Tenting Tonight (standard:non fiction, 1620 words)
Author: Lou Hill	Added: Mar 24 2002	Views/Reads: 3474/2335	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Two young teens enjoy camping out in a small Vermont woods

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

because we were particularly brave either.  In retrospect I guess that 
we were pretty lucky that a branch from one of the big old pines never 
came crashing down on our tent during one of those storms.  Our 
guardian angel must have worked overtime taking care of us. He never 
let us down 

Although she never tried to discourage me from camping out, my
grandmother was always nervous when she wouldn't see me for extended 
periods of time.  We would usually go to our respective homes for 
breakfast in mid-morning.  We never got up too early, but then we often 
stayed up half the night. 

I would go back to my grandmother's and stoke up on my usual breakfast
of too many slices of toast with peanut butter and honey slathered on 
them, washed down with milk.  Then I would be off again.  If we ate 
supper in the woods, she wouldn't see me 'til the next morning.  She 
used to tell me that she watched out the living room window, hoping to 
see us jumping around the rocks by our favorite fishing hole. 

Wendall worked at the store several days a week, so his parents saw a
little more of him.  He would have to go home to clean up before going 
to work. 

Our meals in the woods were a nutritionist's nightmare.  Our favorite
was canned pork and beans, usually eaten cold, sardines, and as a 
special treat for dessert, donuts.  No wonder I had a coronary by age 
45. 

We always had a campfire.  Not that we used it much for cooking or
warmth. It's just if you were camping you had to have a campfire. I 
remember that Wendall's father was constantly reminding us to be 
careful with the fire and we really were.  We had built a small 
fireplace using old bricks.  After first sweeping a large area clear of 
dry pine needles, we built the fireplace	 on top of the damp, black 
earth under the needles.  We always kept our fires very small.  We 
didn't want to burn up the woods and suffering the embarrassment of 
have to call out the Fire Department.  Not to mention the fact that Mr. 
Corron had said something about permanent damage to our hides if we 
ever let a fire get away from us. 

One evening we were stunned to find a small plume of smoke wafting up
from between the bricks we had carefully	 placed on the bottom of the 
fireplace.  We hurriedly pulled them up to find a fire smoldering in 
the composted pine needles, much like the fires which burn for years in 
peat bogs.  Shaken, we made sure to thoroughly douse our fire each 
morning after that. 

We usually set up the tent in the pines as soon as school let out for
the year and left it there until just	 before Labor Day.  One year, the 
last of our camping, we decided to try out other spots.  We pitched it 
up in the woods in back of Wendall's house for two or three days.  I 
don't remember anything out of the ordinary that occurred during that 
trip except that an owl	woke us up one night with a terrifying shriek.  
I swear it was perched on one of the tent poles. 

We also spent a few days of that summer on the banks of what is now
known as Beaver Meadow Brook in East Enosburg.  The first day we fished 
downstream from the tent, catching scads of native brook trout, which 
we fried up for supper that evening.  They tasted much better than 
sardines.  The next day we decided to fish upstream and discovered the 
remains of a porcupine in the stream about a hundred yards above the 
tent. We stopped drinking the water out of the brook after that little 
discovery.    Never suffered any ill effects from it though. 

What did we do in the tent on those nights so long ago?  On hot nights,
we would slide down the hill and go skinny-dipping in the branch at 
midnight.  A few times Wendall's sister Helen and James Hayes, her 
boyfriend (now her husband of more then 40 years) would come up to 
spend a few hours visiting with us.  One night my cousin, John Austin, 
came up to the camp.  He told his constipated hoot owl with laryngitis 
story that kept me giggling for half the night, much to Wendall's 
disgust. 

We often read by the light of the flickering fire. Mickey Spillane had
just become popular then. We were enthralled by his stories of sex and 
mayhem. And of course we talked, talked about everything under the sun. 
When I first saw the scene in the movie "Stand By Me" where the boys 
were sitting around the campfire I was instantly transported back in 
time to a summer night in Vermont 

Since Wendall is the quiet one and I have always had a severe case of
galloping mouth, I'm sure I did most of the talking.  We also spent a 
lot of time just staring into the fire without saying a word as only 
good friends can do. 

Ironically both Wendall and I enlisted in the Air Force when we
graduated from high school.  We never got to use the skills we had 
learned about living in a tent for extended periods of time.    But 
that's how life goes. 

Enosburg Falls VT 1994 

Revised Palmetto Florida 2002 


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