I spent a few hours yesterday afternoon cleaning up the mess of odds and ends which had piled up on my basement workbench. Amongst the detritus, I found four aluminum tent pegs. They appeared to be the tent pegs that belonged to a tent I bought while I was still in high school in, I dunno, maybe 1976? I recall taking it on many hikes while I was part of a Boy Scout troop, so I’m thinking I had it for at least the last three years I was in high school. No idea how those tent pegs ended up on my work bench or how I managed to hold on to them for nearly 50 years.

Even weirder: Under some old rags on my work bench, I found a sheet of paper with step-by-step instructions describing how to erect a 2-person Eureka Timberline tent, the very same tent I bought all those years ago.

It looks like they batted the instruction out on a manual typewriter, added a detailed freehand sketch to the bottom, then ran off copies on a Xerox machine (remember those? Anybody?).

The corker is, I was pretty sure I still had the tent. This afternoon, I went rooting around through some old camping equipment I kept in the garage. I found a familiar-looking orange stuff sack.

In that sack: a basic Timberline tent with poles and a rain fly. I even had a vestibule, something I’d completely forgotten about. Still looking pretty good after 50 years, although the nylon is very crinkly and a little moldy. I don’t think I would trust it to keep the rain out anymore, or to not rip wide open in a stiff wind.

Not only did I go camping with that tent in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, the Porcupine Mountains, and in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, I also took it to the EAA AirVenture (called just “the Fly-In” back then) where I camped overnight in a hay field so I could spend multiple days wandering the flight line with my friends.

I even took it with me when I was assigned to a tour of duty in the United Kingdom. I used it on a hike of the Pennine Way in the Yorkshire Dales. Good times.