camp out

A Camp Out

We all chop up broken branches with our new hatchets. They are not quite sharp, but not dull.

We yell at each other, friends shouting back and forth in excitement—we are on a camp out! The woods are alive and so are we. As the tents pop up, we all feel exhilarated. My foot itches, but I don’t scratch it because if I do I might miss something. I am thirsty, but I won’t ask for a drink of water, because if I do I might miss something else.

Our parents try to fix everything. We have stacked the wood wrong, the tent is crooked, my sleeping bag is in the mud, and the cooler is leaking milk or a mixture of bologna and American cheese. WHO CARES? We are camping! We are away from home! No school tomorrow, no Aunt Helen to visit. We are in the woods camping!

Run wild and explore. Look under that rock, peek under the really old green moss-covered log, find lost gold, discover some long-ago lost treasure, and disturb a lost tribe of extinct Indians. That’s summer, that’s camping out, that’s fun.

After our imaginations have been sucked empty, our hands weary with chopping fire wood, the ritual begins. Dad stacks our labors in a strategic pile. The fire is lit, and slowly a campfire appears. It’s just a match fire at first, but slowly the flame doubles, then consumes all the wood—a real campfire!

Hamburgers and hot dogs are grilled to delicious perfection. Marshmallows are burned to a sweet delicious mush that sticks to every tooth. We don’t even complain about the bugs that swim in our almost cold lemonade.

We tell tales—ghost stories, or stories about lost pets that come back to haunt us because we did not take proper care of them, or tales of some stupid person who got his head chopped off in a car accident who now haunts the school gym, probably the principal’s half brother or insane cousin.

Very quickly the campfire evaporates. No wood or sticks on the ground nearby can help it survive. We all retreat to the tents, and even though we are not tired, we want to sleep. We are not cold from the nippy smoky mountain night. We just want to crawl into our clean dry sleeping bags and dream of tomorrow.




copyright 2011 jimboM