On the Road and in the Mountains, 1956
With three more leaves in your notebook, you
are not off the hook. They make six more pages,
not enough for the Iliad, of course. You can relax—
but only on the hook still—your own Iliad—so
get writing, okay? You could reminisce about
your family-of-origin’s odyssey car-camping
with a first camp on the Sacandaga River, then
across the U.S. and even up into Canada (!956),
driven, so to speak, by your father’s contract
with Knopf to write the book he never would
about family car-camping between wilderness
trips, one trip even up into Canada by canoes
with the intrepid Ernest Oberholtzer and
helped by Native American Jimmy Banks.
Not to mention your mother, Alice, cooking
for six in campgrounds, over open wood
fires—often even by the car’s headlights in
when mileage charts between last night’s
campground and tonight’s proved wrong.
All these had been worked out and charted
ahead with the cooperation of the AAA,
but could prove off-kilter enough to matter.
This was a family of six in a 98 Oldsmobile
convertible, with cooking and camping gear,
clothing, sleeping bags, and three pup tents:
one for the two boys, one for the two girls,
and one for the parents—Army surplus
World War II ski patrol tents, olive drab
on the outside but reversible to the inside
white for camouflage against snow cover
from the air. You did not sleep late on sunny
mornings in the mountains, when the heat
of sunlight magnified in the white of the
tents’ interiors drove you out—like it or
not, into very cold alpine morning air,
with you tent-heated to a sweat, enough
to bone-chill you at higher elevations.
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