Nobody forgets their first time. Camping, I mean. I’ve certainly done my share over the years. I’ve frozen my tail off in Montana, been eaten alive by mosquitos in Maine, and surrounded by hungry bears in Idaho. However, I still remember the first time I came up with the ridiculous idea that the hard ground was a suitable substitute for a mattress and box spring.
In the late 1950’s there was a spot down in the woods that everybody called the Birdscratch. Why the place even had a name is a mystery, in that it consisted entirely of a sloping patch of gravel in the middle of the woods where a small brook emptied into the river. The origin of the name is also unknown, other than the fact that birds occasionally could be heard scratching there. Of course, they could also be heard scratching on hundreds of acres of adjoining woods and fields, but no matter. It was the Birdscratch and that was that.
Four of us decided one Friday night that the Birdscratch would be a great spot to camp out and do a little eel fishing.
That was before I’d acquired a genuine sleeping bag, my bedroll consisting of a couple of military surplus blankets that I’d found in the garage. In fact, only one of our foursome owned an actual sleeping bag, which he and a similarly diminutive member of the expedition decided to share.
The night’s eeling proved to be productive. To keep the eels alive and fresh, we put them in a wire basket and set it in the brook. The plan was to retrieve our catch in the morning and skin them in the daylight. I mean, cleaning eels is disagreeable enough without having to do it in the dark, and who’d want to go to sleep with slime-covered hands anyway?
When we finally bedded down, sleep didn’t come easily. There was a full moon that night, and being enthusiastic horror movie fans, we were more than aware that the moon was likely to bring out an assortment of mummies, werewolves, and ghouls. Indeed, every snapping twig and rustling leaf served as a warning that the campsite was about to be overrun by hordes of slavering fiends of every description.
But, fatigue always overcomes anxiety in the long run, and eventually, we drifted off to sleep.
I was the first to awaken, and I was pleased to start the day with a laugh.
It seems that the slope of the leaf-covered gravel and the slick nylon shell of my friends’ sleeping bag had joined forces long enough to allow the lower section of the bag and its contents to slide into the brook.
Apparently, those guys were used to sleeping with wet feet, because they didn’t stir until the howls of laughter woke them up.
The mood turned somber, however, when we discovered that our entire catch of eels had managed to slither out of the basket, into the brook and back where they came from. Not that anybody was actually looking forward to cleaning a bushel of eels, but it was still a blow.
To make up for our poor showing on the eel front, we decided to stop on the way home to fish under the dam, where trout were known to hang out, along with a sizable school of suckers.
One of our number was in the middle of a spell of bad luck, and true to form, he hooked a large sucker, which snapped his six-pound test monofilament line. Disgusted, he dropped his rod, made a beeline for the village store, and came back with a spool of 27-pound saltwater line, which was the heaviest they had in stock.
“That’s the last time a sucker’s gonna break my line,” he muttered as he spooled his new line and tossed a weighted nightcrawler into the swift current.
Turns out he was right. When he hooked another sucker, this one a giant of seven or eight pounds, the line held fast. That was the good news. The bad news was that the combination of a heavy fish, a heavy line, a heavy current, and a heavy hand snapped his overtaxed rod clean in half.
That happened in April. We stopped laughing in late August. I’m sure the merriment would have gone on a great deal longer if the thought of the approaching school year hadn’t sucked all the joy out of life. Nasty stuff, schoolwork.
