Pawtuckaway State Park is the vacation spot of my family throughout my life where we glamp for two weeks at a time. Having just come from the woods, I’d like to give you a glimpse into a day at Camp Johnson.

Midnight to 3 am
It never really gets completely dark when you’re out in the woods. Even when the final fires go out from your neighbors on the hill next to you who clearly don’t understand that every piece of sound carries in this place, there’s enough light between the moon and soft ambient glow of the purple-dark sky that it never feels pitch-black.

My sister uses this as an excuse to not take a headlight when she gets up for her midnight pee. I still see skunks lurking in every shadowed place.

4 am to 6 am
Camping’s witching hour. If you wake up and the sky is bright-ish and everyone else in the camper is asleep, you could have woken up at 4am and you have the pleasure of rolling over and back to sleep, or it could be 6am, which is nearly time to get up anyways so you may as well just read a book at that point.

It usually feels like you’re getting scammed when you wake up early when you’re on vacation, but the morning sun is so beautiful and the world feels so quiet that I usually don’t mind getting up.

7 am to 9 am
The campsite slowly awakens. Typically, I would hear the creak of the trailer door, the click of a lighter, and the “whoosh” of the propane as my mother put on the water to make the coffee. Sometimes she would make a morning fire. She would tell me about one of her jobs as the youngest child was to make the fires in their family’s furnace during the cold New Jersey winters. Watching her gather the twigs and expertly light the newspaper in the early morning air of Pawtuckaway, I couldn’t tell that fire was a beast, as she had clearly tamed it long ago.

People trickle out of the trailer (or tent, in my brother’s case), and eventually someone will pull out what we call “pre-breakfast,” which is just a name to excuse us having two breakfasts everyday. My dad heats the griddle and asks if I want my muffin toasted, and soon I have two buttered halves sitting next to me as I crack open a book.

10 am to noon
This is the first main “activity zone.” The most planning we do camping is what we need to buy from the grocery store to cook dinner that night and the next, most of the day is left up to our whims. My mom would also be itching to play a game—we owned Settlers of Catan and Dominion year-round but it seemed camping was the only time we could pull ourselves together to focus for an hour.

This year, when I asked my dad what he wanted to do, “Read” was the resounding answer. That’s all I wanted to do too.

Occasionally we’ll kayak in the morning or take a hike to the Fire Tower and look out over the hills of New Hampshire or prepare for Big Camp Breakfast(™) where the kids will be assigned to butter bread or scramble eggs or (when we got entrusted with sharp things) chop potatoes to be crisped to perfection on the griddle. But most days, we’d lay in hammocks/look out over the lake/huddle closer to the fire in our sweatshirts/sit under the fifty-year-old canvas dining fly and read like we’d never get a chance to see a book again.

Noon to 1 pm
Breakfast time, which was actually lunch, which most of the time was just moles-in-a-hole, which is just the name we picked up from another camper for toast that you press the center out of and crack an egg in its place. The amount of butter I eat camping is usually equivalent to my intake over six months, largely due to these slices.

1 pm to 5 pm
The other activity block. We swim, we eat snacks (camping always revolves around food), we read more, we nap, we play games—generally anything that doesn’t involve moving too much. On the rainy days, the nap-taking increases exponentially.

My favorite picture of my mom, the one we used on the back of her memorial program, was likely taken around this time: pink beaten up ballcap, twisting in her camp chair to smile over her shoulder, face spotted with shadows of the leaves above her, presumably a book in her lap.

5 pm to 7 pm
Dinner is usually a production, involving a mix of cooking on the campfire and on the stove. Now that I’m a responsible adult, I have to put down my book and prepare potatoes to be wrapped in foil and throw amongst the coals, slice summer squash to grill on the griddle, stretch dough to place on the grill stretching over the open flame for a personal pizza. 

It takes a while, and sometimes we lose track of time and end up eating at 8 pm, but once everything is roasted and grilled and smoky, it’s all worth it. “Everything tastes better outside,” my dad says.

7 pm to 8 pm
Sunset o’clock.

For years, we’ve camped on site 42, which we chose for many reasons but chief among them was that its lakefront access faces west. Friends on other campsites will mosey in, pull up a chair, and watch the sky put up brillant oranges and soft purples.

Or more often than not, we’ll only see the dark gray clouds or only spot a thin line of orange. Sunsets have to have the perfect mix of clouds and clear, and sometimes we don’t hit it.

Doesn’t mean that my father doesn’t have two hundred-odd pictures with Pawtuckaway sunsets, the tree and the rock of 42 a familiar frame.

8 pm to midnight
Once the mosquitoes are unbearable, we go to the bathroom—my mother and my sister and I usually together since no one wants to do the 2 am bathroom walk—brush our teeth, make sure the fire is out, and huddle in our camper bunks (or open the screens and curse the hot still air).

My mom used to only read kindle books at night once she got a paperwhite one which lit up, but the rest of us tend to don headlights and read. My parents usually are out by 9 pm, and my dad’s snoring becomes a companion to us all.

I’ve had nights where my headlight is lit up far into the night, ravenously reading until I finish my novel at midnight or 1am, and other nights where I knock out by 9 pm, succumbing to the natural cycle of day and night. Early in our latest trip, I was grateful that I didn’t have the temptation of technology to keep me up late; by the end of our two weeks, I was scrolling on my phone until the wee hours.

***

I miss her more, when I’m there. 

The days blend together, and sometimes I think it is purposeful on the part of my parents—my mother thrived on routine and couldn’t quite escape that even in her vacation time. But I treasure it—the lack of expectations, the freedom to do the things that I don’t make time for the rest of the year, the feeling of sun on my skin (sometimes too much of it).

I don’t quite escape the hustle and the bustle—I taught summer school from the campsite again this year, and I drained my phone battery more times than I’d like to admit. But I’m trying—trying to stay in camping time.

Alex Johnson

Alex Johnson (‘19) is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. She spends her days being an uncool adult who enjoys reading romance novels and explaining niche rhythm game strategies.