It Was A Good Tent

On the first morning, I woke to bird songs I did not recognize. They came from high in the canopy, and the campsite echoed with their calls. It was early. Day was barely dawning. I turned over and fell back asleep.

When I woke again, I turned over and my arm landed with a short, sharp splash on the floor of the tent a few inches away from the edge of my sleeping bag.

Splash?

I sat up. Pulling back the sleeping bags and pads underneath, I could see that water had come in thru the floor.

It's been a good tent, holding back inches of standing water in years passed. For heaven's sake, I paid enough for it in the day, so it ought to have been a good tent. But on this trip, the tent did not hold, and things were getting a bit wet.

Still, it has been a very good tent.

As it turned out, the rains continued on and off that day and the next and the next. And the thunder and lightning returned every night. And as good as the tent was in its day, we got wetter and wetter with each passing storm (although we were able to mostly drying things out in between).

On the morning of day two, despite my efforts at tarp reconfiguration, our sleeping bags and even the blankets on top had transformed into sponges. And on our last morning there, as the three of us huddled in the big tent waiting for a chance to break camp and pack the car, the rains fell without letup. With cereal bowls with our hands and paperback books in our laps, we waited for a break in the rain that never broke and hoped for blue skies that never came.

And then came the drips from the ceiling of the tent.

There we were, the three of us, on our last day, eating and reading and laughing at our plight, when a drip dropped on my face. I moved away. And then another drip dropped on the sleeping bags. And soon another and another. And still the rain outside continued. And we began to wonder how long we would have to wait before we could pack and resume our trip to Michigan, which is when the drip turned into drops dripping first regularly and then furiously.

We looked at each other and put down our books and resigned ourselves to our fate: that tent's days were over, and we were going to have to pack in the pouring rain.

Still, it really was a good tent.

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Tent/rain follies
Buffalo Point Campsite, Buffalo National River

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The Passing of the Storm

Our sleeping bags called to us we sat mesmerized by the black night littered with stars that we could see thru breaks in the canopy of the Oaks about us.

There wasn't a cloud in the sky, nothing but stars to see in that velvet blackness of night beyond the trees. But something was flickering and flashing like lightning beyond the hills, although we could hear no thunder.

"Did you see that?" I asked Trudy and Ben.

They did, and our minds turned to the tents. It was hot, and we had left the rain flies off so we might sleep a little cooler. But if a storm were coming...

I stood up and put the poles into the fly of our tent and set it nearby so that we could quickly attach it in a moment of need. Ben dug his fly out of the bag where he had stashed it and set it just outside his tent door. And then we crawled into our tents, finally heeding the call of our sleeping bags. The flashes continued with no hints of rain, and soon we were asleep.

Some time later, in the middle of the night, a few drops started falling.

I sat up and peeked outside. The black, star-studded sky was gone. Clouds had moved in. And now thunder accompanied the flashes of light in the sky. The raindrops started falling faster.

I unzipped the tent door, dashed outside and raced to put on the rain fly. I heard Ben's tent unzip, too, and soon we were both securing our tents and racing around the campsite to make sure everything that needed covering was covered and everything else was battened down.

A breeze came up, and the rain started to fall in earnest. The two of us ran around the campsite in a fury a few final times, putting a few lingering things away and dashing into our tents just as the downpour came.

It rained hard. And the claps of thunder grew louder and came closer to the flashes of lightening. This was thunder as I have never heard it before: ground shaking, nerve rattling crashes that split the air just as your eyesight recovered from the preceding flash of bright white light. This storm was coming right up the river, coming up after us, coming to show us what real rain feels like, teaching us a little lesson.

Flash. Boom. Crash. The thunder was now coming together with the lightning: no time to prepare for the racket. Kaboom. Ka-boom. KABOOOM. One after another. The rain came down in a torrent. The air in our tents had that punctuated feel of mist. We pulled our things away from the tent walls.

And then the rain began to slow. And the thunder began to lag behind again. And the storm receded into the distance until the thunder was gone and the flashes were only flickers beyond the hills.

Outside, the campsite revealed what a rain it had been. The gravel was pushed into now-empty streams. Water had streamed by our tent and around the table and over the edge of the terrace, racing thru the grass under the trees over the cliff and down to the river.

But inside we were dry, and our sleeping bags called to us again, and we finally fell fast asleep.

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The first night
Buffalo Point Campground, Buffalo National River

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