THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 29, 1994 TAG: 9410280017
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
The pup tent is scarcely a conversation piece these days. In fact, it's easy not to think anything at all, for years at a time, about pup tents. But remarkably enough, these longtime military and camping staples popped up twice in quick succession in some of my recent reading and set off a train of recollections.
One reference went back many decades; the other was up to the minute.
In the distant mention, the first appearance of the pup tent was noted. This was in Bruce Catton's Grant Moves South. The author recalls how, at an early phase of the Civil War, ``the new shelter tents, popularly called `pup tents,' had been issued (to Gen. W. S. Rosecrans' federal troops) . . . and how the men did not like them.'' Catton went on, `` . . . in one brigade the men put up derisive signs over their cramped new homes - PUPS FOR SALE . . . RAT TERRIERS . . . DOG HOLE NO. 1.''
The more recent comment leaped more than 130 years ahead, straight into modern times, with some intriguing word on the latest in pup-tent technology. And the focus in this case was on our own Hampton Roads area. The magazine Virginia Business commented this summer on the winning of a Marine Corps contract by Ecotat Systems of Virginia Beach. The company is to furnish ``Freedom Shelters,'' described as the brainchild of Ecotat's Ron Asher. These are lightweight versions of the pup tent that can also be worn as coats or ponchos.
All this brought back a couple of brief experiences of my own, back in Boy Scout days, with the old variety - a low canvas construction like a flattened, upside-down V, made up of two ``shelter halves'' buttoned together, held down with perimeter stakes and held up by collapsible center poles. I assume the modern restyling is a vast improvement; but as far as those old tents of my younger days are concerned, I may have some insight into the unhappiness of Rosecrans' soldiers.
My teenage camping trips must have been fun in some of the usual ways, but much more vivid in my mind is the ordeal of driving those pup-tent stakes into hard ground or keeping them in place at a mushy camp site. There were as well the discomfort of crawling into a space with no standing room, and the airless, almost broiling conditions in hot summer weather, which was usually what we had hereabouts in overnight hiking season.
I also think of the times when the anti-rain trench we were told to dig around the pup-tent edge simply funneled the water inside, where I was trying to sleep. And there were the repeated proofs that touching the inside of the canvas during a rain, as the outdoor experts warned, would produce some very nasty leaks.
They say that as time goes by, you remember the good and forget the bad.
They sometimes lie. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
by CNB