The Pelee Island Gang

The other evening we were sitting around with some other long-married couples talking about when we first started out.   I remember those days well, when there was too much month left at the end of the money. We would gather up our pop bottles and take them back to the grocery store to collect the deposit.   Were we really that young and that poor?   Of course we were.

We talked about vacations back in the day, and what constituted “roughing it”.  That brought back memories of a one week vacation on Pelee Island. 

We were a young family that summer, our children were probably nine, ten and eleven years old, and ready for an adventure.   We were heading to Canadian waters to camp on Pelee Island….we would live on the beach for a week.   Everyone was excited…we were five couples with a bakers dozen of kids under the age of twelve.  We all knew one another from work…we were the staff of WMAN radio…the WMAN ALL STARS.   We played softball together, rode elephants together, participated in water ball fights and sat around in each others homes eating pizza and talking about “the business”.   What could possibly go wrong?

From the outset I had a sneaking feeling this might not be as much fun as everyone else thought it would be….but then I tend to be a realist.  The other couples were experienced campers, and they owned things like tents and Colman stoves and other things for which I had no frame of reference.   So, when we decided we were going to take the kids and go along, we had to hit a sporting goods department before we set sail.

If you are reading this and preparing for your first experience in the “great outdoors” let me share with you some things I learned rather quickly.   First of all, when shopping for a tent DO NOT believe anything that is written on the box.   There were lies all OVER that thing.   For instance:   “Sleeps six”.   Maybe six three year olds, or maybe a midget wrestling team…….but not six of anything over five feet tall.   Here’s another lie:   “Easy assembly”.   That is an out and out whopper. 

Having believed everything written on the box and plunked down our money, we put the tent box safely into the van.   We did not try to assemble it…why would we when the box boasted “easy assembly”?  The first time we actually saw the tent was when we opened the carton on the beach; a large brown bag and four hundred aluminum tubes came tumbling out.   My entire attraction to this particular tent had been that I thought it was a nice color.  (I know)

Now here we stood, Larry, me and our three young children, who expected to have a place to sleep for the night.  After trying every configuration imaginable with the aluminum tubes we created a reasonable looking abode that listed only slightly to the right….so we put driftwood on the left corner and smiled at each other.  We pumped up the six air mattresses we planned to sleep on and discovered the tent would only accommodate four of them.  So much for “sleeps six”.

Our friends, the seasoned campers, helped for a while.   Then, realizing our tent raising had great entertainment value, they sat back and nursed a beer….then watched and laughed and drank some more.

Finally it was done, and as I unzipped the front of the tent I held over my head the “no pest” strip that my friend had instructed me to buy.  “Just hang it in the top of the tent and zip it closed.   When you go to bed there won’t be any mosquitoes or flies,” she chirped.   I did as I was told, and there were no flies in the tent at night.  I am also pretty sure that there must have been a class action law suit a few years later that dealt with breathing in no pest strip fumes….but that’s another article.

As a group we set up a kitchen where we would cook communal meals, and everyone dug in and put their gear away.  Cooking was punctuated with  a series of wild dance moves; we quickly learned anything we put down on a table was immediately covered in black flies.  A spoon discarded carelessly during cooking soon became a living, moving object.  Shooing away flies actually took more energy than cooking.

Being the city girl that I am, I would not come to the island without an in depth explanation of what the bathroom facilities would be. (None would have been the honest answer)   I was assured by my cohorts that we would have a tent dedicated to a porta-potty, and there would be privacy and convenience that would satisfy even a stickler for those details…like me.   I won't say my friends lied to me.  Let's just say they "embroidered" the truth.   By day two the porta potty was replaced by a large pit with a big log over it; an old quilt that hung in front of the pit for “privacy” stood straight out in the wind off the lake.  This new make-shift facility was designed and dug by Phil "Scoop" Linne.  When he was finished he had a look of male pride on his face; I had a look of absolute horror on mine.   It was a modest woman’s nightmare.

On the evening of the fourth day it started to rain.  Our waterproof tent…which the box said was designed to laugh at the elements…was soon saturated. The flimsy white roof produced a steady drip into my left ear as I lay on the hard packed sand floor, (the air mattresses flat since day two) stacked like cordwood with my husband and children.  The storm grew worse, the lightning flashes revealing the white ceiling of the tent.  There, crawling toward the no pest strip, were several “sand spiders”; creatures that looked like pop bottle caps with legs.  They inched toward certain death as the no pest strip waited to do its job.  I couldn't take my eyes off them as I came to the realization that they would soon die and rain down on me.  It was a very, very long night.    The next day I spent wrapping the tent in plastic and Saran Wrap in case the rain continued.  It was a waste of time and plastic, but it kept me occupied.

As is usually the case the women did the cooking for the whole crew.  We worked on a folding table and washed things in the lake.  I’m sure Indian women did all of these same things and more without the benefit of a potato peeler.   It seemed we were always preparing a meal, cleaning up after a meal, fixing snacks for the kids, cleaning up after snacks for the kids or talking about what we were going to cook next.  The only real break in that routine was doing laundry in the lake.  The other women in the group considered these things to be “relaxing”.  The days grew longer.

If you are going to go camping these people we were with have got to be some of the most “fun” people on the planet.  We were a close group of coworkers and their spouses; Larry and I have never found a group like them since.   I know they all had a great time, and most were sad when the week was over…..It was the only thing we did not agree on.

The morning we were to pack up and head to the ferry to return to Sandusky I was up before daylight, ripping my kids out of their sleeping bags and packing the car.   I was not going to take a chance that we might be late for the boat, maybe trapped for another week on this deity forsaken rock.   I was already considering my options if the ferry didn’t show up.   I briefly considered the ramifications of faking a heart attack or hijacking a fishing boat….fortunately it didn’t come to that.   We actually were short one space on the ferry to return, but our friend John Foster and his family stayed over till the next day with his sister who happened to live on the island.  A wise choice…because my third option was to find my potato peeler and take a hostage.

Sunburned and bug bitten, the Pelee Island Gang saddled up and rode back to civilization, following one another like a modern day wagon train.  I came home weary but wiser.  The rest of the group went back a time or two in the summers ahead, but Larry and I hung up our tent and never returned.   Been there…done that…bought the bug spray.

And so, as we recently sat talking about vacations and “roughing it”, I knew immediately what my limits were because they had been sorely tested.  We’ve come a long way from that pop-bottle-returning young couple, and I could write a book about the journey.   I’m not the least bit embarrassed to say that vacationing today in a place with one bathroom is as rough as I intend to get.  “To thine own self be true”……..

Thank you:   John and Geneva Foster, Chuck and Cindy Campbell, Tharen and Phil Linne, Nancy and Charlie Schmidt for a week on the beach we will always remember…..and friendships we still cherish.  A special thanks you to Tharen for posting these pictures on FaceBook and reminding me of this long ago week!!