Camping

• Taylah Murray, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2010

The best thing about being a kid is you want to try just about everything there is possible to do in life. The idea of most things is exciting and death defying.

Camping. How I love it. Camping. How mum hates it.

Somewhere from deep within I found courage to ask her if we could go camping with a group of friends.

Her definition of a campsite is a nettle-riddled, insect-infested, leech-laden area, enclosing competitive men fighting over the camp oven to see who produces the best whole cooked cow.

How was she going to shower the kids when they looked like they had spent their third week at war in Afghanistan. Oh, that’s right she will have to hook up the portable shower and somehow manage to shampoo their hair, clean the 5 inch thick cake of mud from their legs, only to have them step outside the portable shower straight into freshly laid dung.

I suggested she could always sleep in the back of the station wagon, but no way would she want to leave behind her lovely warm doona and soft mattress for a freezing cold, uncomfortable tin can. Not to mention becoming all-you-can-eat dinner for the mosquitoes the size of sumo wrestlers.

Something I said must have changed her mind.

I see you like to travel light Mum as I watch her struggling to close her bulging suitcase the size of the Prime Ministers desk. You do realise we are going away for the weekend, not actually embarking on a round-the-world trip of a lifetime.

I was determined to help Mum prove that she could become a camper, but the instructions for putting up the tent may as well have been written by a martian as she struggled with the tent for at least an hour. When her head finally emerged from the canvas, gasping for air, declaring that pitching a tent was no harder than assembling the Sydney Opera House single-handedly.

After dinner when we were all gathered around the campfire singing Waltzing Matilda, a shriek alerted us to some kind of catastrophe. Disoriented, we all stumbled in the direction of the scream.

It came from our private port-a-loo. It had been tipped forward and someone very unfortunate was locked in side. I can’t begin to describe the words that were ringing in the air. We up righted the port-a-loo and jimmied open the door. And oh, the fear of seeing Mum – who takes a shower three times a day and disinfects our hands when we have touched the fridge door, covered head to toe in sewerage.

As she emerged, spluttering, from her private plastic cubicle, I can honestly say, I was at that moment in fear of my life.

I know for as long as I am a child dependant on my parents for the basic needs in life, like food, water, clothes and money.
We will never ever experience camping together again.