You can learn valuable lessons camping. Maybe I hadn’t been camping in 20 years. But hey, I figured I knew all about Nature. I grew up in the country. I was a Boy Scout. What could have changed? All I wanted was to get out of town for a couple of days, float on the lake and commune with Nature. But like the man says, there are two ways of being frustrated in this world: 1. Not getting what you want and 2. Getting what you want. And who would have thought they would have let raccoons into a park?
Some might say my friend Steve and I should have known something was up when we found we were the only campers in the entire park. “Great,” we thought, “now we have our pick of the campsites.” The one we chose was a charming little place not far off the road, nestled in a nook of overhanging oak trees. From the look of the campfire, other campers had been there recently. Some of their stuff was still there in a trail leading to the roads. Evidently, they had left in a hurry. Sure, there was poison ivy everywhere and the mosquitos were a little bad. What did we care about such minor inconveniences? We are men. We laugh in the face of danger and pain. And Steve brought along a can of mosquito repellent so large that when you pushed the button, the recoil almost knocked him down.
It was getting toward dusk by the time we finished setting up camp. Shadows from the trees crept towards us, the branches like fingers reaching close and we could hear sounds from little animals sitting deep in the woods. This is how humans were meant to live, I thought — camping out under the stars with a slab of meat on an open fire. But oddly, there were no stray pieces of wood in the woods. This is a park, Steve reminded me. You have to buy wood from the park ranger. Having to buy wood in the middle of a forest didn’t sound very primal to me, but we had to find the ranger to register anyway. Not yet having a fire, we were eating a couple of apples when a young raccoon suddenly appeared a few yards away. He was so cute and curious. We threw him our apple cores and he gobbled them up. How were we to know he was the Trojan Raccoon?
When we finally found the ranger, he seemed glad to see us – way too glad. Sure, we can sell you wood, but it’s not $5 a bundle, that’s the old sign. It’s really $7 a bundle, he said, as if making it up as he went along. He then made us pay for two campsites because we had two tents. I got the feeling the mosquitoes weren’t the only predators in the park.
When we got back to camp, we found a gang of masked raccoons ransacking our campsite. Anything remotely edible was gone, including an entire stick of butter. One of them had even unscrewed a Mason jar full of herbal tea. These raccoons were desperate criminals. As we chased them off, I swear I saw one of them smirk.
After darkness fell, the raccoons made their move. They knocked over trash cans, climbed on our picnic table. All night long, mosquitos buzzed and coyotes hauled. By morning, we had no food and no sleep, we were eaten alive by mosquitos and fleeced by the park ranger. Situations like these make a man reach deep into his survival instincts. “it’s time,” I said to Seve.
“Yes,” he said. “it’s time to leave this Gid forsaken place and find a Burger King.”
Editor’s note — Dan is on vacation this week and didn’t have a back up column before he left. This is a tale from a vacation he took a decade ago, published in the July 5, 2012 Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun.