RIVER CITY JOURNAL: IT'S TRU~E! ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS LIVE LONG ENOUGH

Now I understand.

I've heard folks, usually of a particular age, say something like: If you live long enough, you'll see everything.

But I didn't know exactly what they meant.

Until about 4:02 p.m. Tuesday when an e-mail popped up on my computer screen.

Now I've seen everything.

The e-mail was from a company that runs a big-time amusement park. Next to the park is a campground. The campground has spots for recreational vehicles. It has spots for campers. And it has spots for tents.

I don't know about you, but camping in a tent in July in Missouri is not definitely not my idea of something I'd be willing to pay money to do.

When our sons were young, the two boys and I would take an annual "roughing it" trip to our favorite lake in Southwest Missouri. But we had the good sense to go at the end of September. Or early October.

Yes, we usually managed to pick the weekend when the weather changed from autumn sunshine to pre-winter rain.

But we were not hot.

This is important, because any successful camping trip must have a campfire. Campfires are no fun in sweltering weather. Campfires are essential, of course, so you can eat the creamy filling out of the middle of Double Stuf Oreos and throw the cookie part into the fire. You know what happens to Oreo cookies when they are thrown into a fire? Try it and see. It's great entertainment. But for goodness sake wait until it's cool enough for a campfire.

Until two summers ago, I hadn't been camping a single time since those annual trips with the boys, which lasted until they went away to college. As a special treat, they took me canoeing on one of Missouri's pristine Ozarks rivers. I told you about it at the time. It was a wonderful trip.

Except ... .

The boys are campers. They've camped all over the world. They like it.

The gravel bar we chose for the overnight part of the canoeing trip had been exposed to the sun all day. Gravel retains heat. As the night air cools, hot gravel releases its heat. If you took physics, you understand what I'm talking about. If you didn't take physics, you still have more sense than a fence post, don't you?

This particular gravel bar was plenty hot.

Let's just say I didn't get cold.

Let's just say I won't be sleeping on any more gravel bars. Ever.

And let's just say that the very thought of sleeping in a tent at some campground during the summer makes me short of breath. As a matter of fact, sometime during that blistering night I vowed to never spend another night in a tent. Unless it had air conditioning.

Then I saw this e-mail. The one from the big amusement park with the full-service campground.

You know what the e-mail told me?

It said my worries are over.

It said my prophesy "The next time you catch me in a tent, it'll have air conditioning" has come true.

I am not making this up.

The big-time campground has air-conditioned tents. And it's adding more, because they're so popular.

Well, duh.

Of course they're popular.

I am so grateful to the inventor of air conditioning. It's hard to believe people still live without it. My wife's folks never had it. Most of us would go bonkers if the electricity went off one of these hot nights.

But before there was air conditioning, we survived. I was just telling someone this week about the heat wave and drought of the mid-1970s when we lived in Nevada, Mo. Our bedrooms were upstairs in an old two-story house. We had no air conditioning. We had windows. We had fans. We had short tempers.

And we lived through it.

That was about the time September became my favorite month. That's when it dawned on me that the heat of summer turns into those first cool days of autumn in September.

Before air conditioning, we went swimming to get cool. Or sat in the shade of a tree. Or slept on cots out on the screen-in porch. Or drank gallons of iced tea. Or stood in front of a fan.

Or went camping.

I can't, for the life of me, remember why, but before air conditioning camping was considered a cool thing to do.

After air conditioning, of course, the world changed. We stopped talking to our neighbors, because we never saw them any more. They stayed in their artificially frigid world, and we stayed in ours.

Now we have air-conditioned tents.

I've finally lived long enough.

I've seen everything.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.