"Dad. Your boot is on fire!" My sister was nine and stood there in her Levi jeans and matching jean jacket, her cowboy boots and cowboy hat. Her curly orange hair was cropped short to her head and lent to her boyish appearance.
"Hush. I'm talking." Dad's answer was stern. He stood by the campfire telling his stories to Nick, with one foot propped against the rocks of the fire ring.
"But Dad! Your boot…"
"Hush!" He snapped. Suzi stood there quietly watching his boot burn another moment before she had to courage to try again.
"But Dad - your boot….." She said more quietly.
This time his reply flirted with disaster so she slunk away a couple steps watching his foot burn with a small measure of resentful satisfaction until all the sudden Dad bellowed out curses and began to stomp and kick and scream like a girl, looking just like a little Banty rooster.
"Son of a @#@!%#^%^^%,#@$#!@@!" He roared. "Why the #@!%# didn't you tell me my #$#@!@% boot was on fire?" He went off on a tirade of kicks and profanity, taking his embarrassment out on us all.
Ah yes, those wonderful childhood camping memories. I almost can't wait to hear what my own children will remember when they become adults of their own. "Mom took that stupid baby goat with us and it got in the fire and burned all the hair off it's face, then when we went to bed it got lonely and screamed half the night until she finally dragged it in to the camper with us where it pooped all over the place…." Oh wait, that's my bad memory, not theirs - they loved having the goat along, naturally, they weren't the ones who had to clean up after it.
That's mostly why children like camping so much - they don't see that dark, sinister side to the whole so-called enterprise known as 'Quality Time'…the packing to go, the crud in the tent, the wet dirty cloths stacking up, changing baby diapers in the dirt, fire soot on everything, grit in the food, and hoping that coffee boils sooner than later; kids falling in the lake, losing their toys, stubbing their toes, bitten by bugs and hooks tangled up in shirt sleeves, then bringing it all home to unpack, wash and put away… . And - if you're silly enough to take bottle-fed baby goat along, the mess there is to clean up after that.
My kids love to camp, as it should be. Because they get to spend so much time in the woods and by the waters in their normal routines though, fortunately we don't feel pressured in to taking them to camp as mandatory, grudging atonement to ourselves for letting them spend the other three-hundred-forty-nine days of the year in front of an Xbox. Chriss, my husband and I both grew up loving to camp. And in theory, we still love to camp. Honestly though, as we age, and as the children have multiplied - we tiredly admit it's just not as much fun as we remembered it being, in fact it's a whole lot more work than it is relaxation now days - and then we thank our parents knowing it was just as much trouble on them to take us, as it is on us to take our own.
The reality is, good memories seldom come cheap and as parents we have to remember to see the world through a child's eyes every now and then.
Before my folks divorced, we lived in Denver. We mostly camped the Platte River, high in the Rocky Mountains. Other wise, we camped at Pawnee Buttes, or, "Out In The Boondocks."
"Where we going Mom?"
"Out to the boondocks." She'd say. I preferred the boondocks. There weren't any rivers out there we'd be forced to fish, just dry grassland for as far as the eye could see with those two towering buttes jutting up out of the earth hundreds of feet tall where we could climb to our heart's content and bring home fascinating little horny toads. It was a hundred miles from the buttes to the Rockies, but back then we could see that far, before air pollution took over the horizon.
Usually one or more of Dad's friends would come along; commonly it was Nick. This was the early 1970's, and Nick, like so many of his generation, came back from Viet Nam, grew his hair and smoked a whole lot of marijuana. Garnishing his face were big scars that looked like the results of knife fights. He wore bell bottom jeans; his t-shirts and fingers were always stained with engine grease. Shoddy homemade tattoos bled blurry, bluish designs on his dark brown arms. Mom would call those Prison Tattoos.
"Look at that man, he just got out of prison!" She whispered. We were in the food court at the mall when the man walked by covered with tattoos.
"How do you know? Maybe he is in the service." I suggested. "Maybe he's a sailor." I pushed a little further, knowing her opinion of sailors was only slightly above that of convicts.
At 21 months, Shawnee with Mom
"No - you can just tell, he's a con-vict." Her nose was high and pinched.
I nodded and ate my corn dog. Mom was full of ideas and it was just best to play along most days.
Driving home, I pulled up next to a pickup truck at a red light. The driver had his window down, his elbow perched on the rim, and his tattoos were in full view right beside her.
"Mom, quick!" I whispered loudly. "Roll up your window! It's another con-vict!" Then I burst out laughing and she wouldn't speak to me anymore.
Anyway, back to camping the Platte - Crazy Nick of Englewood, we called him. The title was fabricated, nonetheless, Nick drove like Crazy Nick of the Englewood Speedway, and on one particular trip my two large teenage cousins were in visiting from Bixby, Oklahoma. Dad was going to show the hillbillies a thing or two, so nothing would do except for Dad to beat Nick in the race to the Platte river campground.
Try to imagine - we'd be, two adults, one teenage farm girl, three small kids and at least one large dog in the cab of Dad's old truck racing Nick from Denver to the high country through the twisting, turning Rocky Mountains, passing each other on curves, doing 90 mph down the suicide lanes shouting out the windows to each other side by side and swerving to avoid semi-trucks with their Jake brakes rumbling or squeezing through the narrow old train tunnels climbing the mountains so fast our ears would shriek with the changing altitude.
Cousin Roger must have drawn the short straw. He was riding with Nick, pleading silently at us through the window as we passed and barfing on the floor boards.
These were the days before seat belt laws so I was on Mom's bony lap with my little hands glued to the dash hanging on for dear life with a dog scraping and clawing the slick floor under my feet and Mom's arms clamped tight around my belly. And my poor sisters who had to sit on our cousin's lap while Dad shifted gears with such speed as he raced Nick that they arrived at camp with purple knee caps from the three-foot- long solid steel standard gear shifts those old trucks were equipped with; their chest would be bruised from Dad's bony elbow slamming backwards as he speed-shifted. The whole while our skinny little freaky father would be screaming wildly, "Oh we're going to die! We're going to die! Hang on! Whoo Hoo! Oh No! The brakes are out! Get out of my way! Crazy Nick is going to kill us all!" with his elbows flapping wildly as he gripped the big wheel and laid on his horn to passing traffic.
If Mom was clinically schizoid (and she was), then Dad was simply an imbecile.
Dad and Mom during Mom's Blonde moment
When we finally arrived at camp, any camp, any time we went to the Platte, we were supposed to fish. I don't know why. It was like some mandatory penance for being there, which is why I preferred the dry Pawnee Buttes over the mountains - but there'd we'd be, perched up on a high, smooth rock jutting out over the swift, cold river at Dad's command. We'd sit for hours with our little Zebco fishing poles in hand.
It sucked.
I'd caught a fish once at a little fishing derby in Denver. It came home with us in a minnow bucket. Days, weeks, some time later - the memory of that day began to haunt our house.
Our search revealed the odious cache - one rotten little fish, still in the minnow bucket, shoved up high in a kitchen cupboard. Naturally, I got the blame.
"What do we do with it?" was the logical question.
"Throw it out." was Mom's logical answer. Seemed like good logic to me.
Oh no. That wouldn't do. Dad had to be Dad about it. Suddenly the fish had to have purpose and value and meaning and substance and any other theological idea he could attach to it. It had to have ceremony.
"Could we still eat it?"
"Could we feed it to the dog?"
"Can we flush it down the toilet?"
"Can we bury it by the cat?"
One by one our meek suggestions were shot down.
After many long moments of our little family standing around dumbfounded and silent behind Dad's long speech of righteous indignation, Suzi ventured one more idea: "The Indians put fish in the ground to grow corn?"
Ah yes, offer the fish to the garden in the spirit of Native American tradition! Perfect! So with somberness (because we knew better than to laugh at the stupidity of his mission), we carried the bucket with its pustule contents to Mom's feeble garden beside the house and gagging, we dumped it in to a hole.
You see, as a child fishing just never bode well for me. When we camped the Platte and caught what our father would consider a worthy wealth of little trout, we would be allowed off the high, slick rock - but we weren't out of trouble yet. It was from the frying pan in to the fire for me. Now Suzi, she'd pull the knife from her belt, thump those fish on the head, and go to it. Her little cowboy hat pulled tight on her head, she was all business. Me? Um, no. I don't do guts. I'd stand there digging my little toe in the dirt, my moppy hair flying in the cold wind averting my eyes from the pile of guts and fish heads that I was supposed to pick up and dispose of.
Finally Mom would arrive on the scene. This wasn't Little Red Race Car Mom in her tight hip huggers and turtle neck sweater, or Big City Banker Mom in her business suits and fashion pumps. We were in the High Country now and she had metamorphosed accordingly: She'd confront my Dad, standing there in blue jeans with her ornate leather holster (and pistol) hanging against, and tied to, her long, slim thigh cooler than Clint Eastwood himself; she wore a dagger she kept tied around her calf and her long black hair flowed down her back in a braid with a bandana holding the rest back from the wind. She also wore cowboy boots, but hers were red, lavishly stitched - and quite cocky.
"Jesus Darek!" she'd hiss, with her silver earrings shimmying against her dark neck. "She's just a little girl!" Mom would drop her stringer of large trout, not stockers like we had, in to the pile my sister was cleaning. The fight would be shifted then - but I was six, I was just happy to be off the friggen hook. Besides, our measly mess wouldn't feed anyone; it was Mom who kept us fed in trout. Mom, who could catch a trout, gut it, recycle her grasshopper and catch a second fish on the same bait. (Obviously I didn't inherit her talent.)
How ironic, my husband Chriss not only lives for fishing, he has buckets of guts in his taxidermy shop on a daily basis. Our joke to him is, "Gee Chriss, we really hate your guts!" He shows me a new rack of antlers, holding up this skinned skull with huge lidless eyes bulging out of their sockets, proud of his business. Oh gee, that's nice Honey, I tell him. I try not to look at the eyes, but they are like a train wreck and take my mind back to the Platte, there is just no looking away.
The difference, however, is this: if I go fishing with him, I don't have to fish. I'm allowed to bring a book instead. When I do venture to fish, he baits my hook, casts my line, tells me when I have a bite, he takes off anything I happen to catch (which isn't much), and is sweet enough to say, "Look! You caught a fish!" I know I didn't catch anything, I just held a pole in my hand for a while, but he makes me feel worthy anyway.
I just have to love him for that.
Years ago before we were married we camped locally on the Illinois river here by home. It's a trout stream also. The next morning, I found him smoking a few little trout on sticks over the campfire. We ate with our hands, picking the delicious red meat off the bones, licking the smoky flavor off our finger tips. I just had the one child then, Brian, and he was only three. I offered him nibbles, placing the dainty morsels in his mouth. "Remember this." I told him. It seemed to me on that morning there was nothing finer … laying in the early morning sunshine on a blanket in the grass listening to the river and eating one of nature's precious delicacies with our bare fingers just like maybe God intended it that way.
Brian peaceful at the Illinois River
Ah, so this is what trout fishing is about, I thought. I had to move nine hundred miles and thirty years to make the discovery. The following Christmas I became the proud owner of a hot pink custom wrapped fly rod he made for me, and two weeks later I became pregnant. Maybe some day I'll even catch a fish with it, and if I go out on a limb, I can say maybe someday I'll even revisit the Platte with it - but mostly it's hung on the wall because little kids, swift trout streams, and fly rods make a dangerous combination. I've tried to practice in the yard without a hook but I end up untangling string, giving lessons based on theory rather than actual know-how because I don't get the chance to really learn with the boys eager to learn themselves. But that's OK, too. If they want to learn fly fishing, I'm happy to share what I know, which isn't much, so none of us catch trout except Chriss, but that's OK too. He cleans what he catches and I don't have to pick up the guts.
