Tweet
I started my camping life in canvas tents because that is all there was when I started camping as a boy in the late 1960's. I guess there were nylon tents at the time, but they weren't main stream enough for me to have access to them. My introduction to canvas tents were old WWI and WWII tents at boyscout camp and my two-man canvas pup tent. None of them provided good shelter and all of them were terribly heavy and bulky to transport. They were hot in the sun and wet in the rain. So, by the 1970's I retired my canvas pup tent for lighterweight nylon tents with full cover fly. This was a huge improvement for the type of long distant backpacking my friends and I were doing at the time.
Growing up, I missed the whole BIG canvas family tent experience that many of my friends enjoyed. I was either backpacking with my friends or camping in the VW camper van with my family.
Recently, one of my friend's parents gave me their old family canvas tent from the early 1970's or late 1960's. It took awhile to set it up, but with the old PaPa on the phone giving directions, I set it up and was impressed at the size and sturdiness. It had the familiar smell of the old canvas I used to camp in, but it was so much bigger and better and it had a floor and mosquito net doors and windows and an adult could stand up straight in it. I imagined what it must have been like to be a kid camping with the family for a week or more in one of those big canvas tents. It must have been glorious. I am sure that it was moist when it rained, but it was spacious and you could actually do something inside like play cards or read or sit up on a cot and drink hot drinks.
The pup tents I had used in that era were miserable in the rain. They were so tiny that you had to lay still and squeeze to the center to avoid touching the sides of the tent. If the rain lasted more than an hour, it meant laying in a cold wet cotton sleeping bag sopping up water. The WWI and WWII canvas tents weren't much better, but we did have cots, so we only had to deal with the rain from above and not the wet floor too.
So, now I know what my other friends were enjoying when they went camping with their parents and siblings and stayed in those big tall tents. It must have been grand. Most of them had some kind of boat too; either a wooden motor boat or canoe. All those grand things and friends in the campgrounds too. Me and my friends chose roughing it over going with our folks to campgrounds. By the time I was fourteen, my sixteen year old friends had cars and canoes, so we spent every weekend wilderness backpack camping or distance canoeing without our folks. It was fun, but it might have been fun to be with a bunch more kids our age at a busy campground too.
So, it is really with a sense of lost nostalgia that I enjoy the canvas tents today. I have a couple of them and I enjoy camping in them and thinking of what it might have been like for my friends who's families used those big canvas tents.
When I go camping at a state or national park and use a big canvas tent and old Coleman two-burner stoves and old Coleman lanters and I watch my grandchildren run around and make friends with the other kids in the park, it is just like going back in time; a 1960's re-enactment camp so to speak.
So today, when I car camp, I really enjoy using the big canvas tents, except when it rains. Same as it ever was...
Growing up, I missed the whole BIG canvas family tent experience that many of my friends enjoyed. I was either backpacking with my friends or camping in the VW camper van with my family.
Recently, one of my friend's parents gave me their old family canvas tent from the early 1970's or late 1960's. It took awhile to set it up, but with the old PaPa on the phone giving directions, I set it up and was impressed at the size and sturdiness. It had the familiar smell of the old canvas I used to camp in, but it was so much bigger and better and it had a floor and mosquito net doors and windows and an adult could stand up straight in it. I imagined what it must have been like to be a kid camping with the family for a week or more in one of those big canvas tents. It must have been glorious. I am sure that it was moist when it rained, but it was spacious and you could actually do something inside like play cards or read or sit up on a cot and drink hot drinks.
The pup tents I had used in that era were miserable in the rain. They were so tiny that you had to lay still and squeeze to the center to avoid touching the sides of the tent. If the rain lasted more than an hour, it meant laying in a cold wet cotton sleeping bag sopping up water. The WWI and WWII canvas tents weren't much better, but we did have cots, so we only had to deal with the rain from above and not the wet floor too.
So, now I know what my other friends were enjoying when they went camping with their parents and siblings and stayed in those big tall tents. It must have been grand. Most of them had some kind of boat too; either a wooden motor boat or canoe. All those grand things and friends in the campgrounds too. Me and my friends chose roughing it over going with our folks to campgrounds. By the time I was fourteen, my sixteen year old friends had cars and canoes, so we spent every weekend wilderness backpack camping or distance canoeing without our folks. It was fun, but it might have been fun to be with a bunch more kids our age at a busy campground too.
So, it is really with a sense of lost nostalgia that I enjoy the canvas tents today. I have a couple of them and I enjoy camping in them and thinking of what it might have been like for my friends who's families used those big canvas tents.
When I go camping at a state or national park and use a big canvas tent and old Coleman two-burner stoves and old Coleman lanters and I watch my grandchildren run around and make friends with the other kids in the park, it is just like going back in time; a 1960's re-enactment camp so to speak.
So today, when I car camp, I really enjoy using the big canvas tents, except when it rains. Same as it ever was...
Comment