Opa Ralph

It is really rare to get to spend 12 days camping with your grandfather. It came and went for me as fast as the trees turned yellow those two weeks. We started off with a shrug of the shoulders and a “Well, I guess we should go”.  So off we went. It wasn’t too long before I realized that besides the amount of wisdom, stories, and life experience my Opa has, we were the exact same person sitting right beside each other in the vehicle. When either of us would try to decide on a plan of action it, the usual response was one of two things; “I don’t care, what would you like to do?” or “That’s exactly what I was thinking!”. We were either on the same page or only concerned about the other person. A good place to be when spending two weeks with someone.

Me and Ralph are born 57 years apart. He is 84 and I 27. I never took into hard consideration what it would be like to travel with an elderly person. I knew we would have to be careful and take our time, and I didn’t expect to be doing plenty of activities, but that was the purpose of the trip for me. It took us only a couple days to get in the groove of things. I would do the driving and Opa read the maps and navigated, which was a new role for him since he said Oma was always the one doing the navigating. When we arrived at a camp sight for the night we would both take our part in setting up. He would always be the one telling me where and how to park, and tell me how much I would need to crank up the trailer to get it balanced. Every morning I would make one decaf coffee for Opa, and one regular for me. I would cook both breakfast and dinner and when we felt like it we went out to eat. We had 2 meals a day plus snacks and fruit in the afternoon. Diner was usually around 7 or 8pm, which was normal for the both of us and never anything extravagant. We would play one game of cribbage at night, which I would usually loose. I would crawl into bed first in the top bunk and change in my sleeping bag, and Opa would crawl in after me, and change down below. Itwas never awkward between the two of us, living in such close quarters. By the end of things we were both on the same farting and burping schedule anyways. I got a bit of a cold and a few days later Opa got it too, so we were coughing and snorting in sync as well. I did my best to try to remind him to take his medicine (which is 4 times a day) but soon I realized he is better than me at remembering to take it so I wasn’t of much help. 

It was astonishing how sharp Opa’s memory is. Every road we went on and town we stopped in he had a story to go along from 40, 50, 60 years ago. Opa travel the same roads and highways when they were only dirt and gravel. He had seen all the sighs before they became the big tourist attractions they are now. He shared stories of his family, Oma, the kids, his friends, camping trips he went on, people he met, places he’s gone, and ofcourse, he talked about the way things were back in Holland. We talked about God, growing old, his business, his life, mental health, happiness, how to let things go, birds, and the most prevalent of our conversations was how beautiful it was and how blessed we were. 

When we were somewhere that required covering a lot of walking distance Opa would usually stay behind and smoke, and I would go ahead and explore. Everytime I came back I found Opa to have striked up another conversation with a stranger. We met lots of people along the way. Campground attendants became our friends, other travelers, tourists, and locals were all subject to Opa’s stories, and they loved it. So many people were enthused to hear Opa talk and tell stories, and many loved the idea of us on the road together. We averaged at about 150 clicks a day, which usually took us about four hours to complete with the naps and sight seeing breaks along the way. 

When Opa napped I worked. When I drove, he talked. When I walked, he smoked. When I cooked and cleaned, we chatted. I read poems aloud in the mornings and when we were both crawled in our sleeping bags. Every time Opa got up in the night to use the washroom I woke up by the slight shake of the trillium and waited for him to come back to the trailer safely before feeling at ease to fall asleep again.

He made me realize that most of my music preferences were songs mainly only contained guitar and drums. No mandolin, harp, piano, harmonica, or any other variety of instruments that Opa enjoys. But he still liked all my music. We tapped along to songs together as we drove.

“Wendy, I never thought I would be able to do this again before I died” was reiterated to me multiple times nearing the end of the trip. “Just beautiful” was also a common one. What can be said now that it is all behind us? There were no big moments, epiphanies, heightened emotional states, or intense experiences.  It was all very peaceful and honest.  There is something to be said about the uneventful that isn’t totally definite, an easy kind of love. And it was that love that was held so delicately in the moments of complete openness and peace.