This story is part of our July 2025 Young Professionals issue, photographed at Bradshaw Animal Shelter. To learn more about adopting at Bradshaw, click here.

If I thought about it, I’d probably remember some unhappy times while dirt camping as a kid. But why would I do that?

Anybody who spends hundreds of dollars on equipment and supplies, plus weeks in excited anticipation, for the chance to sleep on the ground, to live in a perpetual cloud of dust and mosquitoes, eat food from a milk-sodden, meat-bloodied chest of melted ice, and pee and poop into a fly-infested open pit has no grounds for complaint on any level, least of all personal inconvenience.

But childhood memories are scrubbed clean over time.

In the 1960s, my dad had a huge, unbelievably heavy canvas tent. It was bigger than some honky tonks I’ve been in and smelled almost as bad. He had to prop the thing up with two heavy wooden poles I think he bought from a going-out-of-business sale at a circus. When it rained, the canvas soaked through and dripped on us long after the downpour had ended. Then we mildewed. If it was 80 degrees outside, it was 95 in the tent. If it was 60 outside, it was 45 in the tent.

By the time I started taking my son, Jeremy, camping in the early 1980s, the equipment had improved dramatically. Our tent was made of lightweight nylon. It was the first of those now ubiquitous dome things supported by flexible fiberglass poles. It didn’t have to be lashed to steel stakes in the ground, tethered by 12 ropes poised to grab a foot every time you walked to the outhouse.

The downside of my new nylon igloo was its lack of height — maybe 4 feet tops — which was fine for a kid but forced me to mimic a horizontal pole dancer, writhing and wriggling on my back just to get out of my sleeping bag, pull on some pants and crawl on hands and knees through the little flap at the front.

Like my father before me, I taught my son to build a campfire the old-fashioned way: with balled-up paper under kindling, under twigs, under larger sticks, all fastidiously layered beneath three logs wigwammed in the center. It was a thing of beauty. We stood back in proud appreciation of our handiwork before striking a match in a solemn generational ceremony. Me, with a loving fatherly hand on my son’s shoulder, him scratching madly at dozens of festering bites on his legs and neck.

After Jeremy mastered campfire building, I introduced him to fire starters — those wonderful, waxy chunks of compressed sawdust that make it possible for any idiot with a Bic lighter to ignite the perfect flame.

Dad taught me to fish just as his dad had taught him, in fast and frigid trout streams. I wasn’t very good at it, and frankly, I hated it. He was always on the move, as I flung lures into trees and chased after him upstream, scrambling over rocks for hours just to keep up. But that’s what fathers and sons do. It’s tradition.

My kid broke that curse. Oh, I taught him. He caught his first fish when he was 7 or 8. But the next time I asked him if he wanted to go fishing, he replied with a gentle degree of pity, “Dad, you know you can buy fish at the store, right?”

That finished the sport for me, and now, 40-some years later, I still thank him.

I guess people camp in Texas. I’ve lived here for 13 years, but I have no idea — too hot, too flat, too much, not the home of my heart.

Northern California is a special place for all of us who love life in campgrounds: sweatshirt and jacket nights even in summer, the songs, old stories, s’mores and laughter; the smell and woosh of a gas-powered lantern leaping to life, the crackle and smoke of a jolly campfire properly built.

In evenings such as these with no TVs or electronic distractions, we had no choice but to talk with each other about our lives and thoughts, of fanciful, imagined wonders and deep philosophy, of past events shared and joyously remembered that made us a family; and of mutual hopes, dreams and newly created memories that we would then take with us, yawning and regretful of the day’s end, into our sleeping bags.

On warm nights, we didn’t even bother with the tent. We just lay on the ground and looked at God’s stars twinkling in the heavens. Secure with our families at our sides, we inhaled the fresh pine air and closed our eyes to sleep the unburdened sleep of woodsmen.

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