Roy’s Camping Table

A totem from my father’s workshop adds to an old tradition

For eighteen years running, I have joined my friends, Tom, Mike, and Parker Nevin, at the Silver Creek campground on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, off Highway 4, near Ebbetts Pass. In my best never-learned-to-pack-light tradition, I load up the truck will all manner of stuff— cots, tent, cookware, bar, ice chests, horseshoes— and make the ninety minute journey from house to campsite and then spend ninety minutes setting up all the comforts of home. A tablecloth for the picnic table; a folding recliner for reading the paper; a percolator to brew real pots of coffee with grounds at the bottom of every cup.

This year I am adding one more creature comfort to the armada of belongings.

It came from one of the many storage lockers my mother used— she was allocated one, she commandeered five or six— at the retirement home where she and my father lived the final years of their lives. It’s a small hand-made folding table that travelled with my parents on their many RV trips. My father built it in his workshop. The stain and varnish are a bit faded but the table is sturdy as ever. A smaller person could use it as a stool next to a campfire or beside a fishing stream.

On the underside, in my mother’s hand, written in black magic marker, is “R.J. Rieger 1991.” She had a habit, one I’ve sadly inherited, of putting her last name on anything and everything that might be used in a communal setting, e.g., casserole dishes, salad bowls, Tupperware— after all one never knows when somebody else might have the same Corning Ware two quart covered casserole at a pot luck. It was a matter of “Ida being Ida” but it was practical too.

But she rarely dated any of her stuff. Dates were for photos, keepsakes, newspaper clippings, warranty paperwork, and owner’s manuals. The fact she dated Dad’s little table was her recognition of his handiwork, of the time he spent cutting, sanding, fitting, and finishing a simply designed take-along utilitarian table that sat beside their folding chairs outside their RV under the roll out awning.

It’s remarkable when the simplest of objects fosters such complicated and pleasant memories of people and places. It explains why there are millions of shadow boxes hanging in hallways, each nook filled with trinkets of time that trigger images and memories we treasure: bookmark moments of notoriety that separate the special from the mundane.

So now the table that held coffee cups and cocktails, snacks and candies, a portable radio from time to time, and even Dad’s tackle box, has made its way into the joyful assembly of my camping gear. As I do my annual trek to Silver Creek, it will remind me every year of the man who made it and the smile he shared so many times with friends around a campfire.

(c) 2014