Frugal Fathers
Camping was the way my family vacationed. There were way too many of us for a neat little holiday package that included hotel rooms, chlorinated swimming pools, and restaurant dining. Dinner for eighteen, please, and our party includes twelve ravenous children so bring extra crackers. Visualize the heart-stopping total on the bottom of that check.
My father and his brother were frugal, self-sufficient men who knew how to feed their large families on small budgets, solve problems, and build or repair almost anything. An imaginary scene in which either of them sits in a hotel room watching sports on TV or strolls through Disneyland is inconceivable—way beyond what even my vivid imagination can conjure. Dad and Bud liked wide-open spaces and fresh air. The great outdoors was their domain, and the greater it was, the more they liked it.
Dad and Uncle Bud owned manly camping gear: oil-cloth tarps, canvas tents the size of small living rooms, fat coils of sturdy nylon rope, propane lanterns and cook stoves, a collection of steel knives, compasses, topographical maps, splitting mauls, axes, hatchets, shovels, spades, and rock picks (to deal with the occasional errant boulder loitering in the middle of the best tent site). Any tool with a wooden handle was worn smooth and shiny from decades of use. They liked living off of the land: hunting, fishing, gathering eggs from the hen house, milking cows with names like “Bossy” and “Bess,” and coaxing bushels of fruit and vegetables out of any type of soil. When we camped, they chopped pieces of wood—better yet, entire dead trees—into mountains of kindling slivers that would blaze up into smokeless, crackly fires. They were practical men.
Even the things they took along to keep their twelve children entertained while camping were multi-functional: canvas air mattresses and fishing poles. The air mattresses were a stroke of genius. They functioned as beds, but then folded down to the size of an encyclopedia. And when we weren’t sleeping on them, we amused ourselves by floating on the lake. The fishing poles entertained us for hours and saved our fathers considerable money on meat at the grocery store.
(In celebration of Father’s Day: a short excerpt from a long essay)
