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Ben and I never folded the tent the same way twice. I’m not sure how it is possible but, believe you me, after three straight weeks of camping we used every iteration of tent folding imaginable. It was a very organic process, one that always had us staring at the another with squinted eyes, a perplexed look, and a hand scratching the head: as if we had never seen a tent before and weren’t quite sure how this one got here. Amazingly, though, despite our constant variations in origami, we continued to fold the tent with greater and greater precision. I suspect that if we had written down how it was we folded the tent on our last morning in California we could have revolutionized the field of tent folding (as it is) and solved many of the mathematical quandaries faced by the world’s greatest minds today.

Under the tent we kept a tarp that was responsible for keeping us dry in the event that it rained or the ground was moist. Unlike the tent, however, we folded our tarp the exact same way every morning, without fail, perfectly executing an identical series of movements day after day after day. The shaking, the turning, the lining up of the edges, the perfect situating of grommets, the left-hand to right-hand folds, the cross-person folding with the mid-air release, and the side-hand chop to break the rigid tarp into a pleasant bend: it was always the same. I let go of the end to grab the fold and Ben held on moving his first two fingers while maintaining his grip and never losing our flow of conversation. I don’t know how it was these roles came to be defined but they were unbreakable. I would consciously prepare myself during the morning hours to hold onto the edge of the tarp so that Ben would be the person dropping his end in order to pick up the new fold — but I never could do it. Some greater power was at work in our tarp folding and it continues to affect us even today.

The truly interesting feature of the dichotomy of the perfect tarp folding synchronicity and the discombobulated tent folding disaster is that both resulted in astutely packable items. I believe this further proves the dualistic nature of the universe, in which there appears to be both great harmony and discord simultaneously — when in fact, both result in perfect symmetry and fulfill each respective need completely.

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