"Um, JoAnn, how far is the tent from your face?" I said.
"About six inches I'd say." JoAnn said.
This was not the highlight of our girl's camping trip
to the ocean.
It only got worse.
It sounded like such a good idea to go in October
to see the fall colors.
We had packed up her tiny brown Toyota Celica
and I got the impression
she hadn't done a lot of camping.
When I got hired at the Bothell Post Office
she took to me like grease on a
Ranch Drive-In cheeseburger.
We became good enough friends to go camping together.
Only snag was, that dirty dog, Tom Bell,
sold her a cool tent and forgot to put the tent poles in the bag.
We arrived at Lake Quilleuite campground around four in the afternoon
and we started goofing off in the forest, drinking beer
and hiking around the lake having a good old time.
I could hear her laughing as she went to the empty campsite
next door to get rid of some beer. She must have found the
paper toilet seat protector I had put on a log there for a prank.
The sun went down around seven and we started to get cold.
We built a small fire that didn't warm us up much so around nine
we started putting up the tent and realized we had no tent poles.
"No problem" I said, "We'll just use sticks."
By then it was pitch black out
and we had forgotten flashlights.
We were looking in the area we could see by the firelight.
We found sticks all right.
Bent, slimy old marshmallow sticks someone left behind.
We slid the gooey sticks into her tent pole slots
and got in our sleeping bags.
It started raining.
As the tent got heavier and heavier,
the sticks kept bending closer and closer to our faces.
When the tent was on our faces we gave up.
We climbed into her tiny car,
covered our wet selves
with wet sleeping bags and tried to sleep.
She was snoring in no time.
But I'm afraid of the dark.
AND we were the only ones in the campground.
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