HER FIRST NIGHT IN A TENT

   When we were first married we did not have a lot of money, but we both loved the great outdoors of Utah and the neighboring states. A lot of our vacations were spent in the beautiful green mountains and the red deserts of Utah.
   All of them were fun and we created a lot of memories. After we got home from one in particular, I
(with tongue in cheek) put down on paper this very interesting deer hunting vacation. A little of it is enhanced but for the most part it pretty much the way I spent that night? Ha-ha.

                              HER FIRST NIGHT IN A TENT

It was to be a pleasant week of deer hunting, but as it turned out. It was a serious case of first time tent fever.

My wife Donnie and I had decided to pack up and go deer hunting for our first time out after we were married. I knew she had spent a lot of time in the mountains, but I had not thought about the fact that she had never actually spent time in a tent.

She had roughed it in the mountains in an old cabin—quite old but still serviceable. She had even slept, on one camping trip in a 1961 Nash that had seats that would fold down to make a bed. Little did I realize as we got ready to go, that she had no tenting experience.

Even for the most experienced tenter, you need to have a very large tent with some of the comforts of home to keep from getting the infamous tent fever.

Before we left home in the city, I made sure we packed my pride and joy, a 10 foot by 12 foot wall tent that I had owned since I was 17 years old. I also put in the tent stove that I had made in High School, which I bragged would run most normal people out of the tent if you really got it fired up. We also packed an assortment of other comfort makers. Coolers, clothes racks, lanterns, lantern hangers, a large tarp for the floor and an old bed springs and two brand new five pound Dacron sleeping bags.

We pushed and stuffed all of these things into the trunk and back seat of our old 1954 Mercury, with a few overflow items on the front seat between us. With no more room in the old Mercury, we took off for the mountains of Joe’s Valley for a pleasant week of deer hunting.

When I was seventeen I had bought all of my camping equipment at the Company Store in Hiawatha, where I worked and I was really proud of it. I had a large wall tent, Coleman lantern, Coleman stove, Coleman cooler and a .270 Winchester rifle. The sleeping bags were new or had only been used a couple of times.

I imagined what the week was going to be like as we traveled from the city toward our destination in Joe’s Valley. I could picture Donnie and me roaming the beautiful Joe’s Valley mountains and looking down on our little tent camp, on the edge of a meadow, at the bottom of the mountain.

There was however numerous things I forgot to take into consideration –Donnie had never spent a night in a tent, let alone a week. It also could be bad weather and bad weather in Joe’s Valley was really bad news.

As one might suspect, we arrived in late afternoon and set up our tent in an idyllic setting. We were in the edge of some quakies that bordered on a high mountain meadow. We could set on a log in front of the tent and see clear across the meadow to the mountains on the other side.

We sat and watched the clouds scudding across the sky and tried to imagine the shapes of animals as they changed from one thing to another, moving swiftly across the sky.

As dusk creeped in and total darkness followed, we put out the Coleman lantern, stoked up the wood burning stove in the tent and prepared to settle in for the night. We hoped to get a good night’s sleep so we could arise early in the morning for the hunt.

I had not realized that mild hallucination was one of the early symptoms of tent fever. If I had known I would have gotten a clue about Donnie early in the night. As soon as we got settled down in our sleeping bags Donnie started to exhibit some neurotic behavior.

I was one breath away from being sound asleep when I felt a hand grip my arm and tighten until I thought it was going to shut off the blood to my arm. “Did you hear that,” she whispered. “I didn’t hear anything,” I told her.

I settled back down and again as I was about to pass into the never land of dreams and big Bucks, the grip on the arm again, and she said, ”listen to that THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, there is something right outside of the door to the tent.”

At that point my ears perked up and I listened and sure enough I heard a faint, chop, chop, chop of someone down the valley was cutting firewood. Of course unless you have been in the mountains at night, you can not realize how sound travels a long distance in the thin mountain air.

I could not convince her it was someone cutting wood. She thought for sure it was a bear, moose or perhaps even Sasquatch.

“Did you tie the tent flaps.” She said. As if that would do any good, if it was one of her imagined threats. So I grumbled a little and got out of bed, catering to her psychological need, untied the tent flaps and took a quick look outside, retied the tent flap and said to her, “No one there dear, all is well.” By this time I secretly hoped we could now settle down for a good night’s sleep.

Sometime within the next hour, again just as my eyelids had closed and I could see a big six point buck standing on a ridge looking at me. I heard a panic stricken whisper, “The tent is on fire.”

I jumped out of bed and started putting on my pants. I had one leg in the wrong pant leg and was almost awake when I realized there was nothing amiss in the tent. I hissed as calmly as I could, “WHAT makes you think the tent is ON FIRE.”

“Look at the tent behind the stove; I think it might be burning.” I looked and the air holes in the stove were reflecting a gentle orange glow onto the tent wall. Indeed a nice reflection but no fire.

I blurted out, “Don’t EVER do that to me again,” as I crawled back into bed.

About midnight I felt an elbow in my ribs and was given the enlightened information, from my now psychotic wife, that the wind had started to blow and, “Do you think the tent might blow down?”

“Let it blow,” I yelled. “The fire is stoked, the tent is tied down and I have slept in this tent through everything but a hurricane, so now let’s get some sleep.

About an hour later I heard this small voice say, “Honey what is that plop, plop, plop noise I can hear?” I propped up on one elbow and listened and as I layed back down I said, “It is just a little rain let’s try and go back to sleep.” After about fifteen minutes, that to her seemed like two hours, the plop, plop, plop quit and she gently shook me and said, “I think it has stopped honey, now we can get some sleep.”

I thought to myself as I settled back down, “Was she shivering from the cold, or trembling from her imagined fears or did she just have a touch of tent fever?”

Within hours the temperature was dropping like the mercury in a thermometer in a snow cave. I know how that feels because I had spent some time in a snow cave as a boy scout in my younger years. I got up and stoked the stove a couple of times and finally it was 6:00 AM and time to get up, get breakfast and go off and stalk the mighty bucks.

I got up, stoked the fire, got dressed and untied the tent flap and looked out and let out what my wife thought was a primeval scream, “OH NO.” When the plop, plop, plop on the roof had quit during the night it was because it had quit raining, but what we did not realize was that it had turned to SNOW.

There were two or three inches of, what in any other circumstances would be beautiful white snow. But at this point it was a bone chilling addition to Donnie’s tent fever. It was still snowing hard, and the flakes looked as big as half-dollars, as they were fluttering gently down to the ground.

I started thinking of all the stories I had heard about people being snowed in for the winter, or having to walk out and leave their car, and those that had to have a CAT come in and pull them out. And then I thought of spending another night in the tent with Donnie.

I yelled at her, “get up, get dressed as fast as you can, we are out of here.” She pouted and said, “Don’t yell at me dear.” I screamed back, “I am not yelling I am just excited.” And I to perhaps, had a touch of tent fever.

I dropped the tent almost before she got out of it. I stuffed it, and anything else that was loose, in the back seat of the Mercury. As calmly as possible I told her. “We NEED to get out of here as soon as we can.”

Donnie said, “Why are you shouting and sweating dear, when it is snowing.” I could not tell her it was because of worrying about spending the winter in Joe’s Valley in a tent. We did not even have a Scrabble game or Monopoly game to play if it came to that. I tried to casually say. “I guess I am just trying to pack to fast and it causes me to sweat and be a little up tight.”

Because of our haphazard loading, we could not get everything back in the Mercury. It seems when you just throw things in they take up more room than if they are packed in nice and neat. We ended up throwing snow on the stove to cool it off. We tied the tent poles to the front and back bumpers and tied the stove on top of the trunk lid.

We jumped in the Mercury and I gunned the motor and we shot down the road, sliding from one rut to another. As we were sliding down the road my wife said, “Honey do you hear a funny noise in the engine?”

There has never been anything quite like our first night in a tent. I still kid her about tent fever and she still talks about “snow phobia” that I seemed to have caught that morning.

   (This is a somewhat true story with some embellishments—written by W.R. Baldwin in November of 1993)