I chose such a big tent on the theory that the bigger the tent, the more comfortable my children were likely to be in it, and the more comfortable they were, the more pleasant they would find the camping experience. And the more pleasant they found the first camping trip, the more likely they would be to go on another. If it doesn't work out that way, I guess I'll have a very large, lightly used tent for sale.
It wasn’t that way with me when I was a kid. I was drawn to camping and didn’t worry too much about getting rained on or bitten by mosquitoes. When my father and my uncle took my cousin, my brother, and me camping on the Sabine River, we didn’t have a tent at all. My father and my uncle would string up a flimsy tarp of polyethylene that my father got for free at the DuPont plant where he worked, and we huddled beneath it when the rains came. We didn’t mind.
But back to our new tent. I think it’s the biggest tent I’ve ever seen. It’s long and wide, and at its tallest point I can stand up straight without my head touching the top. It has two doors—a front and a back—and a zip-up curtain that allows you to separate the tent into two rooms (or to tie it back out of the way if you don’t want to). I figured that as my daughters get older and become more modest, they will appreciate having a room of their own or at least a separate dressing area. And since the separate area has its own entrance through the back door, they can even act like their parents aren’t there. That will come in handy when they reach the age where our presence embarrasses them. They can pretend they have a completely separate address in the campground, as though they lived in a ripstop nylon duplex.
The tent is so large that I’m having some buyer’s remorse, because I’m afraid it may be too big for the space allotted in most car-camping spaces in state and national parks. I guess I’ll find out. I’m not going to try to send it back at this point, given what I put it through last night. What’s done is done.
The “8” in the name of the tent means it can sleep eight people. It doesn’t mean it can sleep eight people comfortably, however. Fortunately for tent-shoppers, companies like Big Agnes provide a diagram showing how the claimed number of sleepers would actually fit in a particular model of tent, so no one is misled. Those diagrams always remind me of wasp larvae in their nest. When I was a boy, I once took apart a wasp nest to see what was inside. The wasp larvae were white grubs with the beginnings of wings. Each larva was nestled inside its own little cell, which was topped with a white paper cap. Looking back on it, I’m sorry I took apart the wasp nest and aborted those would-be wasps. But what’s done is done.
Back to our tent. Here’s the schematic diagram supplied by the Big Agnes company showing how eight sleepers can fit inside the Flying Diamond 8:
You can see that if the sleeper in the middle of the pack needs to get up in the middle of the night, there will probably be some grumbling from the others. I suppose some people actually camp like that, but I can't imagine why. I'd bring fewer campers or more tents, or I'd rig a tarp or sleep under the stars, although my experience of last night is a reminder of why a tarp or sleeping under the stars is not always an option. (By the way, I don't fault the Big Agnes company for claiming that their tent sleeps eight. All tent-makers follow the same convention in naming their tents; they name them for the maximum number of persons who can be laid out on the floor.)
Here's a picture of our new tent with the rainfly in place:
I slept in the tent last night in our back yard. I wanted to set up the tent to see what it was like and to learn how to do it. (I’ve learned from sad experience that you don’t want to find yourself using a flashlight to read the instructions for the first time as you try to set up your brand-new tent at night on a riverbank in the pouring rain.) I thought my family, or some of them might want to have a back-yard campout while the tent was up. Unfortunately, the weather forecast was very discouraging: 100% chance of rain, and thunderstorms highly likely after midnight, along with blustery winds. My wife opted out. At first, my two daughters said they would join me in the tent. I knew the younger would bail out when it came time to actually say goodnight to mom and head off for the tent, but I thought there was a fairly good chance that the older one would stick with it. As it turned out, she bailed, too. Neither one was willing to brave the wilds of our backyard without their mother, sad to say.
But I stuck with my plan and thought the predicted rain and wind would actually be a pretty good test. I put the rainfly on and tied it down with extra guylines to prepare for the expected blow. There was only a slight drizzle when I drifted off to sleep but I was later awakened by a hard blast of wind that was strong enough to push the wall of the tent inward momentarily to where it was almost horizontal and touched my face for a few seconds before the tent sprung back into shape. Then the rain came. It was ferocious. The sound of the rain on the fly grew so loud that I began to wonder if it was mixed with hail. I was glad then that my kids weren’t with me, for they surely would have panicked at this point.
Then the lightning and thunder started. At first, I tried to count the seconds between the flash and the thunder to estimate the distance, but there were so many flashes and so much thunder that it became impossible to pair the flash with its corresponding rumble, so I gave up--but not before concluding that the lightning was very close.
I began to try to evaluate the risk I was putting myself in. I knew it was low: there wasn’t much chance that I was going to be struck by lightning. Still, my chances of being struck were much greater in my back yard than they would be in my house. The risk was low, but the “delta” of the risk (as the engineers would say) was great. I began to have serious doubts about whether I was doing a smart thing.
And something else began to bother me. I realized how incredibly stupid I would sound in the news story that would report my being struck by lightning. I started imagining all the “Darwinism in action” jokes that strangers would make at my expense. (The jokes come too late, however, since I've already reproduced. Hah!)
On the other hand, if I abandoned my backyard campout, what message would I be sending my kids? That camping is dangerous, even in your own backyard?
These were the things I was thinking as the lighting kept flashing and the thunder kept banging. Ultimately, I couldn’t stand the thought of the postmortem mortification I would feel from the headline: “Local Man Killed by Lightning Strike While Camping in Back Yard During Thunderstorm Warning.” I gave up and dashed to the house in my underwear at about 4:30 a.m., where I dried off and crawled into my real bed, feeling defeated.
This morning, I surveyed the damage. There wasn’t much. There was a little water in the tent. I’m not sure where it came from. It might have come through the little hooded windows in the rainfly, which allow for ventilation but are configured so that rain would have to be falling almost sideways (or upwards) to come through the openings. You have the option of closing them, and perhaps I should have. Or maybe the water in the tent came in when I opened the door to make my dash for the house. Or maybe the tent just leaked. As strong and unrelenting as the rain was, I wouldn’t fault the tent for taking on a little water.
The wind pulled the stakes loose from the vestibule portion of the rainfly at the front door. I have an idea how I can avoid that the next time I face strong winds in this tent.
But the main thing I would do differently if I had it to do over again is that I would have stayed in the tent throughout the storm. I had a golden opportunity to teach my girls that rainstorms while camping are nothing to be particularly afraid of and that camping is a safe thing to do. Instead, I ran for cover. I blew it very badly. But what’s done is done.
(The news reported today that the local airport reported a wind gust of 69 m.p.h. at 4:02 a.m. and widely scattered hail. A tornado with winds close to 100 m.p.h. inflicted major damage to the roof of a high school in the western part of the county. Today, though, the weather was very nice.)
