A Fine & Pleasant Misery

by Patrick McManus

  You'd never catch a fourteen-year-old wearing such a monstrosity as a new red felt hat. No sir. The first thing a fourteen-year-old does with a new hunting or fishing hat is to redesign it. Immediately upon returning home from the store, he turns the hat over to his dog. After the dog has exhausted his imagination and ingenuity on the hat, it is retrieved by the kid and pounded full of holes with a large spike and hammer. The edges of the holes are burnt with a match. This simulates the effect of the kid's having been fired upon at close range with an elephant gun. (Nobody knows why this is important to a kid, but it is.) A band of squirrel, skunk, or muskrat hide, more or less tanned by the kid himself, is fastened to the crown. Next the brim is folded up on three sides and pinned with the thigh bones of a fried chicken or other equally attractive fasteners. And finally, several tail feathers from a pheasant are artfully arranged about the crown. The hat now resembles the year-old remains of a high-speed collision between a large bird and a small mammal.

  Not all youngsters, by the way, are born with this talent for low fashion. Some have to learn it. I recall an incident back in my junior high school days when my friends Retch and Peewee and I gave Hair Forsyth his first lesson in low fashion. (The nickname "Hair," by the way, derived from an observation by Retch, one of the more scholarly of my companions, that rich kids who stand to inherit the family fortune are known as "hairs.") Hair had taken to hanging out with us at school, and when it came time for the annual early spring camping trip, we thought we should invite him along. Several bare patches of earth had been reported to us, and we decided this was sufficient evidence that winter was over and camping weather had begun.

  There was still a bit of a chill in the air, not to mention several inches of snow on the ground, and we thought it likely that Hair would find these sufficient reasons for refusing our invitation. But he said he thought it was a great idea.

  Since I lived out in the country at the edge of the Wilderness (sometimes referred to locally as Fergussen's woodlot and north pasture), our farm was selected as the jumping-off place for the weekend expedition. When Hair climbed out of his father's car that day, we regular low-fashion campers nearly burst trying to keep from laughing. Hair was dressed up just like a dude. He had on these insulated leather boots, special safari pants, a heavy wool shirt, a down jacket, a hat with fur earflaps, and so on. Naturally, we didn't want to hurt his feelings by pointing out how ridiculous he looked.

  Nevertheless, we thought we should instruct him on the proper attire for a spring camping trip.

  "I hate to say this," Retch told Hair, "but you're absolutely gonna roast in all those clothes."

  "Yeah," Peewee put in, "and those boots are gonna be awfully heavy for walking. Too bad you don't have tennis shoes like we're wearing."

  "Right," I said. "Next time, Hair, why don't you see if you can get some tennis shoes like these, with holes in the canvas so the sweat can drain out."

  Hair thanked us for straightening him out and said the next time he would have a better idea how to put together a suitable outfit.

  After getting Hair squared away, we loaded up and headed out into the Wilderness. The snow out in the Wilderness was much deeper than any of us had expected. Bit by bit the depth of the snow increased until it was about halfway up to our knees. From time to time we would have to stop and chip the compacted snow off our tennis shoes and try to unplug the drain holes. These stops were occasion for much clowning around by us regulars for the benefit of Hair. Retch and Peewee would pound their feet against trees and make moaning and howling sounds, while I would tear off my tennis shoes and socks and blow on my blue feet in a comical manner. Hair laughed until tears streamed down his cheeks.

  Indeed, we all had tears streaming down our cheeks.

  The wind came up shortly after it started to snow, and pretty soon we were slogging along through what we would have called a blizzard except that this was spring and the first of the good camping weather. Retch came up with the idea that maybe we should try to make it to an old abandoned trapper's cabin a couple of miles away and spend the night there.

  "Otherwise, we might freeze to death," Retch joked.

  "Heh," Peewee and I laughed.

  "Freeze!" Hair cried. "You must be joking. I'm burnin- up inside of this darn coat. Dang, I hate to ask but, Peewee, could I get you to trade me your shirt for this coat? What do you call that kind of shirt anyway?"

  "A t-t-t-t-t-t-tee shirt," Peewee said, thrusting it into Hair's hand.

  "Well, I guess I'll just have to leave this wool shirt of mine behind unless I can get one of you fellas to wear it for me," Hair said, taking it off and putting on Peewee's T-shirt over his thick, creamy wool underwear.

  I said, "Dang I'll wear it rather than have you leave it behind."

  "That underwear's not too hot for you, is it?" asked Retch.

  Hair said it wasn't, but that he sure wouldn't mind slipping his boiling feet into a nice cool pair of tennis shoes. So Retch says he has about the coolest pair of tennis shoes a person is likely to find, and he swaps shoes with Hair.

  By dark we had made it to the trapper's cabin and had a roaring fire going in the barrel stove and were sitting around roasting ourselves a few marshmallows and listening to the wind howl outside. From then on, Hair was one of the regulars and, as far as I know, nobody ever again mentioned the ridiculous outfit he wore on that first camping trip with us. It was obvious to everyone that he had learned his lesson, and there was no point in hurting his feelings any more than was necessary.

  The ultimate in low fashion, at least that I ever saw, was created spontaneously on one of our camping trips by Harold Monster, a tall, gangling, wild-haired youth whose chief claim to fame was an uncanny ability for taking a bad situation and making it worse. Sometimes you would be absolutely certain that a situation couldn't be any worse and then Monster would show up and make it nine times as bad as before.

  Back in those days, our camping clothes were referred to by our mothers as "your OLD clothes." A mother would stick her head out the back door and yell at her kids, "Wear your OLD clothes, you hear!" Since all our clothes were old--most of them had been in our families longer than we had--OLD designated the oldest grade. OLD clothes were never discarded, they just faded away. Sometimes they faded away while you were wearing them, and that is what led to Harold Munster's creation of the ultimate in low fashion.

  Retch, Peewee, Monster, and I had been backpacking for nearly a week and now were attempting to extricate ourselves from the mountains as expeditiously as possible. In part, this consisted in wild, free-for-all gallops down steep trails, with packs, axes, and iron skillets flailing about on all sides. It was during one of these maniacal charges downhill that Monster, hurtling a windfall, caught his OLD pants on a limb. The pants exploded in midair.

  Monster landed half naked in a shower of tiny bits of cloth, old patches, buttons, belt loops, and a broken zipper still held shut with a safety pin.

  Well, we were all startled, a little embarrassed, and, of course, worried, because here was a bad situation. Nobody knew in what manner Monster would strive to make it worse and which of us might be swept into the vortex of whatever catastrophe he came up with.

  The mosquitoes in that area were about the size of piranhas and twice as voracious. As Heminway might have put it, Monster had been turned into a moveable feast. His expanse of bare skin drew the mosquitoes off the rest of us like a magnet, and, though appreciative of the respite, we became concerned that our unfortunate companion might be eaten alive or, even more likely, slap himself to death.

  A small spring issued from the edge of the trail at that point, creating a large muddy bog on the downhill side of the trail. Before we knew what was happening, Monster had leaped into this bog and began smearing his lower half with great globs of mud.

  "Hey," he yelled up at us. "This really feels great!"

  We stared down at him with a mounting sense of foreboding, knowing from past experience that this was the beginni
ng of something that would lead to dire consequences.

  Not satisfied with coating his lower half with mud, Monster peeled off his OLD shirt and coated his upper half as well. Then he took handfuls of goop and rubbed it in his hair and on his face, all the while oohing and ahhing with relief and saying, "This will take care of those blinkety-blank mosquitoes for a while."

  The rest of us divided Munster's load up among ourselves so that his mud coating would not be rubbed off by his pack. Thus unburdened, he took the lead and strolled along light of heart and mosquito-free, occasionally whistling a few bars or counting cadence for the rest of us. As we plodded along and the day grew hotter, we noticed that Munster's mud coating was beginning to bake into a hard, whitish shell, with webs of tiny cracks spreading out from his joints and seams.

  Grass, moss, sticks, and small stones protruded from the shell in a rather ghastly manner. Monster began complaining about what he described as a blinkety-blank unbearable itch, and occasionally would stop wild-eyed and claw furiously at his mud cast. His claw marks served only to make his overall appearance even more grisly.

  Our plan was to intersect a logging road and then try to catch a ride out of the mountains with some gyppo loggers who were working in the area. We en countered the loggers much sooner than expected. Three of them had hiked back in from the end of the road to eat their lunch by the edge of a small stream.

  They were now sprawled out resting, smoking, and digging the dirt out from among the calks on their boots. The trail we were on wound around the mountain about a hundred feet above them.

  Retch, Peewee, and I had fallen some distance behind Monster, partly because of fatigue and partly because we could no longer endure the sight of him. As we rounded a bend in the trail, we caught sight of the three unsuspecting loggers, languid pools of tobacco smoke hanging in the still air about them. Poised like a silent gargoyle on the lip of the trail directly above this peaceful scene, was Monster, staring down at the loggers.

  We tried to shout but our tongues were momentarily paralyzed from the sheer horror of the scene before us. And then Peewee found his voice.

  "MONSTER!" he shrieked.

  The startled loggers looked up. I could see the lips of one of them, puzzled, silently form the word "monster?"

  Then Monster bounded down the hill toward the loggers, waving his arms ecstatically and croaking out his relief at being saved from having to walk the last ten miles home.

  Walking the last ten miles home, we attempted to reconstruct the events of the ten seconds following Monster's lunge over the brink of the trail. It was agreed that we had all witnessed superb performances by three of the world's fastest gyppo loggers. Of particular interest was the fact that calked boots traveling at a high rate of speed throw up a fine spray of earth not unlike the plumes of water behind hydroplanes.

  Harold Monster and his family moved away from town shortly after the last of his outfit wore off and I haven't seen him since, nor have I seen anything to match his masterpiece of low-fashion design. But if the Old Wilderness Outfitter had a lick of sense left, he would leave no stone unturned in his search for him.

  Kid Camping

  Kids still do go camping by themselves, I don't deny that. They just don't go kid camping.

  A lot of people think that any camping kids do is kid camping just because kids are doing it. Well that's circular reasoning if I ever heard any. Nothing could be further from the truth. The kind of camping kids do nowadays is just plain adult camping--sans adults.

  The kids use the same camp gear and provisions as their parents: featherweight sleeping bags, aluminum cook kits, nylon tents, dehydrated and vacuum-frozen foods, and even little plastic tubes to put their peanut butter and jelly in. The only exception is the family car, and it is used to haul the kids to the point of departure. They just don't get to drive.

  Why it's enough to make an old-time kid camper roll over in his spaghetti-and-oatmeal omelet!

  Properly executed, kid camping was like no other kind of camping known to man. I say "properly executed" because there was a code that governed every move. Any kid camper worth his can of pork 'n' beans knew the code by heart.

  The code was not something that you learned, it was something you just knew--something you either had or you didn't have. And you never ever went against this thing that you knew. If you did, your camping was no longer kid camping but some other kind, and was divested of some peculiar aura of mystery and adventure.

  Kid camping was a thing fairly choked in mystery. Part of the mystery was how a ninety-eight-pound boy who contracted an acute case of exhaustion carrying the dinner scraps out to the garbage pail could lug a four-hundred-pound pack three miles up a mountain trail laced with logs the size of railroad tank cars, and not even be winded. There was also the mystery of how three or four boys could consume every last moldering morsel of a food supply roughly estimated at a quarter ton and return home half starved.

  One of the unspoken rules of the code (they were all unspoken) was that preparation for a camping trip should involve absolutely no planning.

  This, combined with an equal amount of organization, never failed to invest a trip with the proper mood--a deep and abiding sense of insecurity. There was a monumental apprehension that the food would give out an hour before the expedition arrived home and the whole party, fleeing back across the wasteland of the Crabtrees' stump pasture, would perish of starvation.

  The only way of combatting this dread of starvation was simply to carry enough food to feed Attila and his Huns adequately on an extended foray across Europe. It was assumed that each of the other guys would bring an equal amount.

  The code allowed for only one store-bought item, the indispensable pork 'n' beans, which was the basic ingredient for all meals and most of the bad jokes. Wieners and marshmallows could also be purchased if the expedition was to be particularly arduous. These were generally regarded as condiments bearing the taint of Girl Scoutism, since it was known that no true mountain man would have been caught dead rotating a marshmallow over his blazing buffalo chips. The prospect of severe hardship, however, usually provided for a relaxation of the rules and the inclusion of a little morale-booster (the roasted marshmallow is the kid camper's peach brandy). Severe hardship was almost always prospected.

  All other provisions had to be culled from the home pantry, cupboards, or refrigerator. This was known as "living off the land." The night before the expedition got underway, the young camper would enter the kitchen, gather his provisions, and depart, skillfully parrying the thrusts of his mother's broom handle with a leg of lamb. He would have tidied up the place to the point where it resembled a delicatessen looted by a Viking raiding party, and it is understandable that he would be surprised to discover that an irate troll had donned ol' Mom's clothes and was attempting to terminate his existence.

  Provisioning a kid camping trip was very educational for a youngster.

  For one thing, it taught him the rudiments of lying. Take a typical situation. The kid would randomly select six or seven eggs from a dozen, boil them for exactly 135 minutes, and replace them randomly in the carton.

  "Are you sure you'll be able to tell the boiled from the raw eggs?"

  his mother would ask.

  "Of course," the kid would answer. Now that would be a blatant lie.

  He wouldn't have the slightest notion how to tell the boiled from the unboiled eggs.

  Fortunately, this problem of the eggs always resolved itself. By the time the camper had hauled them over a mountain or two, he could safely assume that all eggs that had not oozed out of the pack and down his backside and legs were the cooked ones.

  Kid camping allowed for no such effeminate things as dehydrated or vacuum-frozen foods. It was proof of one's manhood that he carried his food with all the water still in it.

  After an hour or so of scrounging about (or "sacking," as some ill-tempered mothers called it) the kitchen, the young camper would have accumulated approximately the
following provisions: a loaf of bread, a leg of lamb, a can of condensed cream, nine slices of bacon, a head of lettuce, a dozen eggs, a pint of salad dressing (for the lettuce), a quart jar of cherries, a pint of strawberry jam, three pieces of fried chicken, half a box of corn flakes, five pounds of sugar, ten pounds of flour, seven mealy apples, spaghetti, oatmeal, thirty-seven grapes, a plate of fudge, a jar of peanut butter, thirteen potatoes, a bottle of root beer, and a quart of milk (for the corn flakes).

  Once assembled, all the provisions were carefully loaded into a packsack which acquired roughly the size, shape, and weight of an adolescent pachyderm.

  Then came the moment of truth. The young camper's jeering family would gather around to witness his attempt at raising the pack clear of the sagging floor, a feat that he accomplished with a prolonged grunt which could scarcely be heard by the neighbors three houses away. He would stand there--legs spraddled and beginning to cave, shoulders slowly collapsing into the shape of a folded taco shell--and drill the disbelievers with a disdainful look from his hard, squinty eyes. And it's damned hard to make your eyes squinty when they're bugged way out like that!