It arrived on my porch one day a decade ago, delivered by the folks with the brown trucks. I brought it inside. It lay there in the long box waiting for me to open it. Inside was a bright new tent. A camping tent.

I know what you’re thinking. Just what does a guy who finished high school before color television need with a tent? Well, I wanted it. And I saved up and bought it. Ordered it from one of those catalogs that show pictures of tents with happy families standing and sitting around the tent just being happy.

Maybe far back in the recesses of my mind (my mind has lots of recesses) there may have been a flash of Lurey and me lounging near the tent door, sipping hot coffee and stirring the stew on the campfire. Never mind that Lurey had not tented with me since that one and only time when we were newlyweds. A hopeful vision? Well, OK, maybe a delusion; that’s almost the same thing isn’t it?

My aging friends already had motor homes and camper trailers. The things are really nice, what with running water – hot and cold mind you – showers, cook stoves, air conditioning and of course central heat. They even have recliner chairs and color television.

These rolling campers are so very nice that I would have scrimped and saved and bought us one were it not for two things; 1) When I am inside one, I forget that I am camping out because it just ain’t like camping out, and 2) I am afraid. Yes, I am afraid I would be reading the paper and watching the Weather Channel just like at home, comfortably reclined in the camper’s easy chair and slightly dozing, when tragedy would strike.

I would sleepily dis-recline the recliner, struggle to my feet and stagger through the bathroom door during the Michelin commercial with the cute little baby going round and round in one of those tires. That’s when it would happen. Instead of stepping onto the soft carpet of my bathroom floor, I would step out the door of the camper trailer and break my neck!

My demise would be due to the striking resemblance of the interior of the trailer to my living room – the trailer entrance being exactly where the bathroom should be.

I admit that I had second thoughts about ordering the tent. For one thing, I already had a tent; well, two tents really. OK three, but one had just mosquito netting for walls – not really a tent. And anyway, I hadn’t unrolled them in so long they could have been unserviceable. No one should be caught with an unserviceable tent, especially if one ever intends to go tent camping.

And this was a big tent. Ten by 14 feet! Big enough for Lurey and me and a lot of gear; or big enough for me and a small mountain of gear. And I planned to live in the tent that fall to camp high in the mountains of northwestern Colorado on a deer and elk hunt. And I had other plans for using it, too. Among them were plans to “camp” with relatives, Ann and Lavell, up on Lake Guntersville.

They have a camping trailer fit for royalty; four burners on the stove, an awning larger than my front porch, background music, and room for the four of us to sleep and eat and bathe. I had agreed to go along, but I hadn’t agreed to sleeping in the trailer. I would probably get up the first morning, get out my Visa Card and look for the front desk to pay out.

Instead, I would be outside in my tent. Camping. And the others would be inside doing whatever they call it. RVing I guess.

Well, here it is 10 years later and we never did make that Lake Guntersville trip. I overheard grumblings about a party pooper and a stick in the mud. But I made that elk hunt that fall and almost every fall since and the now old tent served me well. With a desperate frenzy during the worst Colorado mountain storm of last century, I covered the tent with a tarp and tied it off to trees and saved it from being shredded to threads.

Now the old tent is leaning in a corner of my work/storage building at the back of my property with a ragged old tarp draped over it and surrounded by scrap wire and half empty cans of oil, turpentine and goodness knows what else. I don’t sleep out there where things go bump in the night much these days and where I have to build a fire to heat bathwater. But that old tent holds a huge reservoir of stories past that drift back into my aging mind now and then and make me smile. Thus a certain value appears to comfort me much like Tom T. Hall’s “Old dogs and children and watermelon wine.”