Tramp Life

I won’t be posting next week, because I’ll be living in a tent down by the river, with my husband, children, and the local insect population. The kids are really looking forward to it. So are the bugs. The current weather forecast shows rain every day.

As a child, I loved camping and didn’t care a bit about the rain. My dad rented a pop-up trailer each summer for a trip to the mountains, pulling it behind his tan Toyota Cressida. We set up at some KOA or family-owned campground with a bathhouse and a stocked fishing pond, and it was our home for the week.

Camping makes for good stories. You can’t live like that and not run into funny, difficult, or downright unbelievable situations. I remember fishing in the rain at the crack of dawn, wearing a black plastic trash bag for a raincoat, using slimy orange fish eggs for bait. I caught a tree. We ate Vienna sausages.

Once, we spent hours climbing to the top of a mountain, only for my dad to turn us around right before the pinnacle, missing the view we’d hiked all afternoon to see. He said there were bears up there. I found out later that it was a naked couple, wrestling at the top of the world.

And there was the time Dad got hopelessly lost returning to our water-side campsite, only to find we were on the opposite bank of that wide river. Rather than walk around, he had us ford the river, which came up to my neck. I gave him my camera to keep safe, and he assured me he’d keep it dry on top of his head. He meant his own camera; mine was in his pocket.

Now that I’m leading the family trips, they are no less eventful. Last year, it rained nearly the whole time, and our Taj-Mah-Tent leaked. One stormy night, the four-year-old woke up crying, his pajama top soaking wet. I was so tired, I threw a towel over him and went back to sleep. An hour later, he was wet again, and I stripped him down, pulling him onto the blow-up bed beside me. We woke damp and tired, to more rain.

But the boys can’t wait to return. They never once complained about being dirty or smelly. They spent all day with one end of a stick in their hands, the other end in the campfire, fascinated with its slow transition from wood to ash. It was better than any TV show.

I’m content to live outdoors for a few days, too, but then I want to return to electricity, HVAC, and hot water. Every benefit of modern life sparkles anew after a camping trip. I used to fancy that one day I’d hike the Appalachian trail, but no. I want a hot bath. Lots of coffee. A washing machine and make-up.

I don’t want to live the life of a tramp, but I’m fascinated by those who do.

When I was nineteen, I moved back home for the first summer of college and worked at a 24-hour breakfast restaurant. It was on the waterfront, catering to tourists and the bar crowd. Mine was the night shift, from sundown to sunup, which was generally pretty slow except for the closing-time rush.

One morning, just as the faintest hint of light began to bleach the sky, a young man came into the restaurant and asked for the manager. The manager was also the cook, owner, and dishwasher, a nice guy. They spoke, and the boss told me to give the fella anything he wanted, on the house.

A cargo train ran right by the restaurant’s front door, before stopping at the state port a few blocks away. The young man had stepped off that train and into my morning. He is the only for-sure hobo I’ve ever met, and it is one of the great regrets of my life that I did not try to strike up a conversation with him and hear his stories.

The closest I’ve come is reading the accounts of gypsies, or travellers, from Ireland and part of Europe. I’ve read many of these books, enamored with their unique view of life. Here are four good ones:

Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey – Isabel Fonesca

Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two: A Gypsy Family’s Hard Times and Happy Times on the Road in the 1950s – Maggie Smith-Bendell

The Gypsies – Jan Yoors

The Horsieman: Memories of a Traveller 1928-58 – Duncan Williamson

Also, check out my friend Autumn’s blog post about Tramp’s trouble and tramp culture.

It’s not all songs around the campfire and fresh air. The traveller lifestyle was hard, sometimes criminal, and the women were rarely treated as equals. There are flaws within the people and their culture, but you go ahead and cast the first stone if you can’t say the same.

The gypsies in these books are great story-tellers, and in that way they are my heroes. They’re masters of living in the moment, appreciating what you have, and finding the wonderful in the everyday. They keep just what they can carry, in order to experience life more fully. In the words of one hobo, “‘The more you take, the less you experience.”

If nothing else, the Irish gypsies sure knew how to camp in the rain, and come next week, I’ll be needing that wisdom – that and a family pack of black plastic trash bags.

by Jessi Waugh