The Worst Campouts

Even though I’m thinking back 30 years or more, the ones that come to mind the quickest are always the worst ones. It’s a lot harder to dredge up the sunny-day-swim-in-the-pond campouts than it is to fend off the memories of rain and bugs and cold and heat. Maybe that’s because we catalog the victories in a bigger drawer than the ordinary times.

I camped since I was a little kid. First it was with the family: Mom and Dad and two brothers and eventually one sister. Summer campouts in big canvas wall tents that must have weighed two hundred pounds when bone dry. How we ever got them assembled with the poles and the struts on the inside I’ll never fathom. Even though this was in the Sixties, wouldn’t you think that someone would have invented something better than cotton canvas to use in building a family tent? Undoubtedly they had, but we weren’t willing to pay the extra bucks for it. Canvas was good enough for Dad in the old WW2, so it was good enough for us. When we got a little older, the boys got to sleep in our own tent. Mom and Dad and Sis got the newer, lightweight canvas tent. We got the one that probably still smelled like Korea – if we had known what Korea smelled like!

It’s amazing what you can get from the Army surplus store. Since we camped out of the back of the station wagon, it didn’t matter so much how big something was or how much it weighed. What mattered was sturdiness. Just like it mattered to the guys in the khaki uniforms. You could drive over those pots and pans, or use them to pound in stakes, and they didn’t care. I still have that old Coleman stove – it was probably made back in the Fifties. I haven’t used it in more than 20 years, but you never know when you’ll need a sturdy source of fire and heat out here in the land of earthquakes and forest fires.

What’s the first worst campout I can remember? It’s hard to say, mostly because after you get through one of them they stop being the worst and turn into one of the best. Surviving is part of the recipe that creates the conversion. Once you know you can get through something it somehow seems a lot smaller. The other part is bragging rights. You had to have a story up your sleeve anytime you were camping, or even thinking about camping, to impress your peers – or your elders – that you knew what it was really like out there in the weather and the woods.

Summer Camping

The first one I remember was I think the first Boy Scout official campout I went on. Of course it turned to rain – otherwise it wouldn’t count as a Boy Scout initiation campout. We had pitched the tent to fit three of us on what we thought of as a flat piece of ground. “Can’t you tell flat from anything else,” you laugh? In the middle of the woods, with trees and roots and rocks and stumps all around, it was not so easy to see where the ground was going to settle once you laid out three bodies on it. So we chose a flat spot by our own estimation. The three of us climbed in and pulled those sleeping bags up around our ears. No mosquitoes were going to find us! (The netting was torn in more places than one, a natural state for Boy Scout tents.) After hiking and cutting wood and roasting marshmallows it didn’t take us but a minute to fall asleep.

In the middle of the night – precisely in the middle, otherwise it wouldn’t be a Boy Scout initiation campout – we woke up in the rain. I mean, the tent was in the rain and we were in the tent. And the rain was in the tent, or at least what rain becomes after it hits the ground and mixes with leaves and dirt – that was in the tent. And the ground was not flat. Of us three boys, two of weighed about 60 pounds and the third weighed about twice that much. Naturally, the biggest one had started perched at the top of the “flat” ground, and now that the ground was wet, he had slipped downhill onto boy #1 and boy #2, until all three of us were crowded into one third of the tent floor at one edge. Since it was the slope that had caused this problem, and since gravity affects all objects the same, it stood to reason that the rain and the leaves and the dirt had also crowded to the same edge of the tent floor. And there we were. There wasn’t any way out: everyone else’s tent was already crowded, it was still dark outside, and outside was wetter than inside.

Morning finally came. We wrung ourselves out, ate campout oatmeal (made in one of those reinforced steel pots) and survived. I suppose we griped and complained, and the campout leaders moaned and groaned about our stupidity (to themselves of course, being good Boy Scout leaders). And the other kids who had already been through one or more initiation campouts laughed and snickered. But we had survived. And the next time we camped out, we were on the lookout for the new kids who couldn’t find flat ground in the rain.

Some years went by and we got pretty good at this camping stuff. As Boy Scouts we camped all twelve months of the year, rain or shine, mud or snow. And there were some bitterly cold campouts. How does it feel when the tent falls down around your ears in the night from the load of fresh snow? You don’t know, because you’re a Boy Scout and you’re fast asleep when it happens! But when you wake up in the morning, let me tell you, your breathing gets a little short and labored darned quick! But we survived.

Winter Camping

The worst winter campout was the one when it wasn’t supposed to be winter at all. I guess it was late November, and we were hiking in to the camp site. We had graduated from car camping and from having a truck carry our tents and gear. But we had also gotten smarter. On this campout we were headed for an open shelter at the camp’s archery range. No one was going to use it for shooting, but it meant we didn’t have to carry tents. So what if it was a little brisk overnight? We had our Boy Scout sleeping bags and lots of food, and besides it was only a one-nighter anyway.

The trouble started on the way in to the camp site. Rather than follow the Scoutmaster around by the road to the destination, a few of us ventured off on a side trail. We knew it went to the same place because we had hiked it the previous summer. What we didn’t know was that the camp had embarked on a massive construction project right on our route. We had to cross 200 yards of muddy field.

So there we were, half an hour later, stopped in the middle of that field to rest. It was hard work pulling your feet out of that mud at every step. The cold temperature made the mud like wet cement. We each had rather heavy packs (even without tents, as older Scouts we had learned to bring lots of supplies to ease our time through the wilderness), and tall boots for the mud. After resting for ten minutes we turned to set off again. Or we intended to turn! The heads turned. The shoulders turned. The hips turned. But the feet did not turn. The boots were stuck in twelve inches of mud.

“No problem,” I said, and slowly pulled one foot out of the mud, placed it a stride ahead, and leaned forward. That boot went down and the other one didn’t come up. Now I stood with feet apart, with less leverage than before, and not only couldn’t pull either boot out, but could hardly maintain my balance.

“I know what to do,” said Johnny. “I’ll just pull my feet out and walk without boots. Then I can put my pack down over there and walk back without the weight and retrieve the boots.” Pretty smart, huh? Well, as soon as he put that first foot naked into the mud, he squealed, “That mud is freezing!” and jammed the foot back into its boot, mud and all.

We looked at each other, looked at the mud, looked at the hundred yards to go, and looked back at each other. Then we looked 200 yards to the east where the other 20 kids and the leaders were patiently strolling up the road. Did we have to admit defeat? Would we have to holler for help?

After about ten minutes, and before they disappeared around the bend and into the woods, they finally heard our screaming. It must’ve been hilarious for them, but after they finished rolling in the dust clutching their sides, a few of them put down their stuff and came to rescue us. Another half an hour and it was all behind us, except for the souvenirs inside Johnny’s boots. We got to the campsite, made a fire, warmed our feet, and finally got down to the business of camping.

But that camp wasn’t done with us yet. It wasn’t enough to humiliate four kids out of twenty-five.

The next morning the bonfire was gone. The marshmallows and crackers were fully consumed. And the ground was white. Very white. It seems that late November is not a good time to go camping without a tent in upstate New York. The Scoutmaster didn’t get hit with this – he had had enough smarts to sleep in his tent. The rest of, well, suffice it to say that it took a long time to get going that morning.

First we had to screw up our courage just to get out of the sleeping bags. It wasn’t so bad as long as you stayed inside, but our bladders had other ideas. And then there was the problem of winter: Boy Scouts can’t hibernate like brown bears, and our moms and teachers would have eventually noticed we were gone. So we had to get up. Then we had to find clothes, and boots, and get those clothes and boots onto our bodies. We banged around, getting the blood flowing, poking at lumps in the snow to find the back packs and separate them from the sleepers. I cut through all the laces of my hiking boots so that I could stretch them out enough to accommodate my feet. Seems that mud and sub-freezing temperatures make untying and unlacing totally impractical, even to an accomplished knot-tying-Boy-Scout like myself. I clomped around, gathering up my stuff. Sleeping bag went into the back pack thrust by thrust. No neat roll. No change of clothes. No breakfast preparations (all our firewood was under the snow, too). We just wanted to get out of there.

Back down the trail, alongside the muddy field, headed for the cars. It was cold and windy. Really windy – maybe with the wind chill factor it was way below zero. The Scoutmaster kept an eye on everyone, reminding us about frostbite. Kids had socks on over their hands, shirts on over their heads and ears, and back packs grasped in their arms. It must’ve looked like a stream of refugees coming out of a bombed village. The Scoutmaster carried one kid who had worn loafers instead of boots on the trip. Another kid who weighed only fifty pounds was lifted several yards through the air by a gust of wind and plunked down at the head of the line. There wasn’t any talking going on. And no one stopped to pee. We headed for the cars. And we survived.

There were others, like the one when some kids fell asleep beside the campfire in the wintertime and we woke up to find quivering masses in the snow. They survived. And the one when we hiked more than 10 miles up a canyon, dragging jugs of potable water with us since the well was polluted at the destination.

But then there are the memories. I wonder if any of those other kids - all men with their own families now – think back on those days like this. Maybe their lives have been so filled up with other events and other memories, good or bad, that the path back to those campouts is grown over. Maybe not. We were just kids, and the leaders let us be just kids. We got cold and wet and hurt sometimes. But we survived.

And now when we get cold or wet or hurt – on the outside or on the inside – we know that we survived those bad campouts once. And we can survive them again.

Copyright 2005 by William Altmann, all rights reserved.