Secrets of Camping

I was tired. We all were. It had been a long day, having been up since 5:30am. My friend Alex and his dad had picked me up in the morning to take me on a long planned Boy Scout camping trip to the local mountains. This was what we called “car-camping” which meant no hiking with packs. It was mostly for fun and experience for the youngest scouts. But Alex and I weren’t the youngest, nor were we the oldest. We had enough experience to know what we were doing, but we were not old enough to be in charge of anything major. Which was great for us. It meant a more or less carefree weekend of minimal supervision out in the wilderness where we could get into all sorts of the mischief that young boys get into. It turns out that my experiences wouldn’t be remembered quite as fondly as my friends.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Jason. I’m what you would call the shy, quiet kid at school, and that was the case even in scouts. I was smaller and lighter than most of the kids my age which contributed to my general insecurity. I had black hair, light skin and blue eyes. I stood out against my friend Alex who was larger, several inches taller than me and built for football. He loved football. I never saw the appeal, but we were best buds, so we could often be seen throwing a football around in between rounds of me stomping him in whatever the video game of the month was. He was different than me in many ways, his curly light brown hair, light brown eyes, and strong build made me look even smaller than normal. But he was always by my side. We had each other’s backs, and no one messed with me because of that.

The car ride was long, and we picked up several other boys on the way. We quickly got bored and most slept due to the early wakeup. Once we got to the camp site though, the mood quickly changed. Excitement spread through the car and we began talking about all of the things we would get to do over the weekend. We hopped out of the car into a bright sunny day and an endless expanse of trees and wilderness around us. Being good scouts (well, at least in our parent’s eyes) we began setting up tents and the camp.

Alex and I quickly found two other friends of ours, J.D. and Matt. They had been waiting for us because we were planning on piling the four of us into one large 8 man tent.

“Sup guys,” Alex said as we got close.

“Finally!” exclaimed J.D. “We’ve been waiting to set up so we can go exploring. Matt said he knows a lake around here that we can hike to and get away from these other losers.”

I smiled as we got to work setting the tent up. J.D. was adamant about setting up our tent as far away from other people as possible, which I thought was odd, but I went along with it. I was just glad to be back with the group. While I hadn’t been friends with J.D. or Matt long, they were both longtime friends of Alex and they had welcomed me into the group unlike most of the kids at school or in scouts.

“How far is the lake?” I asked.

“Only about a mile and a half. Not far, but far enough that no one else will want to go out with us,” said Matt. I liked Matt. He was taller than me and had blonde surfer hair, but was slim like me. He shared a lot of my personality traits and we got along great. J.D. on the other hand was very different from the rest of us. He grew up in a rougher household that didn’t have as much money. Our Boy Scout troop sponsored him a lot so that he could go on trips with us. He was about the same height as Matt, but his brown hair was scraggy, and his white skin was darker than the rest of ours. He was nice – as long as you were his friend.

“We should get going,” said J.D. “If we take too long, we’ll get roped into teaching the younger scouts.” We all agreed, so we grabbed a few things we thought we’d need, told one of the adult leaders we’d be going on a hike to the lake and set out.

The day was great. We laughed while hiking and went for a long swim in the lake despite it being freezing. As we lay warming in the sun afterwards, I caught J.D. and Alex looking over at Matt and me sitting away from us. They were whispering about something as they looked over at us, but I thought nothing of it.