Camping – Reprise (aka: what really happened)

My camping trip, based on a true story, transcribed from my chicken scratch journal, 8:30AM Monday 9/5/06:

I was keeping track of my life by what lesson of Pimsleur’s Mandarin Chinese I was on, but this weekend has thrown me off a bit. Here I am now at the Crystal Locust Lake state park camping almost resort, featuring electricity and menonites with their husbands dressed in jeans and their babies dressed in fuzzy yellow jumpsuits. The baby, if you choose to give her a name, would be called Andrea, and she would smile at you at the sound of her name like a cat.

"My husband is fishing." The mother tells me with a shy smile, before stopping to let her baby wave her hands at a mop shaped dog.

In the barking and laughter, I pull past the mother with her stroller that seems shocking in the fact it isn’t built like a ten ton baby tank with a protective rim and synthetic canopy that keeps out rain and sun with equal vigor.

I see a man in jeans with a tackle box at his feet. He looks up at me when I say "good morning", and I realize that he and the menonite are a pair because he gives me the same shy smile. And think ‘that’s strange for a menonite to be wearing jeans’ and suddenly realize I have no idea about what menonites would or should wear, and was that woman in the white fishnet hairnet and pink dress that reminds me of something I wore as a child pretending to be a fairy princess without the lace, was she even a menonite at all?

I’m tempted to tell him that his wife is coming up right behind me, and that his baby Andrea is really adorable, but I don’t because I don’t want to ruin the surprise. I don’t want to spoil the weight of my conjecture with the possibility of real facts. I don’t want to scratch at the surface of a beautiful morning with too much conversation. I don’t want to change anything about this moment at all.

Later that morning, I rolled down a hill. Later that day, I ate popcorn chicken at a dairy barn. Later that afternoon, I scrambled up and down rocks. A little after that, I got into a fight. Later, made up. Later that night, I almost puked up my guts. Later than that, I tried my first elephant’s ear. Later than that, I hugged a friend. And when I went to bed, I was so sore and tired, nothing in my mind could keep me awake.

Score for the weekend:

• 1 fire started
• 2 hotdogs charred
• 10 marshmallows set on fire (by me alone)
• 1 kickin’ roadtrip
• 1 night slept under the stars
• 2 hikes through the woods
• 1 hawk spotted.

Casualties:

• 1 Crocodile Hunter (Sorry Steve Irwin, you will be missed.  My heart goes out to your family)

Overall:

• I’m so excited to go camping again. I might even buy my own tent!