It was my idea to go camping. As a thirteen-year-old, I had few excuses for staying away from home. My cousin had moved away a year earlier, eliminating one option. My grandparents were a possibility. I had spent many weekends on their farm. That was fine when I was younger. Now, the point of staying out was to be free of adult supervision, regardless of how benign. Camping filled the bill. It would keep me out for the night and free me not only from supervision but of the possibility of being tracked down. It was 1974.

Tom was reluctant though. He had never camped. He was a townie. And his question, “Why?” was a sensible one. “Because,” I said, “we can hang out in the woods. You know, take some food, maybe a radio, and no one will bother us.”

Tom didn’t have the home life I had. He didn’t mind being home. It was only him, his mom, and little sister. His mom pretty much let him do what he wanted. She never left the house as far as I could tell and never questioned Tom about his comings and goings. He a had tiny bedroom barely big enough for a couple mattresses piled on top of each other and sheets and blankets I’m sure hadn’t been washed in months, if not years. He also had a door to the outside world right there in the room. More of a free spirit than I, with much more freedom, Tom was a source of admiration and consternation. 

He agreed, though, to go camping. I road my bike home, preparing myself to ask my stepdad. Left to make the decision, he’d say yes. If my stepmom got involved, it would be complicated by questions like why I wanted to go camping and why should they let me. I was pinning my hopes on my stepdad, and it worked.

Ten minutes after he said yes, I was back on my bike, pup tent wrapped in my sleeping bag and slung across my back. My backpack, holding a transistor radio and a couple candy bars, was strapped to my shoulders and hanging across my chest. 

While I was gone, Tom had pulled two blankets and a pillow off his bed and stuffed them into a large backpack. In a smaller one, he put a box of Ritz crackers, a sleeve of Oreos, and two of his mom’s beers. He was waiting on the front stoop when I pulled up. 

I could hear the television inside. Through the screen door everything was dark. Tom eyed me as I dropped my bike next to the steps and crossed the stoop to look inside. “We can stay here, if you want,” he said. ”Your parents won’t know.”

“No,” I said, the thought of sleeping in Tom’s room was only slightly more appealing than going home. “I need to get away for a while.”

Tom nodded. He knew my home life, although I had never told him the hell my stepmom put me through. The fact I never invited him to my house and avoided going home until I had to was evidence enough. “Yeah,” he mumbled before smiling. “If we stayed here, we couldn’t drink the beer.”

“How many did you get?” I asked. 

“One each.”

“Can’t you get more?”

Tom shrugged. “She might figure it out.” He nodded at the screen, where we both knew his mom sat on the other side. “Oh, what the hell,” he added after a moment. “Let me see.” He stood. “She’ll know, but she can’t do anything about it.”

Tom went inside and I heard him tell his mom he forgot something. He came out thirty seconds later, pulling the small backpack over one shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said, grabbing the larger pack. 

We walked north toward the railroad tracks. We followed the tracks out of town and across the bridge that spanned the reservoir. We stopped on the bridge and stared between the railroad ties at the slow-moving water below. The bridge was pock-marked with rust and covered in graffiti. “I can’t believe trains still use this,” I said. 

Tom nodded. “Remember when dudes used to jump off it?”

When Tom and I were younger, high school kids would hang out on the shore and jump from the middle of the bridge into the lake. It was the spot they knew was deep enough. The water was too shallow now, as the reservoir could no longer keep up with water demand. The town had put up wire barriers on both sides of the tracks, with “No Diving” signs posted every ten feet.  

Beyond town, we kept to the tracks, cornfields on both sides of us. Our steps moved in sync with each other, as we went from tie to tie, sometimes skipping one. We talked about girls, who we liked, who we wondered about, and who was boyfriend and girlfriend. I had had two girlfriends in seventh grade. Tom hadn’t had any, as far as I knew, but he seemed to know more than me. He had slew of porn magazines under his mattress, but his knowledge ran deeper, as if he had experience. I was too scared to ask, knowing it would confirm my innocence and maybe reveal more than I wanted to know about Tom. Again, the deadly duo—admiration and consternation—rose up.

Two miles out of town, we turned on a country road and headed west. A half mile later, we turned back south toward the far side of the reservoir. The cornfield gave way to woods and the road dead ended. We climbed a fence, ignoring the no trespassing signs. 

The woods were shadowed and cooler. What daylight was left hit us at an angle that was blinding when it broke through the trees. Clouds were building overhead, and a breeze was starting to kick up. We were talked out, and I just wanted to find a place to stop and put the tent up. 

We had planned to camp along the reservoir, but when we came to a creek we decided we had come far enough. We found a clearing along the bank above some rapids with a sandbar that stretched half-way across the water. The ground around us was covered with a bed of fir tree needles. I dropped my sleeping bag at my feet. I spread the tent over the ground and an uncomfortable feeling welled up inside me. I had forgotten the tent stakes and poles. 

Tom dropped an armful of dried branches under a tree. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

I told him. He rolled his eyes. “Do we even need a tent?” 

“Maybe we can use tree limbs for poles,” I said. I began searching for anything that looked suitable. We worked in silence, Tom collecting enough firewood to build a house and me resorting to breaking off rubbery tree limbs for poles and stakes. 

The night came on quickly, but I managed to find enough branches to prop the tent into a usable structure. Tom tossed his blankets inside, and I threw my sleeping bag in. I rolled two large logs over for us to sit by the fire. 

Tom stood by the wood pile, frowning. When he saw I was staring at him, he said “Matches?”

 “You don’t have matches?” I said. 

He rolled his lips in and out and returned his stare to the firewood, as if it might save us and light itself. “No,” he said after a few moments. “Shit. I was about to get them when I went to get more beer. Dammit.”

We sat around the pile of firewood as the darkness swallowed us and closed us off from the rest of the world. Crickets chirped, and every once and a while a fish would splash water around as it moved through the rapids. We ate crackers, cookies, and candy bars. We drank the beers. We talked about kids we went to school with, rehashing past indignities and victories, leaving no one untarnished. Time was lost to us. After what could have been an hour or four hours, I was ready to sleep. 

We crawled in the tent and talked about television shows, sports, and school for a while, not saying anything we hadn’t said many times before. 

“Know any ghost stories?” Tom asked abruptly.

I thought for a moment. “Not really.” 

“I thought you were the camper?”

I chuckled. “Not really. This is the first time since…” I paused, trying to remember. “Six years?” I was unsure. “My stepdad used to take me when he and his buddies went. They’d get drunk and fish all night.” Tom sighed. “Do you know any?” I asked.

I heard Tom shrug, the swoosh of his shoulder moving across his covers. “Yeah, but it feels kind of stupid telling them with us laying here, just the two of us. I mean, they’re not scary if there’s only us.”

“Yeah,” I said, “imagine telling Don Weston a scary story.”

“He’d freak,” Tom chortled. Don was the one kid who provided solace in our world of self-denigration. We could always say, "At least I'm not Don."

“Yeah, but it ain’t going to happen. I’d never go camping with him.”

“I know,” Tom said.

I woke up to water seeping through the seams of the tent and spreading under my sleeping bag. Half of the tent had caved in under the weight of rain. Through the tent flap, the trees and world around us lit up from lightening, followed by quick thunderous bangs. The rain, already coming down hard, turned to a torrent. I thought for sure the tent was going to cave in if we weren’t washed away first.

Tom sat up. “Shit,” he said. When I didn’t respond, he asked, “Are you awake?” 

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you wet?”

“Soaked.”

“Me too.”

We lay in a pool of water. Tom’s blankets were completely soaked. The bottom of my sleeping bag was wet, and water had seeped through the zipper that ran along the length of it. I lay there, trying not to move, feeling like an island. Any movement might bring a wave of water over me. The tent sagged more, as pockets of water formed in three or four places, with one about six inches above my head. 

I wondered if anyone was concerned about us. The only people who knew we were gone was Tom’s mom and my stepparents. We hadn’t told them where we were going. They wouldn’t know where to look even if they wanted to find us, which, I knew, they didn’t. I fell in and out of sleep, dreaming of rain, angry stepparents, and being washed away by the rain and the creek.

By morning, the sky had cleared and the sun shone brightly, the storm horror subsided. We were still wet and cold. We climbed out of the tent and let it collapse upon itself. We stripped down to our underwear and hung our clothes on limbs to dry. The remaining crackers and cookies had dissolved in their water-soaked containers, leading to a barrage of “dammits” and “shits,” from both of us. We walked in circles, until I had enough. I grabbed the tent, getting soaked again as I held it to my body, and ran and tossed it and the makeshift stakes and poles as far out into the creek as I could. The current took it slowly over the rapids, until it caught on a branch hanging over the water.

“My blankets were in there,” Tom said, as if it were an observation he made regularly.

“My sleeping bag, too,” I said, the initial panic quickly smothered by the absurdity of it all. It didn’t matter. It was my sleeping bag, and only I cared about it. No one else cared. 

“Do you want me to wade out and get your blankets?” I asked. “I’m already wet.”

Tom scrunched up his face. “No. No, I’m not carrying home wet blankets.” 

After our clothes had dried enough to walk without dripping, we grabbed our now light backpacks and headed out of the woods. Cold and damp, and tired from not sleeping well, we were met with a hunger that only made us more desperate to get back to town. “I’d buy a dozen donuts when we got to town if I had any money,” I said. “I’d eat eleven and give you one.”

Tom shook his head. “Yeah, right. I’m going home and taking a shower and going to bed.”

 I told him I had to mow a couple of yards later that day and would probably just get my bike and go. I was in no hurry to go home, though. Each step, with the scenery becoming familiar, made me even less so. 

At the railroad bridge, the water looked deeper than it had yesterday. We stopped and peered through the ties. The brackish greenish blue color of the day before was now a muddy, opaque brown littered with small branches. Tom turned and walked ahead. I waited until I was the only one on the bridge. When I stepped off it, I would be back in town. My twenty-four hours of freedom would be over. 

Camping was terrible, and I vowed never to do it again. Still, it was better than a lot of other things.