The Future is Blue

The tent was a Sears & Roebuck purchase made by my father at the Minneapolis Lake Street store in 1962. It was big, measuring 18 feet long and 9 feet wide and was made with sky-blue canvas panels. Not a deep horizon blue but the overhead, clear-summer-day-blue you see when you lay on the grass and look straight up.

A robin’s egg blue.

A complex set of exterior aluminum poles were stored handily. The narrow duffel bag, with long tie straps sewn into the seams, was made from the same blue canvas as the tent. The tent was suspended from the poles stored in this bag. An identical, miniature bag held the steel tent stakes plus my grandfathers old claw hammer. His hammer was relegated to live out its days as a companion to the 18 tent stakes. The stakes pinned the tent floor taut to the earth.

First the tent was unfolded and staked in place and then the aluminum frame was assembled. After that you simply pulled up the seamed in O-rings of the tent to the corresponding J-hooks of the frame. It sounds easy, but for us kids it was somewhat of a Herculean task given the heft of the canvas and our lack of height.

Whenever we pitched the tent we had to relearn the pole-set by laying them out on the ground before we forced them together, male to female ends. A pre-bent cross piece formed the pinnacle above the highest point of the tent from which all the other poles joined. This left more than enough standing room for my father, the tallest in the family. The father of his eight children.

The youngest three or four kids always lucked out of the tent pitch and I would eye them with envy as I struggled with pounding stakes in rocky soil or pulling the heavy canvas to the hooks on the frame. With dads encouragement they would feign to help by handing me a tent pole or trying to place the stakes before we pounded them in.

Once the door awning was lifted and poled, its ropes adjusted and staked at an angle, there was always a moment – rife with anticipation – as we would clamor to be the first to enter the tent by untying the dozen or so door-flap ties, rolling it up, tying it at the top, unzipping the tough outer canvas door and then the delicate inner screen door. This was made even more tedious given our haste and the fact that the zippers were metal and jammed easily.

Blue Void

The smaller kids would always manage to scoot through the legs of the ones unzipping the doors. We would all tumble into the blue void in a frantic scramble with the doors still half unzipped.

The tents interior blue-filtered light felt like falling into the sky.

Yet equally as memorable as the light, was the indelible smell of its heavy, wax impregnated cotton canvas. The scent on a hot, humid afternoon, made you instantly sleepy. As kids in swimsuits and underwear we would all doze off in some torpid, puppy-litter like pile. Eventually we could hear our mother outside and be woken from our stupor. All red faced and sweaty, hair damp-tacked to necks and foreheads with limbs haphazardly woven together, she would coax us from our damp slumber.

Promises of Kool-Aid and Popsicles could do such a thing.

Blue Sky

The big blue sky above the earth has become my big blue tent. It is filled with  turbulence and drama. Much more than a mid-20th century American boy could have ever dreamed of.

My story.