News

May 15, 2024

Old camping tent to be repaired, donated to homeless

I hated the idea of throwing it out. Well past its life expectancy, the old Eureka dome tent already had been relegated to backup camping status. Weary of fixing another splintered fiberglass pole, I

I hated the idea of throwing it out.

Well past its life expectancy, the old Eureka dome tent already had been relegated to backup camping status.

Weary of fixing another splintered fiberglass pole, I upgraded 10 years ago to a newer tent with aluminum poles. Aluminum poles may be torture on bare hands on cold mornings, but they are much lighter to carry, and I haven't found a way to break one yet.

So, toward the end of its service, the Eureka mostly gathered dust on the camping gear shelves in my garage. It became the backyard camping tent when the kids were younger and got my son and me through our Cub Scout adventures.

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After that, it came out once in each of the past two summers, for the annual fishing trip I take with my son. He would claim the "good" tent. I would take the Eureka, with a mix of nostalgia and growing appreciation for the aluminum tent pole.

The occasional broken fiberglass pole aside, the Eureka had a good run.

My dad bought it for me one Christmas, right around the end of college or shortly thereafter. That makes it about 30 years old.

Always one for a bargain, he'd found the tent at the Eureka Camping Center in Binghamton, N.Y., once an outlet for the brand. It was a factory-second, and therefore greatly marked down.

He got his money's worth.

The bond that forms between a camper and a good tent might be hard for non-campers to fathom. But some ripstop nylon and a few poles (did I recommend aluminum?) are all it takes to make a home away from home.

I spent dozens of nights in the woods in the Eureka, both solo and with tentmates. It went other places, too.

The tent kept my wife and me dry during Edenfest, a three-day rock festival in Ontario with a killer lineup and a host of logistical problems that one Internet history has dubbed "a great success but an even greater disaster."

It sheltered us one August weekend when we decided on a whim to drive to Bethel, N.Y. and see what was going on at the original Woodstock site, back when the property was still an undeveloped grassy hillside and hippies would show up on each anniversary just to hang out and form drum circles. We saw Richie Havens there. No advance notice, no stage, no support, no tickets. He just appeared with a guitar and started playing.

But a tent proves itself truly worthy when the weather turns. In that regard, my dad's factory-reject find performed swimmingly.

In 1999, for instance, my father and I planned a camping trip in Pennsylvania. As the trip drew near, so did Hurricane Floyd.

Dang it all, we weren't canceling.

In hindsight, a dumb idea. It rained and rained and didn't stop raining. Ultimately, Floyd would dump a foot of rain on parts of Pennsylvania. We were battered by winds that, to the south of us, were strong enough to knock freight train cars onto their sides on a bridge over the Susquehanna River.

The wind did not knock the Eureka over.

The wind didn't knock it down during the 2012 derecho either.

That storm, as anyone living in central Ohio at the time knows, was not something you would choose to weather in a tent. My son and I were at a Webelos summer camp at Camp Lazarus in Delaware County when it hit, but the camp had received enough warning to hustle everyone inside strong buildings before the front ripped through.

Trees came down all over camp, but our little dome tent was still standing when we later made it back to our site.

But this summer, on what I decided would be its last trip to the woods, another fiberglass pole splintered. When my son later asked for a tent of his own for his birthday, there seemed no official reason to hang onto to the old-timer any longer.

I still couldn't bear the thought of it in a landfill. It deserved a better fate than that. I entertained the idea of sending it off in a campfire blaze of glory, but spewing toxins into the environment seemed an equally antithetical end.

I don't know why the solution took so long in coming. Simple, and so obvious.

I'd written a few times in recent weeks about the unfolding situation at Camp Shameless, a homeless camp on the Near East Side where residents had faced eviction by the city before a housing deal was struck.

Why not repair the Eureka and pass it on to someone who might need a temporary shelter more than I ever did? Tents are not an acceptable answer to homelessness, but they are a necessary stop-gap.

So that's what I'm doing with my old tent.

I'll fix the poles one more time.

I'll seal the seams and give it a dose of waterproofing before sending it off on what I hope marks the start of its second, much more important life.

Theodore Decker is the Dispatch metro columnist.

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