Mother, nature

I thought by 43 I’d reached a point in my life where sleeping on the ground was a thing of the past.

Yet here I am -- sandwiched inside two zipped-together 100% poly-fill sleeping bags with my daughters Madeline and Susannah lying on top of me. Fine for them, of course; they’re preschoolers. But why must they be wearing some 12 layers of sweatshirts and a thermal blanket, boasting foil-like material appropriate for astronauts? After all, it’s June.

Through the darkness, logs sawing around us, I hear my husband ask, “Are you warm?” Warm, I think. That’s not half of it.

“That crackling sound you just heard was my lower body actually exploding into flames.”

There are two types of people in the world: campers and those whose idea of outdoor relaxation is sipping chilled crantinis poolside at the Ritz-Carlton. That would be me. But even I have had to face certain realities over the years.

I lack Paris Hilton’s fortune and frequent-flier miles, my immediate family is not the cast of “Sex and the City,” and for 17 years now I’ve been living with a South Dakota-born fishing musician, originally introduced to me as one of those amazing he-men who can “fillet a trout like a zipper.” Read: camper.

Add the fact that much of our vacation time now features our two children, ages 4 and 3, and their friends and cousins, and family camping trips make more and more sense. (Especially after that single day at Disneyland that seemed to cost $73,000.)

Where children are concerned, the outdoors has an advantage over the indoors: Nature is free. And it is also educational, accessible and, with a few artful swooshes of leaves and twigs, relatively easy to clean. Especially if you’re car camping.

North to the woods

Just hours earlier, our slightly pockmarked last-century Toyota minivan had been pressure-packed with gear. The kids were strapped into their car seats and L.A.’s smoggy basin slipped behind us in the rearview mirror. Yes, “Mickey’s Comedy for Kids,” beloved soundtrack for our children’s lives, blared its stream of puns and knock-knock jokes for the 100th time, making me a little carsick. But the beauty was, thanks to my husband’s kamikaze driving -- and I mean that lovingly -- we hurtled as fast as legally possible toward a place without electricity. As far as I know, there is no such thing as a solar-powered boombox.

Certainly it was nothing I saw at that circle of urban hell: the Outdoor Retail Store.

Henry David Thoreau wrote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Obviously Thoreau never went to Big 5 with little children, or he might have wished the end had come sooner.

It was there, the day before, that I’d almost considered canceling. While Mike was wrestling with sleeping bags, I had just turned down the aisle for gloves for our daughters when there was a crash in the fishing department.

Looking over, I realized that Power Bait attracts not only trout but small children. To my daughter Susannah, the little glass jars of brightly colored pink, yellow and green salmon eggs looked like candy. And then there was all the dangly stuff like gummy worms. She was grabbing the jars and packets with the frenzied glee of a kid in, well, Willy Wonka’s Fishing Factory.

Just then I looked at my husband, who was marauding bear-like, his arms full of thermal underwear, lanterns, a headlamp, flares, an inflatable mattress, propane for the stove, a Frisbee and some sort of vague Velcro paddleball game, when his phone chirped. It was his friend Jimmy Goings, who at the last minute had agreed to join us. Mike listed the only two items our marriage still lacked, saying, “Bring, if you have them, a frying pan and a hatchet.”

Camping vs. Kamping

I had often thought true camping to be a low-impact, environmentally progressive thing that lean-muscled Sierra Club members do, involving tissuey materials like Gore-Tex and Thinsulate, ballerina-like climbing shoes, martial arts-style ponytails, and pitches of difficulty 5.7 and higher.

By contrast, I’d often associated car camping with Kar Kamping, as in Kampgrounds of America, where the wilderness bar is low, of difficulty 0 or perhaps even -12.6. Kar Kamping is pulling the minivan into an oil-spotted parking place next to a rusty fire pit that cradles marshmallow droppings and discarded Bud Light cans, 50 yards away from the humming UFO-like vibrations of a fluorescent-lighted public bathroom. Kar Kamping is a camouflage-toned “fishing chair” whose seat features a built-in beer cooler, a Winnebago tent (bought at Kmart) so big you can stand up and flip hamburgers in it.

Not that Kamping doesn’t have its advantages. When you do succumb to an outdoor weekend with Mr. Kamper, you instantly gain a husband who will do all the slave labor, whistling with glee. That leaves me free to retreat into my inner glaze, a Zen state peculiar to mothers of small children. Like the poet Kahlil Gibran, all I will require is a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine or two. And I don’t even need a thou. Just a book. Maybe Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air.”

As we head north, two hours into the drive, excitement infects the car -- the excitement of impending coast, impending fog and impending redwoods, which we’ve described to our kids as “very big trees.” How big? I hold up an old schoolbook I found at a garage sale, one of those wonderful old pieces of Americana featuring a photo of the awesome if politically incorrect “Drive-Thru Redwood.”

“But of course we will not drive through the trees,” I explain to the children, turning down the Mickey tape. “We will cherish the trees, nurture the trees. Trees are our friends.”

Just as I run out of eco-homilies, we turn into Big Basin Redwood State Park and begin the windy drive into deep woods. The girls are instantly curious, wide-eyed, twisting in their seats to peer out, up and around: “Who lives here?” they ask. “Santa Cruz hippies” seems to be one answer, judging by the confluence of quaint roadside shoppes of vintage clothing, tie-dye and dangling crystals.

The campsite we pull into is idyllic, not at all like KOA. If anything, our new home resembles a stage set of a prehistoric forest: The canopy-filtered lighting is dreamlike, the carpet below a soft tapestry of leaves and twigs. You can sleep under, or against, a giant redwood if you wish, and because the trunks are so enormous, you can’t gauge the trees’ size all in one glance. One has the sensation of being underwater, of moving in a gauzy wonderland populated by giant dinosaur feet, their shapes subtly transforming under ever-shifting shafts of light.

The kids jump out to explore, and Mike and I begin the task of dragging out our expeditionware. Fortunately, it’s 1:30 in the afternoon, so no one is around to judge how well or poorly we’re doing, which is good because we are way out of practice at even setting up camp for two people.

But then I realize, standing in front of a pile of stuff, in the middle of a forest, that it doesn’t really matter. Family camping is not about efficiency but about the long, slow hours of family undefinition. Preschool-age, our kids are still too young to be dispatched into real activities like swimming, hiking, Scrabble or playing cards, unless you count the peculiar horrors of 13 1/2 -card Go Fish, Disney Princess style. We have eight hours until darkness, given the extraordinary length of June days here, and all we really have to do is eat and sleep.

And then there is the tent -- in this case, our blue and white Winnebago tent. Which smells kind of mildewy. Never mind. Within 30 minutes, Mike -- with Madeline’s help -- has put the tent up, stowed inside two inflatable mattresses made quickly ready with his new fast-working D-celled air pump, and set on top of those four brand new sleeping bags. With delight, the girls crawl into their cozy nest of fun. Wielding a lantern, Madeline excitedly starts telling her sister a woods-inspired story about the Berenstain Bears.

During this Norman Rockwell moment, Jimmy Goings arrives. The ultimate Camping Helper, Jimmy -- whose profession actually is “comedy manager” -- brings instant joviality, not to mention Basque marinade, salmon steaks, skirt steaks, rib eyes, bratwursts, beer. And of course the frying pan and hatchet, which, in concert with the firewood, are soon put to good use.

And now the stove is cheerfully crackling, which transports Mike into a state of Coleman-induced euphoria, crowing: “I love my stove! Viking brags about their 18,000 BTUs! You know what I’ve got here? 16,000 BTUs! 16,000!”

And when we’re warmed inside and out, hand-sampling toothsome salmon and steak right out of the pan with all the drippings, now come the pleasant camping reminiscences. For Mike and Jimmy, both from South Dakota, memories are full of fishing, cabins, tents, lakes.

“For me,” I recall, “growing up in a Chinese-German family, the closest we came to roughing it was a thing you might call ‘hotel camping,’ where the hotels you stay in are so bad it’s like camping.”

The downside

But as our lovely forest glen grows almost imperceptibly colder, it’s becoming apparent that for Madeline, five sweatshirts (including two of mine), aren’t enough to stave off the chill. What was once a charming Berenstain Bears narrative has downgraded itself ominously to simply “bears.”

“I’m scared,” my former angel whimpers, her mood imploding. “I want to go home.”

Hopping from patch to patch of remaining sun, I present her with a frenetic array of Club Med-like activities. I try a giddy game of Velcro-strap “Reach Volleyball,” a round of “Dora the Explorer” picnic, even a pre-nightfall marshmallow roasting moment, my offerings of which she finds disappointingly burnt. In desperation, I throw an emergency thermal blanket over her, which apparently lends all the comfort of wearing a tarp and gives her the appearance of a small, gloomy, hunch-backed Teletubby.

While it’s frustrating that our Rocky Mountain high can be so quickly sunk, I do know how Madeline feels. Apparently we share the Loh family curse: Chinese camping genes. Age 4, her first time out, she has not yet learned how to locate her inner Ritz-Carlton, in my case, a personal bottle of red wine. By 43 she’ll figure something out. All that’s left for her now is to go to bed. At 5:30.

And in her place, who pops up like a top from her nap but Susannah. Saving the day, our scavenging raccoon is (soon literally) full of beans. Who needs an activity when you can chase a banana slug for an hour gaily yelling, “Sluggy, sluggy, sluggy!”

All around us, the woods are finally enveloped by darkness, punctured here and there by the distant orange glow of a lantern on a picnic table beyond, or diffused behind the soft veil of a tent. The only sounds are the faint chittering of insects and, occasionally, the murmur of voices.

Aloft in our bubble of firelight, we sit hypnotized by the snap and smell of the fire. My desire to walk to the too-bright concrete bathroom and brush my teeth with cold water gradually melts down, irrevocably, with the embers.

Epiphany

Morning is perfection: sun, redwoods, kids, both in fine form, veritable wood sprites, exploring tree trunks, running, jumping, singing, climbing -- doing all the things children, with their natural wonder, are supposed to do. Breakfast is another cholesterol-spiking mixed grill of eggs, hamburger, hot dogs and sausage.

Indeed, if this were a Jon Krakauer adventure, between my husband, Mr. Kamper 1, and Jimmy Goings, Mr. Kamper 2, the biggest challenge would be not scaling the Himalayas but processing all this meat. Clearly we should have trained by at least walking across a few parking lots while eating pork chops.

I’m handed a mug of hot coffee and, yes, Mike has brought whole milk. And, stuffed in the blue-and-white Big 5 bag, Equal. Thank God someone thought to over-pack. My coffee is an exquisite treat in our dinosaur-foot forest. Thoreau found his Walden perfect because he was alone -- his most delightful companion, solitude. To me, car camping -- with its tantalizingly painful combination of wildness and domestication, irritation and hilarity -- is a metaphor for the family itself, with all of its complicated joys.

This morning I feel as old as the redwoods, who, on the upside, seem to be still standing.