Tom Tatlock, 2023
Hello, I’m a two-person Montgomery Ward canvas pup tent with a 
floor, created before all the high tech stuff. I remember when I first met Andrea and Tom Tatlock and how excited they were. We made a lot of trips together in their 1969 red Fiat convertible. I liked them, but I became even closer friends with their sleeping bags, a green Coleman Camp Stove, their clothes, groceries, and other stuff. It was a very small trunk.
Here is my version of what happened on some of those camping trips. One of my favorites is when they camped their way from Kansas City to the West Coast. This was before the internet so they had a big fat paperback book that listed both state and national parks, plus campgrounds. We would usually camp out for two or three nights and then they would go a motel to get cleaned up. They would also leave me when they were in big cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Salt Lake City, where they would stay with family or friends. When the weather was bad, too hot, too rainy, or if they felt too grubby, they would go to a motel.
Some of my favorite memories are when we were camping in the redwood forests in California by a stream. When they woke up and opened the tent flaps, the small dust-like particles floating in the bright morning sunshine reminded them of the light shining through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral. The soft, gurgling sounds of the stream made the scene even better. Andrea and Tom really liked Whidbey Island, but it was a little too damp for me. In that heavy humidity, my canvas just absorbs the moisture.
The Camping Fiat of Tom and Andrea Tatlock
You can see the size of the trunk. We had an ice chest/cooler in the small backseat. At times, they would try to dry out the canvas by putting me in the back seat, driving with top down and rotating me to expose one side to the sun at a time. That technique was NOT very effective.
This is an episode that happened on a beautiful, bright sunny day on Highway 1 along the Pacific, when they were driving with the top down. The sounds of the ocean were calling to them, so they stopped, got out of the car, took some food, and scrambled down toward the ocean. They were enjoying a pleasant picnic until a car up on the highway began to honk and honk and honk. Tom was concerned that the person was in some kind of trouble or might have had an accident; so, he went up to see if someone needed some help. What he found was an older man in large grey Cadillac who didn’t appear in any distress. The guy put down his electric window and yelled, “Bet you don’t any views like this in Kansas,” before he sped away.
We had been at so many good campsites – in the redwood forests, near the beach and other neat places, that I couldn’t decide which one was the best.
We all agreed on the worst place, but we couldn’t agree on its exact location. Neither Andrea nor Tom blamed the other one, but they weren’t fighting to take credit for suggesting this location, way out in the boonies. It wasn’t a site like the one described in the book.
The worst site was a desolate place with no trees, some knee-high bushes, no streams, or water; plus, it was at a higher altitude than any of other camp sites. It was cold. There was one good feature: you could clearly see the beauty of the night sky, no light pollution and nothing tall enough to obstruct your view. The ground was very rough, and Tom and Andrea had trouble sleeping. In the morning they had more trouble getting organized. Tom was not as gentle with me when he removed my aluminum tent poles and rolled me up to stuff me into my canvas tent bag.
This campsite gave us another adventure that they discovered after we had driven 75 miles. Andrea had lost her birth control pills. She had put them on the black top of the Fiat; they had fallen off somewhere after we left the campsite.
We think this worst campsite was some place in northern Utah because we had to drive through several small and medium-sized towns. Andrea and Tom thought that they could solve the problem of the missing birth control pills by stopping at a pharmacy and asking the pharmacist to call her doctor in Kansas City for a prescription. The first pharmacist told them, “The lines are down between here and Kansas City.” That seemed strange but it was a small town. Next time they tried in a larger town and received the same response, “The lines are down.” After they tried a third time and received the same response, they finally figured out what was going on. (They were even more naive back then than now.)
All three of us had a great time on this trip. When we got back to Kansas City, they wanted to give our group a name and suggested HTWT, Have Tent Will Travel. I thought that name was rather ego-centric and arrogant. The name that I wanted for our group had the same letters but in a different order. T WTH — Tent Willing to Travel with Humans.
All three of us took additional trips, but those are stories for another time.
Tom, first of all I can’t believe you could store all the camping equipment in your trunk! When I was fourteen, my mom, dad, and I took a camping trip out west, and, like you, used the tent or a motel, depending on the situation. We drove a ’57 Ford Station Wagon. Our first campsite was in northern New Mexico. We simply drove until we spotted a place along a stream that we could pull into, pitch the tent, build the campfire, etc. It was almost dark and I thought my dad had waited too long. No official campgrounds, then, of course. We continued to the Grand Canyon, found a campsite and pitched the tent on a slight slope. Like yours, our tent was that horrible heavy, smelly canvass, and difficult to maneuver. Since rain was predicted, my dad and I dug a trench around the tent, and it was a good thing because it absolutely poured that night. The trench drained well and kept us dry. Oh yes, I just remembered the night we camped at White Sands National Monument and someone’s dog chased a skunk, right behind our tent in the middle of the night. We were up for quite awhile taking care of that! Not fun!