A little night music

A tent is a marvelous thing.

When you’re on the trail, or in a campground, it does the obvious – keeps out rain and thirsty mosquitoes.

I tested my tent in the living room. Easy peasy.

And yet it does much more. Offers privacy. Suggests “home” when the house is so far away. Provides helpful structure to one’s outdoor existence, because it forces you to live small and tidy.

Yep, small is beautiful when you backpack. The goal always is to stuff your pack with as much comfort as space and weight allow.

So you wouldn’t haul your Sleep Number Bed into your tent. No plug-in, anyway. But you would a down-filled sleeping bag, self-inflatable mattress and super-lightweight pop-up pillow.

Oh, some things a tent doesn’t do well. Burps, snorts, snores and farts all will resonate from a tent faster and louder than a ricochet off a canyon wall. I know this. I once camped with a dozen older Scouts and three Scoutmasters. It was like a gaggle of off-tune trombones, bassoons and plugged-up French Horns playing Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring. 

Ffffittt! Braaap! Schhhhanuck! Errp!

Even the hungry bear took flight.

One or two millimeters of fabric, though, create an illusion of sound barrier and shelter  … of home. And I now have mine.

It’s a Microlight FS 2, manufactured by L.L. Bean. It weighs a mere 3 pounds 14 ounces. When packed, the roll measures but 16.5 x 7 inches. Not much wider than my dog Nellie’s rawhide bones.

Just a bit wider than a bone!

Unwrapped, though, is when marvelous becomes a miracle.

First there are the poles. I’ve been around long enough to know that tent poles usually require the genius of Buckminster Fuller to assemble. (For those who don’t recall Fuller, he was the proponent of the geodesic dome. If you don’t recall the geodesic dome, Google it.)

It wasn’t always this way. Early man, 40,000 years ago, created tents from the stretched hides of woolly mammoths and kept them up with simple tree-poles.

Boy Scout tents in my day were also simple but rectangular – basically a heavy tarp shaped into a steepled structure with vertical poles at each end, a horizontal pole along the top, and lots of stakes in the ground to keep it upright and steady.

For Neanderthals and Boy Scouts alike, though, tents and tent flaps barely kept out the rain, while insects had carte blanche.

So modern tents became more complicated. Cindy and I received a two-man tent as a wedding gift in the early ‘80s. We still have it. Its poles are many, and when assembling them, they must be arched and crossed with each other and plugged into retaining spikes at the corners. 

Sounds easy, but it was always like playing a game of Twister with yourself. At any time, the thing could go sproing! like a giant mousetrap and send an errant pole up your nose.

Not my Microlight FS 2. Its poles are many, too – the bundle measuring, again, just 16.5 inches wide – but they’re interconnected by shock cords that guide you in the assembly.

It’s the ultimate Idiot’s Guide to Pole Erection. It’s not easy to screw this up. Each pole is tethered to its mate(s), and your job is to simply guide them to the right resting spot. No pressure.

The tent is a wonder in other ways:

-       It sleeps two – amazing, given its weight.

-       Instead of the usual tunnel entrance at one end, there are zipped entrances on both sides. Handy if you or your tent compatriot needs to visit Nature in the night. (Dimmed flashlight, please.)

-       Each side also has a vestibule. Yes, a vestibule, an antechamber, a grand entrance commonly found in stately buildings of palace size. These vestibules are created when the tent’s fly is stretched and secured above the tent itself, then staked wide of the entrances. Sure, my vestibules are just big enough to shelter a backpack – 6.8 square feet, to be exact. But in the condensed world of living outdoors, this is luxury.

-       And, it’s definitely insect proof. “Breathable no-see-um mesh tent body offers great ventilation and protection from bugs,” says L.L. Bean.

I’ve not camped out in it yet. We plan to test our equipment overnight before the big hike.

I’m confident, though, given the on-line reviews, that I’ll like the FS 2 each and every night.

Fellow hiker Bill Stott also bought a new tent. We compared notes via shared photos. His tent seems to measure up just fine. I’m sure the third traveler in our little band – friend Bruce Kaldahl from Kansas City – has a good one as well.

Hoping he prefers Top 40.

Yes ... there likely will be a little night music from these tents, for all the woods to hear. Can't be helped. 

But that's okay. The beauty of our trip is that after 15 miles of lugging 30 or 35 pounds apiece each day, we’ll sleep like babies at night ... and hardly notice.

Not so, we hope, the bear.