Not a summer passes when friends
don’t invite me to come stay overnight with them while they are camping
somewhere in New Hampshire.
“It’s so peaceful to fall asleep
listening to the crickets chirping every night,” my friend Jean told me.
I think some of my city friends
forget I live out in the wilderness. Not only do crickets chirp at night in my
back yard, coyotes howl incessantly and there’s this really loud whippoorwill
that sings for hours right outside my bedroom window. I keep hoping it will develop a bad case of laryngitis, but so far, no such luck.
So trying to use the sounds of
nature as a means in which to entice me to go camping just isn’t going to work.
Back when I was a newlywed, my
husband also used to try to convince me to go camping. He constantly talked
about wanting to sleep outside under the stars. He’d done it while stationed in Colorado when he was in the
military and he couldn’t stop raving about it.
“You could see a zillion more stars
in the sky at night in Colorado than you ever could see here!” he gushed. “It
was incredible! It was like actually being close to heaven!”
Incredible or not, he wasn’t about
to get me to sleep outside underneath any stars, especially not after having
recently watched the Peter Fonda movie, Race With the Devil.
In the movie, two couples unknowingly set up camp right near the
isolated meeting place of a satanic cult that was in the process of slicing and
dicing people for sacrificial purposes.
When the cult happened to spot the campers on their turf, the chase was
on. And let me tell you, those cult
members were a really nasty bunch.
“Stuff like that happens only in
the movies, not in New Hampshire!” my husband said. “Believe me, you’d love
camping!”
He was talking about camping in a
tent. When I was a kid, I spent summers at my family’s camp, which
basically was a small cabin in the middle of the woods. It had no indoor plumbing or electricity, but at least
it had windows and doors that locked, and beds with actual mattresses on them. I
really wasn’t eager to sleep in a tent – something a strong wind could launch
into orbit, or a bear could pick up with its teeth.
As luck would have it, two of our
friends (I will call them “Jane” and “John” to spare myself the risk of having
to retain an attorney) bought a fairly large two-room tent back in the 1970s
and set it up for the summer at a campground along a river only about 15 miles
from where we were living at the time.
“We insist that you come spend the
4th of July weekend with us!” Jane called to invite us. “We’ll have
a great time barbecuing, swimming, playing cards and sitting by the campfire
and roasting marshmallows.”
My husband practically did
cartwheels when I told him about the invitation. I, on the other hand, was secretly praying a meteor would land on
John and Jane’s tent (not while they were in it, of course) and immediately put
an end to the whole camping idea.
Still, never let it be said I
wasn’t willing to try something at least once…especially if it meant putting an
end to my husband’s constant nagging at me to go.
As we headed toward the campground
that next weekend, my husband was as excited as a kid at Christmas. “I’m not going to sleep in their tent,” he
said. “I’m going sleep outside, under the stars! There’s no point in camping out if you can’t look up at the
stars.”
I couldn’t help but think of that
old joke about what it means if you wake up in the middle of the night while
camping and see stars above your head.
It means someone stole your tent.
Due to the holiday weekend, the
campground where John and Jane were set up was so crowded, when the guy at the
next campsite bent over, I was sitting close enough to read the tag on his
underwear.
By six o’clock, I was so hungry, my
stomach was making noises that sounded as if I’d swallowed a live bear.
Finally, John lit the campfire – a
regular old-fashioned campfire, not a grill – for what he promised was going to
be a fabulous hot-dog and marshmallow roast.
I was so famished, I had to resist grabbing a hot-dog from the package and
eating it raw.
Just as the blaze began to crackle,
the skies opened up and dumped down so much rain, it drowned the campfire. And by the time we rushed around gathering
everything to bring back into the tent, we all looked as if we’d taken swan
dives into the river.
It was bad enough having to sit
wet, hungry and shivering with three other people in a tent, but John and
Jane’s dog, Buster, a big collie, also was in there with us. And believe me, he didn’t exactly smell
fresh.
Even worse, the thunder that
accompanied the rainstorm made Buster go crazy. He ran around in circles inside
the tent and barked endlessly. And even
after the thunder stopped, he continued to bark. In fact, an hour later, he still was barking.
Campers began to come over to the
tent to politely ask us to keep the dog quiet.
After another half-hour of Buster’s
incessant barking, the campers stopped being polite. In fact, they looked as if
they were about to form a lynch mob. I seriously began to fear we were going to
meet the same fate as the campers in the Race With the Devil movie (spoiler alert: they
all ended up being murdered by the cult members).
The campground manager finally paid
a visit to our tent. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave if you can’t keep
the dog quiet,” he said. “I have had numerous complaints. And I do have to consider the welfare of the
other campers, especially those who have young children who are trying to
sleep.”
Let’s just say that John, who was getting irritated by then, wasn’t
exactly cordial in his response to the manager’s request…and the four of us
ended up being “escorted” from the campground.
I felt like kissing the dog.
After that, John and Jane sold
their tent and never went camping again.
And my husband stopped mentioning sleeping out under the stars.
But just in case he ever did, I was
prepared. I bought some great self-adhesive, glow-in-the-dark stars I could
stick up on the bedroom ceiling.
