Speaking
of family trips, we also used to spend a lot of time camping at
the lake during the summer.
I know that camping, like baseball,
fireworks and apple pie, is a great American pastime. But I was
never one for getting back to nature. Give me synthetic lighting,
air conditioning, a mattress, a VCR and a pile of Jeremy Irons
movies over the scorching sun, slithery fish flopping and gasping
on the sand and a sleeping bag on the floor of a tent guaranteed
to repel anything except flies, mosquitoes and various kinds of
lizards.
I could never sleep late at the lake. At
home I could pull the blinds, shut off the phone and sleep until
noon. At the lake, if the rising sun didn't turn my tent into a
microwave, the frog sharing my pillow woke me when he got up to
eat the flies that had congregated on my foot, which was still
scented from the dead fish I stepped on while screaming down the
beach in an attempt to get away from Joel, who was chasing me with
this completely disgusting catfish bait that we always called
"stink bait." (For me, every family camping trip was
followed by six months of therapy.)
To be fair, I have to admit there were
times when camping was fun. I remember all of us - the same crew
from the Mount Rushmore trip, including Kizzy, who liked camping
about as much as I did - piling into the van and driving to the
lake, listening to country music on the 8-track player, Jennifer
and I saying to each other, "Willie Nelson is YOUR
sweetie!" At night, we would all sit around the campfire and
tell stories and eat crackers with that great squirt cheese that I
don't think is even really classified as a food. Of course, the
best part about squirt cheese was doing "cheese bombs."
As soon as a can was empty, someone (usually Joel) would toss it
into the campfire and yell "CHEESE BOMB!" Then we would
all jump out of our lawn chairs and run back about three feet and
wait, expressions of rapt anticipation on our faces, until the can
exploded. Then we'd laugh our heads off and go back to our chairs
and start on another can of cheese.
Ah, good times.
One summer we had one of the greatest
food fights on record. As I recall, we were just finishing lunch
and Joel had climbed up into a nearby tree to saw off some
branches. (We didn't need branches for anything, making it one of
those things that only seems logical to a 13-year-old boy.) Just
for the heck of it, I threw some potato salad at his shirtless
chest. Seeing how potato salad stuck to the skin like a spitball
to the ceiling and he was in a perfectly vulnerable position,
everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Soon we were throwing hamburger
buns, three-bean salad and then large chunks of watermelon at him
and each other. Adding to the fun, he refused to come down no
matter how many times he was hit. He'd just say, "Damnya!,"
wipe off the latest attack, and keep sawing.
Kelly, who's older and usually very
laid-back but was laboring under the misconception that I was a
sassy little pest, cut off the end of the watermelon, got me in a
headlock and pushed the watermelon onto my head, twisting it back
and forth like he was juicing a giant orange. He then released me,
leaving me standing there, stunned, wearing a watermelon-rind hat,
juice cascading off me everywhere.
I'm still vowing to get him for that.
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