Pymatuning helped seal the deal

Maybe it was Lake Pymatuning that sealed the deal.

When my wife and I met more than 50 years ago as college students, we were struck by the number of things we had in common.

Her father was an English professor; I wanted to be an English professor.

My family had made an unusual camping trip in Europe in 1960; her family had gone to Europe in 1964 when her dad was on sabbatical.

Her father had written a book about their adventure; my mother had written a series of articles for the newspaper about ours.

But Lake Pymatuning maybe sealed the deal.

After all, how many folks have heard of this reservoir in western Pennsylvania close to the Ohio line?

But Connie’s folks had camped there, and so had mine.

Family camping, of course, was one of those other things we had in common.

For Connie’s family, making the annual summer trek from south central Illinois to southern New Hampshire and the family cabin, Pymatuning was just one stop along the way.

In those pre-interstate highway days, it could easily take four days for the family to make the trip. Sometimes it might have been five.

The campground at Pennsylvania’s Lake Pymatuning State Park was one of those stops.

For my family, it will always be memorable as our first — first — family camping experience.

It was 1957, and the plan was to camp for a few weeks in New England, Quebec and distant parts of eastern Canada.

The fact that we’d never gone camping as a family didn’t seem to matter. Camping had been limited to backyards and a pup tent until then.

But the camping bug had bitten, and there was no getting away from it.

My parents had purchased a Heilite camping trailer, a pop-up tent for my brother and me, the requisite Coleman stove, the equally requisite scary Coleman lantern that hissed and spit and always looked like it was ready to explode, some sleeping bags, aluminum and plastic cookware and a few air mattresses.

The air mattresses, as I vividly recall, were purchased at an Army surplus store in Huntington. And they had a few problems: They were difficult to inflate, and they leaked.

Our first day that summer — setting out later by at least an hour than my father would have liked — we made the long pre-interstate trek across Ohio.

Even with interstate highways, travel across the Buckeye state can get a little tedious. In 1957, it was one long march.

Our goal that first day was Lake Pymatuning. It sounded at once exotic and like a bit of Americana. The fact that it was a reservoir rather than a natural lake didn’t diminish its imagined charm at all.

And we actually made it there.

My guess is that the other campers laughed for days about the greenhorn family from Indiana.

We weren’t very good about setting up the tents. My mother fought with the Coleman stove. The air mattresses revealed themselves to be essentially useless. And no one wanted to mess with the Coleman lantern for fear that we all might burst into flames.

Hot, sweaty and not used to hearing our parents bicker with one another, the kids were sent to the lake.

And along with our towels we took a bar of Ivory soap. The lake would be our bathtub, and Ivory didn’t sink.

There were no showers. The toilets were pits.

But we survived, and we headed northeast the next day, eventually making our way to the Atlantic coast.

In its own way, Lake Pymatuning was an essential part of that adventure.

And when Connie and I learned we had shared that experience, it made a huge difference.

After all, if she could put up with family camping at Lake Pymatuning, she could put up with me.