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Tuesday, August 17, 2004 

Prose snapshots from my too short camping trip

I could write an entry that scrolled for minutes down your screen about my camping trip.

I will not.

Instead I will share a series of brief moments from the trip and try to give you a taste of it.



I sit in the tent, an hour after setting it up and several before sunset. Rain starts to filter through the forest canopy. Then it pounds down in sheets that shake the tent and splatter mud up the walls on the outside. I notice two leaking holes in the tent, light a flat tealight candle and put a dab of wax on each hole with a Q-tip.

After the rain stops, I fail to build a fire despite much gnashing of teeth. Apparently, nothing is dry. And I'm too stubborn to use the homemade firestarter in my backpack. Only matches and what I can find. Phooey to that, I decide later before falling asleep. Or trying to.

I toss and turn that night, uncomfortable in my sleeping bag and on my sleeping pad. At one point, I hear a creature moving around outside the tent and am unafraid. When I camped alone as a boy that always scared me.

I awaken thinking it is Sunday morning and that I am blind, only to realize its the middle of the night and the darkness is absolute. Which is something you never get in the city, or even at my parent's house.

An hour after dawn on Sunday I crouch by a deer trail in the woods. The air temperature drops and the wind comes up. I walk quickly through the woods to zip myself back into the tent in time for another hour-long rain. Not as heavy this time.

I start a fire in five minutes Sunday morning after the rain using the firestarter. I made it years ago as a Boy Scout and never used it. Truth is, I needlessly doubted its effectiveness. It was four egg holders from a cardboard egg carton with a mixture of parrafin wax and wood shavings in the bottom of each.

Around noon on Sunday, the embers of a successful fire cool beside me and a baked potato cools in its tinfoil. My chin is on my chest as a porcupine climbs tail first down a maple tree seven feet away. About five feet from the bottom, it pauses and looks straight at me as it holds a tiny branch with one of its front paws. Then it starts climbing down again. I am sitting stock still and realize that its eyesight must be movement based, like deer and other prey animals. It gets to the bottom of the tree and I stand so that it will see me and not make a pin cushion of my leg as it blunders into me. It scrambles up the tree again. My next thought: "Never again will I go into the woods without a camera."

I'm roasting my back in the sun, sitting on my poncho in Skunk's Hollow beside the wheat field. Reading. An indigo bunting and his brown mate chirp away on the old rusted swing set. Him on one side and her on the other. Every so often, I look up to find that he has flown up to perch on something a few feet away. As I look, he chirps and then flies wildly back to the swing set, swerving one way then the other before smoothly landing. I smile and wish Christa was here to see it. Which would be a little difficult considering she's now living in Australia.

Later, I go back to the campsite and look way up into the tree. The porcupine is still there. I can see its head peeking over the edge of a branch.

"You realize if you don't come down I'm going to have to move my campsite?" I ask.

Its head disappears, but I can still see the quills.

Later that afternoon, I sit and read on a hilltop at the eastern edge of the property. I'm hoping the porcupine will climb down and go on with its day and not die of thirst because I didn't know to look for small bits of bark at the bottom of the tree and nicks in the bark of the tree when I chose my campsite. I add that to my mental checklist after "Widowmakers." (Widowmakers are dead trees just waiting to fall.)

The same hill, the same afternoon. A flick of movement catches my eye. A great bird with a huge wingspan wheels up out of the long grass on the other side of the field and soars to perch in a tree at the edge of the bush. I see it sitting there. I walk closer to try to get a better look. It calls twice, the distinctive sad screech of a hawk. That sound always pulls at my heart, and does so now. It spreads its wings and soars soundlessly into the woods, disappearing like a ghost. My next thought: "Never again will I go camping without binoculars."

Later, I check the upper branches again. The porcupine is gone.

Late Sunday night I get up with the flashlight to go relieve myself. I finish up, resisting the urge to swing the flashlight around wildly as I walk back to the tent. Memories of scenes from The Blair Witch Project plague me. I push them from my mind, with effort. I slowly walk back to the tent with the flash in front of me and the seemingly endless dark behind me. Funny how the imagination is the greatest source of fear in the woods. Why is it so much harder to control when you're alone?

Monday morning I pick chokecherries. Or are they pin cherries? My book doesn't seem to be much help in distinguishing the two. Whatever they are, they're not toxic. I ate some Sunday without any ill effects. I'm concentrating on the bush in front of me when movement in my peripheral vision catches my attention. A turkey vulture is lazily gliding in wide circles far overhead, barely moving except to adjust its path. It continues like that for at least ten minutes before going out of sight. It never flapped once.

I stand on the edge of the wheat field, listening. I'm on my way back to my parents' house. My backpack is heavy on my back, with all my gear packed and my tent in two pieces on either side. My second rule of solo camping is, "Only bring what I can carry in one trip." (The first and third are: "Short of injury, no going back until the alloted time is up" and "Plan carefully.") There is a snapping sound from the field that has mystified me all weekend. At first I thought it might be mice running through the wheat, knocking the stalks as they pass. But the snapping comes from the tops of the wheat. Then I wonder if it is insects flying through. But I watch and listen carefully and see that when an insect knocks into the wheat, it makes a different noise. Finally I figure it out. It's the wheat itself. Its cracking open. I stand and listen harder and hear the surface of the field crackling for as far in every direction as I can hear.

That was all great stuff, but that last little bit:

Cooooooooooooooooooooool.

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