3-8-19 TENT

My grandchildren will not know it, that peculiar smell of a musty old canvas tent. They won’t have to lug a big ole two-ton duffel up into the Pennsylvania hills, complete with hefty support bars and metal tent pegs and a blunt edged axe buried in the bottom. They will never know the kind of tent that takes at the very least two people to assemble, and one of them had better know what they are doing. The tents of my youth, the ones lugged to Young Womens Camp up Mingo Creek, never dried out. Never. They got air in them a few times a year, when the Scouts used them, and when the girls got them and finally cleaned them out.

The seams were lined with speckles of black and blue, with tea-stained water marks seeping up the sides. The pungent sting in the nostrils, mildew and earth and campfire smoke swirled into damp cotton, remained through the days and nights of our journey into nature, and it remained and was added upon through the years. When you’re young, if you are blessed to not be too awfully anxious and you are in the safe company of family or friends, the smell of an old canvas tent may be bearable. But if you start fixating on it, you end up in trouble and will find yourself in the morning outside the tent, freezing in the distillery of and awakening morning in Western PA, and you will be covered with bug bites. Still, there is a charm in the aroma of an old canvas tent that my littles will not know, and it kinda makes me sad.

Instead, because they do have adventuresome parents, they will carry their tents in their backpacks, all sleek and practically weightless. They’ll assemble them in a flash, by themselves, and take them down by themselves as well. I should celebrate the beauty of such ease for these kids I love. They can enjoy the sweeter things in nature. With all the technical advancements of the modern age, there will be more energy and time to enjoy fish in the waters, and trails to be hiked, and sweet mountain air to inhale.

Still, they will have to find a clearing for whatever tent they carry with them. The material may be different, but I suspect there will always be one sweet absolute in every tent, at least ones actually used in the hills: Smoke. Pure, aromatic, heart calming wood smoke. Mother Nature, as patient as she is with the advancements of mankind, may have watched as we outgrew our old musty canvas tents. But she still has certain absolutes: earth, water, wind and fire.