fivebyevif

“Hm,” I said. “There appears to be a porblem.”

My cot was too big for my tent.

Have you ever slept on rocky ground without padding? Right, neither have I. I had three options: sleep outside on my cot with the ticks and the gnats and the raccoons, drive down to town and hope for a store to still be open that sold outdoor gear, or suck it up and hope my sleeping blanket would cushion me enough.

I chose to suck it up.

Somehow, the conversation got around to Texas. I don’t remember how, but here’s the gyst of how the conversation went:

“They don’t do it like that in Texas,” Jeff said, “they do things like so.”

“Yes,” Melissa agreed. “In Texas, things are like this. Unlike here, where they’re like that.”

“Well, in Texas,” I said loudly, “golden bricks fall out of your ass when you fart!”

Snarf.

We observed stars, made monster s’mores, and ate steak. Then we went to our respective beds.

Dave pitched in by giving me his sleeping bag, which helped a little, but by morning it was undeniable: I’d been sleeping on rocks. I could feel it.

Anyone who goes camping to be convenienced is in it for the wrong reasons. I was rested, and that was good enough for me.

Time for breakfast.

Breakfast came in three glorious, artery-hardening steps. It also took Mike three hours to make.

First, the bacon. I’d say a couple pounds worth. Enough that when he was done, Mike’s twelve inch cast iron skillet was half full of grease. Unlike everyone else in the camping party, I like my bacon cooked, but limp. Not British, limp. Crispy bacon is such a turn off to me.

Second — eggs. For me, blinded (that’s sunny side up and splashed with hot bacon grease). I had one. Delish.

Third were the pancakes. I nibbled on a baby one, having eaten a banana and some coffee cake in between the bacon and the eggs and the eggs and the pancakes. I was quite full.

“What do you mean you didn’t bring water?” was what I was thinking. I may have said it, too. My fool mouth has a tendency to be that way.

Either way, I handed my spare bottle to Matt, eyeing my remaining one thoughtfully. Filled to the brim, I figured it would last me the 3.4 mile loop to Mina Falls and back.

I figured wrong.

There’s a gravel path at the point where the Mina Falls Trail meets up with the Taum Sauk trailhead. After that, it rapidly devolves into a rocky, rugged path. The first half of the hike is over a mile, terminating at the falls. The second half is longer, and far more dangerous.

We were a quarter way along that second half, picking our way up the mountain. I pulled my bottle out from the net holster on my backpack and shook it. Two, maybe three gulps left.

“Not good,” I muttered.

Dave and Matt had wandered on ahead. Looking behind me, I could see Jeff was resting again. He’d been doing that a lot. He, too, was low on water. Mike and Melissa stuck close to him, watching him. They were thinking the same thing I was.

“This is not good,” I repeated.

Matt trotted back down the trail.

We talked, a quick plan forming. We related our ideas to Melissa and Mike, who nodded in agreement. Then Matt and I took off up the trail.

I had it figured two ways. Either I was going to go slow with the party and take two hours to do the last mile on a sliver of water — which wouldn’t last me one hour, let alone two — or I was going to charge up the path in a quarter of that time, refill, and return with water for the rest of the gang.

I started out ahead of Matt, but he caught up when I had to stop to drain off the last of my water. He stayed fifteen paces ahead of me the rest of our charge — somehow I managed to maintain a good clip.

Then my face and hands started tingling. I stumbled, plunged on.

“So not good,” I muttered.

And then Matt yelled out the one word that made my day ten times brighter.

“GRAVEL!”

There’s a scene in A Horse and His Boy where Shasta finds a cataract after wandering for days in the desert. He’s thirsty, hot, and grubby, and he is overjoyed when he finds the water, enjoying it more than he ever has in his whole life. I can relate to that scene very well now.

Nothing has ever felt so good as Matt dumping a gallon of water on my head. Steam rose off my shoulders. My hair plastered to my head, I grinned and gingerly made my way back to his truck.

We drove back to the trailhead, and then Matt charged off down the path, lugging a nearly full five gallon jug of water and a folding chair. I watched in awe as he went, then started to tug my shoes on again.

We’d passed Dave on the way up, and only now — after we’d driven back to camp to refill our bottles and acquire the jug — did he finally emerge from the Mina Falls trail, moving at a slow pace toward my car.

I handed him the keys to Myrtle, told him to enjoy the A/C if he wanted to, grabbed my gear, and went after Matt.

Jeff said he saw a woman in blue jeans. She wasn’t really there, but he saw her. The hero Matt, who hadn’t seen her, described her to me as half-naked.

The second time up the trail was nicer than the first, when all I’d had to focus on was my impending heat exhaustion and the rocks in front of me. We stopped to let Jeff recuperate, to keep Melissa from having an asthma attack. We doused ourselves in the luxury of water.

When we got back to camp, I grabbed my towel and clove shampoo, and took a bath at the water spigot, Japanese style. I hooted and shrieked as I doused myself with cold water, but it felt good.

So, so good.

That night, we discovered Melissa had a tick in her back. Mike had already taken out one from himself. We were all nervous.

“Don’t brush against leaves,” someone said to Jeff. “Or sit under tree branches.”

“The ticks like to fall down from them onto your head,” someone agreed.

A pause.

“Alligators do that, too,” Dave observed seriously.

Snarf.

We went back to the overlook and observed stars again. Over in the treeline, some glowing insect tried to outdo the heavenly bodies with a lightshow that looked straight out of Vegas.

We saw more shooting stars than there were people in our group. Some of us saw the Milky Way for the first time since childhood. We tried to pick out satellites, and even succeeded a few times.

Back at camp, yet another sleeping bag was contributed to my padding-deprived abode.

I woke up with a bruise in my leg in the morning.

Packed up and packed in, my car could only afford two people in it: one driver, one passenger. I got Mike this time.

Looking back over the now empty camp, it was impossible to tell we’d been there the night before, sitting around a super-heated fire (courtesy of Matt and Mike) and eating chicken and shrimp stir-fry (courtesy of me).

I pulled off the tickets on the campsite markers that indicated we had claimed them, said goodbye to the local spirits, and drove away.

A fine way to turn 27.