October Stories - Mysterious Camping Trip
My cousins and some of my neighbors were members of a local camping club called “Wagon Dragons”- a camping club, what a gloriously seventies concept. I was asked by my Aunt and Uncle if I wanted to accompany them and my cousins on a fall trip and I said, “Sure.” This type of weekend excursion was an aberration in my normal weekend routine, and as such, stands out from the other fifty-one Saturdays that year. I must have been about nine years old or thereabouts when they picked me up that Friday afternoon and drove me away. My memories of this entire trip are both vivid and fuzzy at the same time. I have tried to bring some of the details into focus by asking my cousins, Tim and Eric, what they remembered. When they started to answer, I changed the subject. I discovered that I didn’t want any information to alter my version of what happened.
These are the things that I recall:
-Driving over the hills with the sun low in the afternoon sky, throwing long shadows across the fields.
-Buying a tiny ceramic dog for my dresser in a local store on the way.
-Climbing around in a playground wood tugboat and scaling up to the crow’s nest.
-Running around the decks of a life-sized paddleboat run aground on the edge of the river. It doesn’t sound plausible, but…
-Watching a Jerry Lewis movie on the T.V. in my cousin’s R.V.
-Sitting around the campfire. Now, this I remember pretty clearly. All of the kids were asked to gather at the fire to hear a retelling of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” One of the dads with an upbringing steeped in the oral tradition spun the familiar tale for us, building the suspense until the Headless Horseman himself came running out of the woods screaming with a lit pumpkin where his head should be. Holy shit! It really was him, I thought, until he got closer and turned out to be my neighbor, Dave, with his windbreaker pulled up over his head. Because of this, he probably couldn’t see where he was going. He ran by us and let the pumpkin fly off of his shoulders, where it landed directly on Tim’s head. He started crying and Dave broke character to apologize. We then went inside to watch the aforementioned Jerry Lewis movie. We woke up the next day to run around the paddleboat before the drive home.
Did this trip happen? Definitely. Are all of the details accurate? Probably not, I’ll never let Eric tell me any different, and thanks to that blow to the head, Tim probably doesn’t remember.
