Camping was one of my mom’s favorite things in the world. We went two or three times a year for most of my childhood, sometimes by ourselves, and sometimes with another family. We always got a big bag of licorice jimmies from a Holiday store in Fridley before we left. Mom was happiest sitting by the fire, eating peanuts and tossing the shells onto the coals. During the day she would sit and read while Dad and I took the dogs for long walks, and at night we would eat marshmallows and tell scary stories. She and Dad slept in two sleeping bags zipped together, which I always thought was so romantic. She was always the first person to get up in the morning, and I would lie on my air mattress and listen to her footsteps fade down the gravel road while the trees cast moving shadows across the tent.

Our favorite place to camp was at Wild River State Park. We always camped in the same campsite — A19. It was at the end of the first loop in the campground, and surrounded by thick woods. Only 20 feet away the woods opened up into prairie, and at night the sky was huge and black. Wild strawberries lined the roads everywhere, and the frogs and crickets were so loud I could feel the sound humming in my chest. One year I figured out that some of the trees lining the campsite were wild plums, and even though they were hard and green I picked a few, hoping I could get them to ripen somehow —  I tried leaving them in the sun, boiling them, and burying them in the coals of our fire, but nothing worked. I still think about going back at the right time of year and picking some to bring home.

The last camping trip we took was also the most eventful. I was going to Skovsøen, the Danish Concordia Language Village, and my parents decided that we would stay at Bemidji State park the night before, and they’d stay for a little vacation while I was busy singing songs and learning to conjugate irregular verbs. We brought our beagles, Polly and Sukey, with us.

When we got there it was the middle of the afternoon, and it was starting to get pretty windy. I was in a bad mood because I had been stuck in the back seat with the dogs for hours and hours. They liked to walk across my lap so I had to protect my legs with my pillow, which meant it was pretty much saturated with dog drool by the time we got out of the car. Mom and Dad were kind of cranky too, mostly from listening to me complain about the dogs for the entire trip. Trying to set up our tents in the wind didn’t do anything to help, because by the time we got one up the other would collapse and we’d have to start all over again. Everyone was pretty fried.

After a few hours of trying to unpack and set up camp the tornado sirens started going off, and just as a park ranger came to tell us where to go to weather the storm we realized that the dogs had made a break for it, and all we could see were the white tips of their tails wagging farther and farther into the underbrush. Dad and I went off in pursuit of them, leaving Mom at the campsite to try and get some of our things repacked. Fifteen minutes later we had the beagles wrangled and in their kennel, and we set off to the emergency shelter in the visitor center.

When we got there Dad had to argue with another park ranger about whether we could bring the dogs into the visitor center, which of course had a no-dogs policy. My dad eventually prevailed, saying that they were in their kennel and would be quiet, and that he wasn’t going to leave the dogs outside in the van to get blown away in some storm. We spent the next few hours sitting on the cement floor in the dark, watching National Geographic nature documentaries featuring Dudley Moore as the voice of an animated globe. Finally the all-clear was given, and we retreated back to our wrecked campsite in the dark.

The next day my parents dropped me off at Skovsøen, and over the next couple of days my dad sent me a couple of letters about how the dogs had broken out of the campsite again after I was gone — as he put it, the dogs were defecting to the wilderness just as I was defecting to the Danes. He even drew a couple of pictures in the margins. Mom hardly ever wrote me letters at camp, but I think that was mostly because I never replied to them when she did.

I still like to think of my mom sitting next to the fire with a big stick for moving coals and branches into place, with her feet resting on the edge of the iron fire ring and her hat pulled low over her eyes to keep the smoke out of them.