Going to Church in the Strawberry Patch

Trying to Grow Up In Spite of Myself

A Memoir by Tom Bessette

Copyright 2009 BessetteBooks

Chapter 9
Purpose in the Mist 

My teeth are loose and I am at my wits end. 
I keep tonguing them, prodding them, until they come free in my mouth.

I can’t make myself stop…have to keep touching and nudging…mouth full of saliva, loose teeth floating…now all teeth detached from their roots…floating, mingling, molars and bicuspids together, slight clicking sounds as they mix around my gums…full knowledge that I will have to get dentures…hate the thought, adhesive and shrunken mouth…done now, too late, teeth are loose…I did it, my obsession got to me. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

For the rest of my life I will be a failure;
I failed to keep my teeth attached.

I get the urge to swallow…

I drift up out of sleep, tangled in my sweaty sleeping bag, air mattress deflated, sore hips on the cold ground, listening to the soft sound of drops hitting the tent.

As always, I don’t want to get up, want to drift back to sleep, back to dreams, avoid the effort I know is coming, and for what?  My decision is made for me; I have to piss out the rest of last night’s beer anyway, so I sit up and reach for my Levi’s and flannel shirt.  My underwear is damp and smelly but I’ll take a bath in the lake today after breakfast, or at least as soon as the water warms up a bit.  I pull my boots out from under my bag, grab the camera gear and the life cushion I had been using as a pillow, and squint out into the gray of predawn. It’s not raining; the ground is dry.  The drops I have been hearing are condensation dripping from the mist enshrouded branches overhead.

I grunt into my boots, sitting in the tent with my feet thrust out the zippered door, letting in mosquitoes.  Like my father, every mundane task seems to be a struggle.  Clothes and shoes argue about being put on, bottle caps stick, fishing line knots up, food causes aromatic gas and wind blows my canoe around.  The chill in the air is dampness, I know that as soon as the sun burns through the fog it will be hot, but now I am downright cold and shivering.  It’s muggy and thick and the mosquitoes are serenading my ears with enthusiasm. I lace my boots and put on sweats over my jeans and a sweatshirt over my worn, torn,  flannel.

I pile the camera gear on the picnic table, which is littered with crumbs and empty bottles from the night before.  Dead moths are thick and scorched inside the glass dome of the gas lantern, and small bug corpses are strewn over the table, smooshed under stale donut remnants soaked in spilled beer.  I drop my gear bag on it all anyway and trudge up towards the outhouse.  It will stink horribly so I stop a few feet away from it and water a tree; immediately when I’m through and zip up, I realize, as happens every morning, that I will have to crap out my beer infested waste soon anyway, so I may as well brave the outhouse now before I get out into the canoe.  I go through this same stupid performance every morning, ever optimistic, always defeated.

Jesus Kee Ko, this morning ‘getting ready’ crap is a pain in the ass.  After a night of beer and chips and hot salsa and peanuts and Ron’s homemade pizza, this will be a stinging, messy and noisy interlude.  I’ll spend long minutes sitting on a damp, porcupine chewed seat in my own stink, hoping nobody hears me; every time I think I’m done with the latest spasm of sludge, my intestines will get that nasty feeling and I’ll know more is working its way around the last bend.  Ultimately I’ll decide enough is enough and finish as best I can and get reorganized and leave the lovely place for fresh air and more voluntary purpose.

I walk down to the shore and overturn one of the canoes, fish the paddles out of it and situate it half in the water and stow my gear.  Since I remembered to invert the canoe last night before bed, the seats are dry, unlike yesterday when my rear end was wet and itchy the whole morning.

Another struggle:  I balance the canoe on its keeled and thus uneven bottom and tilt each way as I hitch, grunting and cursing onto the seat.  One foot in, half seated, I shove with the other foot, holding onto the gunnels, trying to get waterborne with a single monstrous shove.  As always, I don’t manage it, and find myself precariously half in and out of the damn boat, my free foot now too far from shore to reach dry land for another shove.  I squat and reach my foot as far as I can, holding on for dear life, stretch just enough to plant the tip of my toe an inch onshore and thrust again, only to tilt unexpectedly and swash my boot through the water up to my ankle as the canoe glides out.  The boot is supposed to be waterproof but the warranty balks at submersion, and I feel cold water seeping around my toes like ice.

In a short few minutes, I am out into the lake.  The fog is so thick that I am soon enveloped in my own private sphere of visibility.  I can see about 10 feet in any direction, all sides and up bounded by a dome of grayness; cold, damp and eerie. My beard and eyebrows get a frosting of dampness and millions of tiny droplets float through the air, alighting on every hard surface in my narrowed world.  I drift along, paddling slowly and quietly, mostly sculling , listening to the silence.  A sudden flapping and throaty squawking nearby is probably a surprised heron, a Great Blue, happening upon me while gliding towards the swamp in search of a morning meal.  Seconds later I hear the wail of a loon echoing around the lake, the classic wilderness soundtrack to a dozen or more movies sited in locations where loons would find it impossible to be.  As I near the swamp outlet, I see a V-shaped wake a bit ahead: a beaver is heading back to the lodge and hasn’t seen me yet.  I float along after it, getting closer, sculling my paddle behind.  Suddenly, the beaver looks back, curls in the water and a gunshot cracks the air as the animal disappears underwater, the stinging sound of its tail slapping the water in alarm bouncing off the hills in the distance.  Even though I knew it was coming, the adrenaline rushes me anyway and, heart pounding and hands shaking, I aim the canoe towards the now barely visible swamp outlet.

I’m not taking pictures yet this morning.  I have shot the mist many times and there are certain lighting and composition situations I am looking for.  The mist now starts to thin perceptibly and I can see more detail of the shoreline of the swamp outlet.  Everything is gray and monochromatic. Dead trees lean crazily and arch-like over the waterway, roofing and framing my path.  A single tree ahead at a bend in the stream, solitary shore trees on each bank leaning towards it; now I break out the camera with my Kodachrome 25 and short zoom lens and start framing my image in the viewfinder of my Minolta.

Another struggle:  I waited too long to see the image and drifted too far by the time I woke up and readied my camera.  I now have to paddle back and reposition myself.  As usual, as the mist thins, a light breeze comes up; just enough to shove me the wrong way, ruining my composition.  This is my recurring frustration.  By the time I recognize the composition I am looking for, by the time I anticipate what I need to do and what I need to use, the problems begin.  I drift when I want to float still, then the viewfinder fogs up and I can’t see through the lens to compose. I dry that, leaving residue around the edges, then I have drifted again. I grab the paddle to back up, then drop it overboard, lunge to get it, soak my sleeve to the elbow and drop the paddle on the floor of the boat with a ringing crack, the canoe wobbling back and forth and the calm water riddled with tiny waves that I can’t have in my composition because it would be clear that I was in a shaky boat and what kind of strange thing is that to photograph when you are THE Committed Wilderness Photographer???  Jesus Kee Ko!

Finally everything comes together and I get my image, knowing that it will be one of my classic fog shots, the guys will drool over it, wishing they would have had the gumption to get up and out at 5AM to pursue these images themselves.  I have scads of these images and while I am mentally impressed with myself, a flitting thought passes through, speaking of sameness and unimportance that I quickly cast away.  I’m in the moment and have accomplished something after hardship, don’t bother me with any crap.

I tie up to a protruding branch embedded in a beaver lodge for stability and watch as the mist obscured ball of sun peers through, casting a warm glow.  I shoot, framing the sun with dead, leaning trees, getting the reflection just right, using technical expertise to make a beautiful image, always thinking Adirondack Life Magazine cover shot and exhibition.

I drag my canoe over the beaver dam, again wetting my feet, and launch it into the calm pond above the dam, sculling the canoe across and around a bend. I clumsily dripped water from my soaked boots onto my seat so now I will get my itchy bum anyway. I am sitting and steering from the rear of the canoe.  I have my camera resting on the square life cushion at my feet, my camera bag behind me.  I glide around a bend under alders and suddenly I see an 8 point buck whitetail staring at me incredulously.  I freeze, the adrenaline courses through me, we stare at each other; me thinking of the fabulous cover shot I am about to get.  My brain starts functioning, I reach down for my camera, the deer reacts to my movement by throwing up his white flag tail and crashing away through the brush, snorting.  I am left staring at where he was, water roiled, alders quivering, me shaking with excitement and disappointment.  I tried to snap a picture of his distant retreat and the shutter won’t release.  I was at the end of a roll anyway.  Jesus Kee GODDAMN Ko!

As the sun gets stronger, the morning is warming up.  Now is the time to shoot dewy spider webs.  I had marked a few earlier; I have to paddle to them quickly because the photo opportunity I am looking for will last no more than ten minutes or so.  The remains of a tree jut up out of a shallow spot near shore; weathered gray wood, striated with cracks, limbs branching askew.  A spider web hangs between the trunk and a limb, dewed and shimmering in the rising sun.  The breeze has died and I scull over to the web.  I have been watching this one since yesterday and have already practiced the best way to get myself close in the canoe.  The web, glistening white with tiny droplets, is framed by the texture of the old wood.  It all comes together for my camera, steady, quiet, perfect timing; I snap a few frames, playing with focus and depth of field, wanting a sharp web and wood tree but a shattered background.  A few minutes later I watch as the strengthening sunshine evaporates the dew, leaving the web gossamer and all but invisible, the picture gone now, but saved on my film.

I look around again and now the mist has pretty much finished burning off.  The day is clear with a warm glow; morning light glistening off the damp grasses, distant hills reflected in the calm water of the swamp.  I check my watch for the first time since getting up and it is past 8:30 AM, so I have been out on the water for over three hours. I shot three rolls of thirty-six exposure Kodachrome , a pretty typical morning shoot. Maybe I’ll get four or five classic images and about ten ‘also rans’ for my efforts, we’ll have to see after I get them developed.  Reluctantly, I turn around, feeling hunger pains, and start paddling back to the beaver dam.  I speed up and am able to skim over it without getting out of the canoe.  Below, it is about twenty minutes to the lake and then another fifteen back to the campsite.  I could dig in and paddle hard for speed but these mornings are what I like best about Forked Lake and I paddle slowly out, breathing the ripe swamp air and feeling the coolness of the damp mixing with the heat of the sun.

As I paddle out of the outlet, there is my brother-in-law, Ron, standing in his outboard boat over there where the swamp meets the lake, reeling in his line.  I paddle over and he has a string of smallmouth bass tethered to the boat.  He pulls them up and I see four fish ranging from twelve inches to one eighteen inches.  He’ll fillet them later and we’ll have a fish fry tonight.  He is a serious fisherman and spends near all his free time fishing according to season.  Ice fishing, fly fishing, bass fishing, casting for trout, he does it all.

Ron married my sister Judy when I was 8 in ’63.  More than either of my blood brothers, he has been a companion, mentor and big brother to me.  Sometimes scary, often stern, always accommodating and ready to help anytime, anywhere.  He and my father hunted together and my parents and Ron and Judy played bridge together regularly through the years. Ron is clearly as much of, and even more, a son to my parents than my brothers.  He helped paint the house.  He helped take down the huge trees that were dropping branches on the roof.  When I was giving them teenage trouble, they turned to him for help and rightly so.  He was there, ready and willing, all grown up and everything.  I always think of him as the assistant family patriarch.

Ron and I chatted a few minutes about the beautiful morning we’d witnessed.  He told me he’d seen a buck in a small inlet off to the left a little while ago, and maybe he was still around if I wanted to go look. I paddled quietly into the inlet, camera set and ready, and sure enough, there was the buck, horns in velvet, a full ten points, chewing some arrowroot.  I had my camera at my eye as I drifted up, the buck raised his head, I grabbed the shot, and the second image I got was of his white tailed rear streaking off through the alders. I turned and headed across the lake to our campsite, about a half mile away.  It was 9:30AM when I pulled up to shore, by this time I had shed outer layers and was barefoot, t-shirted and toasty warm in the sun.  This early, the campsite was mostly in shade so the air was cooler. 

Most everybody was up already and breakfast was winding down.  On these annual campouts, the rule was that everyone was assigned a KP day where you were responsible for cooking the meals and cleaning up.  The reality was that my father and Ron seemed to mostly share the cooking chores, so the rest of us did dishes and policed the campsite.  My father was the indisputable breakfast guy.  Crispy eggs, broken yolks, bacon either burned black or nearly raw, charred toast, all delicious.  Things really do taste better cooked outdoors; if that weren’t true, surely we all would have starved trying to eat my father’s camp cooking.

A second rule was that the first person up eats first and last up eats last and so on.  On morning mist days, I was always the first up, often with Bob DuPuis accompanying me, and was always the last to eat because I got back to camp so late.  On mornings that had no mist, I was so loathe getting up that I was the last up and last to eat on a regular basis.  All my life, I have had difficulty getting up unless there was something I really wanted to do, and until then it was a chore to be cursed at and done reluctantly.
I sat at the picnic table under the canvass tarp and crunched my eggs and slurped my bacon.  Washed it all down with a cold Coke and then helped my dad clean up the kitchen area because it was my KP day.  I took all the metal plates and forks along with the fry pan to a spot out beyond the outhouse that had a good bed of pine needles.  We had found over time that rubbing the dirty dishes with a mixture of Pine needles and acid Adirondack soil was just the ticket to get the greasy food debris off the cooking and eating ware.  Finish off by rinsing the cleaned items in cold lake water and they were ready to be dried and tossed into the duffle bag under the tree.

The day was warming up nice and promised to be a good day to scour the slime and dried crud off our bodies in the lake, our substitute for a bath.  My father smelled pretty bad, holding fast to his vow to wear the same clothes and not wash up all week, and I had been at him to join me for a bath over at the beach in the bay.  He bitched and moaned but when Ron said he was indeed getting pretty ripe he acquiesced grudgingly.

We got our suits on, hopped into the canoe and headed over to the bay shore that we called the ‘public beach’ the only sandy-bottomed swimming area on that end of the lake.  We used ‘biodegradable’ soap, which was probably a lot of hogwash, but we felt good about it, and then washed all our grime into the lake water without further concern.  We dove in, wetting ourselves thoroughly, frigid with cold, even pulling out our suits to enable free flow of water, and then waded back towards shore and soaped ourselves liberally, shivering and all goose bumps.  We were a sight standing there, knee deep in water, hands down our crotches, trying quickly to dislodge baked in dirt and whatever else might have infested our nether regions.  We would actually have to scratch under our arms with our fingernails, filling them with accumulated Mennen Speed Stick which we had been using liberally in lieu of bathing.  We then dove back into the deeper water, again shocked with cold and again swishing our hands in our privates to vacate the soap suds and avoid itching later on.  Clean as we would get, we’d then swish walk through the shallow water over to one of the boulders that lined the shore, climb up, drape a towel around our shoulders and see who could stand to sit there shivering the longest.  Dad usually won, even though the rest of us hated being the wuss and being the first to head back to camp and warm clothes.

Back in camp, we’d dress in jeans and tee shirts, maybe even sweats, and then get out the horseshoes.  My father was a devastating player, all through his healthy years he regularly shot three out of four ringers.  Whoever was on his team was guaranteed to win their game.  Interestingly, I was considered to be a good horseshoe thrower by association, even though in practice I was lucky to get one ringer every other game and rarely got points for that matter.  I was still ‘good’ and got to play as much as anybody.  It’s who you know!

Lunch was cold cuts and chips, bread, soda, whatever, everybody get their own, use paper plates.  It was also a signal that beer time was coming.  We were growing up at a time when the drinking age was eighteen, and on campouts, away from police interference, my father considered it OK to let us have ‘a beer or two’ as young as fifteen.  I was legal but we always had younger guys with us and they would put a lot of thought into when to have their daily allotment.  Have it early in the day and be cool daytime drinkers, or wait until the campfire at night?  A conundrum for sure.

One year about this time, when I was twenty three or so, the weather was rainy and cold for a few days, not at all unusual.  We were gathered under the tarp, disconsolate, four walls of constant dripping surrounding us, when we saw a herd of canoes coming down the lake from the carry.  We were camping then at the less used west end area of the lake, five miles from the official state campsite, and would often go three or four days without seeing anyone outside of our group.  We knew that the only campsites available for a big group were the two on either side of us.  We watched the canoeists check out the other side and then we yelled, got their attention and waved them to our side.  As soon as they hove in sight, we saw that they were a group of young women with two in their twenties or so and the rest younger teenagers.

Fast as lightning, the younger guys, Ron Jr., Roach and Worm, hit the cooler and were standing on shore, suavely holding opened cold ones, as the girls scrambled out of their boats in the rain.  Not helping them at all, mind you, but just standing there looking way cool. Lined up on shore, mostly in the way, feigned indifference on their faces, blushing to beat the band. Protectors, benefactors, explorers; they were men.

Turns out that the ladies were from one of the elite summer camps on Raquette Lake, and that this was the big wilderness adventure part of their week.  Consequently the counselors were enthusiastic about accepting our hospitality, pitching their tents in the adjacent campsite and joining us for dinner and good fellowship.  My father, understanding such things, relaxed the one beer rule for the younger guys and let them off with a warning not to overdo it, as if fifteen year olds could possibly overdo it.  The girls stayed with us three days; there were only a few incidents of the guys being rousted from the back of the campsite where they had met a few of the young lassies who had snuck out of their tents after the counselors were asleep.

I have a great memory of a fire lit night.  Two sisters, Arancha and Louisa, were from Spain. Louisa was beautiful at 14 and Arancha was a talented guitarist and singer at 16.  I was sort of playing guitar at this time and Arancha and I jammed together, knowing a few tunes in common, her well and me not so well, but we managed to play and sing a few songs.  I was so enchanted that I forgot to drink any beers that night. She was a kid, oh so much younger than I (I thought) but I fell head over heels for her.  Long, glorious hair, handsome, accessible, warm smile, throaty voice and she seemed to really like me.  She gave me her number in Spain but I never called, never got up the nerve.  What would I do, fly off to Spain pursuing a kid near seven years younger?  They paddled away in the emergent sunshine the next day, and I never saw her again.  There were a few of us with sad eyes that day.

Cousin Joe actually kept in touch for a while with one of the counselors, Liz, who was from South Africa.  No politics were discussed; this was back when Apartheid was the rule down there.  I think he was smitten in his own unfocused way, much as I was, except he had the nerve to try to stay connected.

Nice afternoons in camp were spent canoeing or sailing.  We usually had at least 4 or 5 canoes and would often set out on expeditions to the far reaches of the lake or well up into the swamp.  As the crow flies, the outlet of the swamp was about 2 miles, but with all the bends and curves, actual water mileage was three times that, and it could be paddled, if you were willing to carry over beaver dams, for hours of some of the best wilderness experience anyone could ask for in the lower 48.  The stream started out surrounded by false land, floating hummocks sheltering ducks, and turned eventually into a placid stream, narrow, winding, new sights at every turn, and absolutely no signs of other humans for miles.  There was one area, about 2 miles in, where there was a rapids that you had to carry over, though in higher water, you could hop from rock to rock, drawing your canoe by rope behind you.  Above this was a large pond with mountain reflections in the distance and beyond, sandy beaches in the stream at the edge of deep pools filled with trout and, except for being ice cold even in July, perfect for swimming.

Up this far, the stream starts to wind through close forests, narrowing as you go; at some points it is impossible to turn the canoe around and you have to keep going to find a wide spot.  Stepping ashore into the woods anywhere along here gives one a sense of what the primordial forest may have looked like, although I know for a fact that this area was logged over as recently as the 50’s and possibly more recently than that.  At the end of a few hours, we come to another area of rapids and a quick reconnaissance above tells us that we can no longer navigate as the stream is now a woodland creek.  It would be about another mile to the outlet of the private Brandreth Lake out of which this stream flows.

When we get back to camp after the five hours or so of this trip, a cold one is called for.  Cousin Joe will want to take out his sailboat and one or more of us will go with him.  He has a wooden ‘Blue J’ and keeps it in perfect condition, hand rubbing coats of lacquer and repainting every second year or so.  He is a competent but cautious sailor and as far as I know has never had an accident with his boat.  When I sail it, I always want to haul the mainsail in and scream along. He much prefers to dump the extra wind and poot along more sedately.  It is exhilarating to be out there tacking across the lake, coming about near the far shore and then racing back, sun shining, water dancing and the wind freshening from the west.  Those classic Forked Lake days where the weather is perfect, the air is pure and you want to live there forever, they were my lifeblood.

Other days, the clouds gather and we get ‘socked in;’ grayness close to the ground, and a steady drizzle or hard, cold rain.  The one time we convinced my mother to come for a few nights, it rained steadily for three days.  The campsite was mud punctuated with streams flowing through, emptying into the lake.  We hunch under the tarp at the picnic table, attempting card games if the wind isn’t too high, talking about warm clothes and dozing under the mid day sun.  Everything gets damp and you hoard every inch of dryness, paranoid that someone or something will wet it and then you are lost forever, you get that crazy.  If we forget to properly trench the tents, then the water will be flowing inside across the floor, air mattresses floating every which way, clothes and sleeping bags sopping.  These are days that call for a lot of beer and we answer the call.

Supper is often steak and baked potatoes, bread, and sometimes salad for those who can stomach green stuff.  We’ll grill the steak over the open fire and toss unwrapped whole potatoes into the fire proper as we did when we were kids.  Both steak and potatoes charred and properly crunchy, we dig in, and wash it all down with a few beers.  If he has been lucky, Ron will put on a fish fry, coating the fillets in bread crumbs and frying them on the gas stove.  Fresh bass and crunchy potatoes rivaled any meal we could think of, except maybe donuts.  Towards the end of the week, we often got low on supplies and, being too lazy to run into town for a paltry days worth of food, we would get creative with whatever was left in the coolers.  Baloney and rancid hamburger sandwiches, things like that. 

Once, feeling organic, Bob DuPuis and I elected to make a salad for the last night.  Lacking lettuce, we remembered that ferns were edible and set out into the back woods to collect enough to feed 10 people.  Forgetting that the young spring fiddlehead ferns were the ones mentioned in our reading, we came proudly back with the largest, most mature ferns we could find.  We washed them in the lake, ripped them to shreds, added questionable mushrooms, wilted celery, browning tomatoes and soft cucumbers and served it with pride.  No dressing, if I remember right. Lots of stems caught in throats, an interesting aroma from the extra ripe veggies, and hours of merciless teasing later, we finally admitted that it was far and away the worst meal anyone ever ate, and we scoured the coolers and bins for anything remotely edible to assuage our hunger.  Lucky we had enough beer on hand to mitigate our discomfort.

Nights around the fire were the highlight of the day.  Bob and I had the best seat, directly in front of the fire.  Ron would make homemade pizzas in this contraption he had bought.  He’d place two slices of bread on each half of the cooker, butter them liberally with this squeeze margarine stuff he brought, then slice mozzarella and pour spaghetti sauce on the bread.  Clamp the contraption closed and hold over the flame and when you heard it sizzling long enough, he’d open it up and out would pop something that looked like a grilled cheese sandwich but much more interesting.  Went really well with beer.  We’d much on these or popcorn, drink our beers, run into the woods to pee every half hour or so…life was good.

Most nights my father sat at the picnic table with a puzzle book or a deck of cards, playing solitaire.  He didn’t much care for sitting by the fire and I still have this one night shot I took of him.  Glow of the lantern on his face. A puzzle book open, the debris of the day scattered all over the table, heaps of dead moths and mosquitoes, and he’s there with his hand on his forehead, the image of a curmudgeon in his place of honor.  After sitting there for an hour or so after dark, he slap the book shut, gap and stretch and wander off to bed, Mr. Buck trudging along behind him.  Then would start the grunting and cursing, a nightly routine, as he struggled to crawl into the tent, get out of his clothes (except the underwear, which had to last all week) and hitch and slither clumsily into his sleeping bag.

The story is still laughed about the night it had been raining all day and the campsite was a pool of mud, everything covered.  Bedtime came and Mr. Buck was as muddy as he’d ever been and crawled into the tent with dad.  The usual swearing ensued, added to by my father’s entreaties to Buck to stay off his sleeping bag:  “Bucky stay…no…no…not there dammit…grrr…just lay there you…stop…no…please no…stay GODDAMMIT…don’t, no…Christ, Jesus Kee Ko…oh…oh…oh Bucky, whaddya do that for…”.  The bag was muddy on the inside that night.

Bedtime for most of us was midnight or later.  At some point, the few of us still idiotically up would feel we had enough beer, enough stories around the fire, enough pretending to be awake when our eyes were actually closing with the dullness of the beer.  I would try to remember to flip the canoes upside down so the seats wouldn’t be wet the next morning.  We’d douse the fire and police the campsite in the dark, unsuccessfully, of course.  A few times we tried dousing the fire with piss instead of bothering to get lake water but the steam that was produced convinced us otherwise. A walk into the woods for the last piss of the night; usually, by now, dad has been up at least twice to piss out his beer. 

Am Bluteau, the few times he was invited on the campout, had a habit of walking a step or two behind the nearest tent and pissing there, creating a lovely aroma for the unfortunate billeted in that particular tent.  He’d get yelled at by everyone, stare back incredulously and then promptly do it again next time he had to go, never understanding the problem, as usual.  If he did finally get it, he’d then sulk and look sad and abused well into the next day.  He is the one who would toss his uneaten spaghetti right into the lake, where it would stare back at us the rest of the trip, and often enough, still be there the following year.  Am was the one who arrived at the landing once, much later than expected, long after the person sent to meet him in a canoe had given up on him.  He pulled his car right to water’s edge, opened his door and passed out in the seat, still there, blocking the way of paddlers carrying from Raquette Lake.  What a guy.

Usually I had forgotten to blow up my air mattress earlier when I could see and was still awake, so I had to do it now, and naturally never really got it well inflated, so it would be sure to be flat by morning.  Crawling into the bag was always cold and damp feeling, and it took awhile to warm up the interior.  I slept with my dad and Mr. Buck and between them both farting out the junk food each had eaten all day, the atmosphere was always mighty thick by the time I crawled in.  I was always optimistic that I could make it through to morning and was always defeated, usually by 2AM I would have to get up and grunt back out of the tent to deliver more processed beer, often being less picky about how far away I got.

I always found it hard to sleep at Forked Lake, even years later when we had learned to put our food out in a canoe to keep the bears from getting it.  I would lay there, convinced I heard heavy footsteps in the campsite, worried lest my father had brought food into the tent to tempt the bear to tear a hole in the wall and come inside, showing teeth.  I felt I was in one of those horror movies where the future victim is compelled to venture to danger alone, the audience cringing and saying out loud, “Don’t open that door, the monster is right there, can’t you see?”

One night, I came up out of a dulled half sleep to the unmistakable sound of slurping near the picnic table.  I tried to close my eyes and cower down in my bag but I just couldn’t; I knew it probably was my imagination, as usual, and I had to look to be sure.  I got my flashlight and got out of my bag, clad only in my smelly skivvies, crept to the door and quietly zipped it open.  There sitting on the table was a yearling bear, holding a box of carnation instant milk in his paws, his nose buried in the stretched box, slurping away at the contents.  He stopped and glanced at me with a look of total boredom and disinterest and started slurping again.  My voice was gone, I squeaked, “Get ‘im Buck. C’mon boy,” in a broken whisper, looked back just as Buck awoke and exploded out of the tent.  The bear scrambled away, right through a corner pole and guide wires of the tarp, it came crashing down, the bear sped off trailing ropes and tarp and scooted up a tree like he was on fire, Buck nipping his hindquarters as he got up out of reach.

By now the whole campsite was up, everyone spilling out of tent doors, bumping into each other, asking what was it, where is it, holy cow, look up in the tree.  As would happen many times to come, we had to pull Buck away from the tree, hold him steady for about 15 minutes until the bear came down, to saunter grudgingly away. In later years, after Bob and I learned about the advisability of securing our food, the bear visits dropped to nothing, though I was certain that I heard the footsteps treading our site, just in case.

In any given week, it was unlikely that the weather would stay good long enough for me to have more than two fog mornings.  It had to be a cool night, warm day and at least partly clear skies for a mist to develop.  On those cloudy mornings, I would drift up out of my sweaty, hung-over sleep, slide out of my tangled bag, look outside, see the far shore of the lake, crawl back to bed and fall right back asleep, deflated mattress be damned, happy to be off the hook.

Hours later, my father’s voice: “Tom, last call for breakfast…Tom…Tom!…Jesus Kee Ko, TOM!”