence, waiting for him to cool off and
say something. But he just looked out the windshield, soaking wet, sitting in
the driver’s seat, with his thinning, curly hair plastered to his head.
And then, movement. A single drop of rain rolled
slowly down his forehead and dripped off the end of his curved nose.
As God is my witness, I just couldn’t help myself. I
put a hand to my face to try to stop it, but it was already in motion. Too late.
I started laughing. Looking at me for his cue, Lee started laughing. Rob turned
to glare at us but he couldn’t pull it off. His face turned tail, selling him
out, and he dissolved into laughter, too, his shoulders shaking while he held his belly, he threw his head back and roared. There we sat, the three of us,
dripping wet inside the fancy van, howling at the hilarious indignity Rob had just
survived.
I’ve never met anyone who could laugh at himself the
way Rob could.
When the storm blew by, the campsite was soaked, the
popup was decimated and soggy, and we didn’t even think twice. In less than
five minutes, we’d gathered up the survivors of our doomed expedition, threw
the muddy mess into the back of the fancy van, and drove home. We pulled into
the garage, closed the door, and never told a soul until Monday that we were
there or how we’d created the original Stay-Cay by bailing on our camping trip
and sleeping in our own warm, dry beds for the entire weekend.
It was glorious. There were no cell phones back then.
No telephone answering machines. No one was expecting us at church or work or
family anything. No one knew were home with the garage door closed, protecting
our privacy. No one had any reason to call and interrupt our focus on our family. There, in the middle of civilization, in the aftermath of failure, we seized the moment and disconnected.
I was thinking about that trip last night. Every one
of our camping trips was as miserable and memorable and laughable as that one.
But that one, I think, has always been my favorite.
The weekend we cleared our calendars and just stayed
home.
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