I grew up in a family big enough to start our own basketball team,
with a coach and an equipment manager. Our titles strung together, dad, mom, Zachary, Michael, Kenzie, and Audra (I squeeze in as the second oldest), sound a bit like the chorus of a Raffi song. I use the term titles, because we are one of those families that use made-up, mostly gibberish, words and phrases for nearly everything, including names. The kids put on improvised religious-themed performances every Christmas, most lacking certain politically correct details. Our family had “VanDerwerker Power,” a motivational tool used to make Sunday chores more interesting. Probably the most unique of all, we grew up eating dinner at the same time and, try not to gasp, at the same table. However, the one congruency that our family had with the other, less creative families of the 21st century was our timeless love for camping at the beach, a love that I secretly did not share.
A family camping trip to the beach is usually one of clear skies, warm sunlight, puffy clouds, and scrumptious meals of just-caught fish, where getting in touch with nature means literally hugging a tree so as not to fall before reaching the top. It is a restful and relaxing replacement to endless workdays or substitute teachers, where you can throw in the towel on life, throw a towel on the sand, and just bath. Well, at least, that is what I hear.
For my family, a camping trip to the beach was when I first understood what one of my substitute teachers meant when he tried to explain to me Murphy’s Law. Stepping on burs during a midnight bathroom trip, random unwonted sibling snuggling in an overcrowded tent, and, simply put, insects were all givens during our annual four-day summer trip to First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Every trip began with a one day packing spree, where I learned about priorities. The youngest of my sisters, Audra, known around our house as “Poodge,” is a serial packer. She gave new meaning to the adage everything but the kitchen sink, in that the only reason the kitchen sink did not make it into her bag was because it might have gotten her Disney princess coloring books wet. Did I mention that these coloring books had already been fully colored, and, when asked why she felt it necessary to pack coloring books that were already completed, a feat I had previously believed to be impossible, she would reply that she “just wanted to look at them.” Of course, all suitcases had to undergo a parental inspection before making it into the minivan, where books full of orange princesses wearing blue and brown jewelry did not make the cut.
The next part of the trip was the car ride, where all of us were taught a lesson in tolerance. I sat in the backseat, needless to say the furthest from the air conditioning, next to the eldest of my younger sisters, Kenzie. Known as “Bootsi,” because her real name was too difficult for a younger sister to correctly pronounce, she used the painfully long ride to catch up her sleep. She slept without permission on my shoulder which, to this day, I am convinced was just a show to make me angry. Bootsi also drooled; however, she was not the only vacationer that produced an excessive amount of saliva. On the contrary, the three full-sized dogs that also rode with the seven people in the seven-person minivan could not help but spit out a few drops of mouth sap in their perpetual excitement of riding in the car.
Four to five hours later, depending on how much soda any one kid drank before hopping in the car, we would arrive at the campsite and start to unpack. Now, for most families, the lugging of luggage and attempts to decipher the directions to the tent are ways to bond over teamwork. That was never completely the case for our family. “Michael Mahoney,” who was alleged to be, in a rhythmic fashion, “full of bologna,” always had an alternative to unloading, i.e., his Game Boy Advance. While we accidentally poked each other in the eyes with the uncooperative tent poles and blew up air mattresses by mouth, because we forgot to bring the pump, Michael Mahoney would catch Pikachu’s and inquire about the E.T.A., a then newly learned and slightly misused acronym, for going to the beach.
Before we could indulge Mike’s undeserving desire to build sandcastles, we would have to have a lesson in responsibility, especially “Nacky Boy,” or Zachary, as he is known to the rest of the world. Being the oldest kid, it was his job, which he did superciliously, to escort us younger children to the bathroom. He would hold our hands one at a time, because goodness forbid that we coordinate our bladders, and walk us to the outhouse-esque restroom establishments. It goes without saying that these bathrooms were in shoddy conditions, at least for a preteen. There is just something about growing up in the nineties that made using a toilet in a stall without any sort of door out of the question.
After the bathroom escapades and daily trip to get ice cream at the general store, we would finally trek to the beach, and show off a little strength while we were at it. Each of us would be adorned with surprisingly great armfuls of beach accessories, chairs, towels, a cooler or two, maybe a book for anyone trying to impress the parents, sun block, and the occasional dog leash attached to a dog that weighed nearly as much as we did. This tradition, however, did not apply to mom. The only thing that mom ever carried to the beach was her red, white, and blue bag, known creatively in our neck of the woods as “the red, white, and blue bag.” This mesh bag was sort of the Costco of the beach. It had everything you would need. Cheese and crackers, jellyfish sting medicine, replacement headphones in case the sand got to your original ones, and every once in a while a completed Disney princess coloring book would show up in the off chance that Poodge “just wanted to look at them.”
After hours at the beach, we would partake in a trip to the grocery store, or what I like to call patience training. Since our cooler was too small to house enough food to feed a family of seven for more than half a day, grocery shopping happened a lot. For anyone who thinks this to be an ordinary task, try keeping five little hands on or near a shopping cart while you try to figure out the layout of a different Food Lion than you are used to. Dad would always buy the same things: sandwiches for lunch, spaghetti or chicken for dinner. Now, you may think that after two or three nights of spaghetti, grilled chicken sounds pretty good. However, keep in mind that dad is cooking on a square 12 inch propane-powered grill. With such limited tools, being a self-proclaimed grilled chicken chef takes just under two hours to prove. That’s okay, dad, spaghetti is fine with me.
The trips were not all bad. In fact, the last hour spent on the campground was the reason I endured the unavoidable sunburns and sibling temper tantrums. The last hour was the time when Evan, who also goes by “Evan from Heaven,” was, pun intended, in heaven. The final car ride home began with a stop by secret bathrooms that my parents found on their honeymoon decades earlier. On the far end of the camping ground, clearly installed for the employees, were the cleanest bathrooms with unlimited hot water. I would spend at last an hour in these bathrooms, rinsing sand out of places I did not know I had, before putting on a pair of white tube socks that I had packed in an airtight plastic bag so sand would not seep between the threads before this moment. The feel of the cloth squeezing against my feet, that had undergone a four-day ransacking by an army of sweltering sand particles trying to find shade underneath my toenails, equaled the relieving coolness of an unused side of a pillow. Ah, how I overestimate the benevolent importance of socks!
And, I would sit there, towel wrapped around my head, wearing my fresh clothes, when my comforted smile would vanish at the thought of spending the next four hours in a crowded minivan with drooling siblings and, now, wet dogs.
