A Road Less Travelled

When I heard that the Prices were inviting the entire church to camp in their backyard for Memorial Day I thought they were crazy and that it sounded like fun. I then simply assumed that we wouldn’t be joining them. The last time the S. Ben-Ezra household camped together it went super bad and I assumed that we wouldn’t be trying again until the children were a lot older. But the children who understood what was going on thought it sounded like a lot of fun and really wanted to go. Plus, it would be a good setting to figure out how the younger two would handle camping; if something went terribly wrong there was a house right up the hill and home wasn’t that far away. So we jammed camping into our already fullish schedule and Sunday evening we headed out.

In the previous paragraph I stated that we were going to be camping in the Price’s backyard. Now, this statement is technically true, but I don’t think it gives the right idea of exactly where we were. The Prices live out in the country in what I believe are called the boonies. Their house is a charming cabiny looking house set on a large piece of land. Now, this being Illinois one would naturally assume said piece of land would be predominantly flat. Don’t worry, that’s nothing to be ashamed of; I would have assumed the same thing. There are large portions of the land that is flat. However, in order to get to the flat bits one must ascend or descend, depending on the starting position and the intended flat bit, one or more hills of epic proportions. Normally I would be snooty and insist that the not-flat bits are slopes because they don’t go up and down, but slope doesn’t quite capture the image. There was one hill in particular that became the bane of my existence. Sadly it was the main hill, the hill one had to descend to get to the camp site. Down wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad. Up… well, let’s just say that I quasi-seriously suggested taking a collection to build the Prices a ski lift and nobody seemed to think this was a bad idea. We were sleeping at the bottom of that hill and the bathrooms were all the way at the top.

So we get there and we cart all of our stuff down the hill with the help of David Price, his tractor and the trailer attached to it. It was at this point that Raquel, who’d come with us since the Lansberrys were too cunning for this camping scheme, fell off the trailer. Sadly, I wasn’t there to see it. I got down to the bottom with my load of stuff just in time for Justice to have a complete freak-out. I have no idea what his problem was. He just didn’t want to be there. He kept screaming for the house and just could not calm down. I ended up taking him up to the house while everyone else set our tents up. This is an important fact. Remember it.

Justice managed to calm down with the help of two Gala apples and we went down to where the fire was. There were two ways of getting to the fire from the house- the long way which went around a short, but steep hill or the short way which went straight down the hill. This hill didn’t have his brother’s length, but he made up for it in steepness. I can’t remember which way I went this time, but I did both while we were there. When it got dark I started turning my flashlight off and sliding down the hill on my bum in the dark so no one could see me.

We ate dinner around the fire which was the usual scrum for hotdogs and buns and sticks and a place around the fire. I loved it. After dinner were smores, of course, and flaming marshmallows which made me very nervous with all the children waving them around at eye level. Seth called at least one person a marshmallow heretic, but I missed the first part of that conversation so I’m not sure if she deserved it or not. After smores I discovered an interesting thing that apparently Seth and Crystal had known, but hadn’t told me. None of their children have any night vision. They are all functionally blind at night in a place without street lights. I was about to be troubled by this in the long term sense, but then the practicalities of five mostly blind children distracted me. They did pretty well, actually. I ended up walking Arianna, Isaac and Noah to the house so they could use the bathroom and get ready for bed. With one hand I held the flashlight, with the other I held Noah’s hand and then I had Arianna and Isaac on each side with one of their hands in my pocket. When I was walking them from the house down to the camp site I kept getting a bit of a profundity on the edge of my awareness. There was something about their dependence on me and how they made it harder on me and themselves when they wouldn’t trust me. I also had the wind up flashlight which hadn’t been wound properly in a while so it got dimmer and dimmer as we went down the hill. I didn’t want to stop and wind it because then I would have to let go of Noah’s hand. So we walked together in the quasi darkness and only missed one turn. Did I mention that there are turns in the path down the death hill? There are.

I delivered my charges and headed back up to where the party was. I ended up playing volleyball which was fun in the darkness. I hit the ball exactly four times; three of those times I was serving, the other time I hit it halfway down the short hill. After the game broke up due to people leaving I settled down on a flat bit half-way down the death hill where another fire was going and people were just sitting. It was the perfect crowd for fire sitting. Someone would say something, everyone would nod and then we would lapse back into silence. More people showed up with a guitar and some hymnals and we sat in silence some more. I got into a Finding Nemo quote fest with someone and then lapsed back into silence. And then it thundered. And then it lightninged and thundered again. And then a hole opened up in the sky and someone upended a bucket right over our heads.

There was a mad dash to the tents. I wrenched my knee in the dash which made Raquel laugh a lot what with all the romantic stories we know of that involve a twisted ankle in the rain, but the only other people in the immediate area were Seth and Crystal so I hobbled on to our tent. Now, here is where you need to remember that I wasn’t around when the tents were set up and neither was Raquel. There had been talk of swapping tents with someone else because theirs was large and ours was small, but we didn’t know where their tent was so I headed to ours. But I didn’t know where ours was either. Seth pointed it out and we dashed to it and tried to dash inside. There were two impediments to the dashing-inside plan. One, we couldn’t find the front and two, the tent that Raquel and I were to be sharing was about the same size as a postage stamp and about as high as a Smurf. And apparently whoever had designed the door had planned on it being used in perfectly dry circumstances where one could get on one’s knees, contemplate life for a bit, hem and haw as to whether one actually wanted to enter said tent, find the zipper, and then leisurely crawl inside. This doesn’t work well with the mad dash mentality. We got soaked.

Inside the tent was nicely dry, but also rather sparse. My bag and Raquel’s bags were there and one of my pillows, but that was it. I had been expecting something in the line of a sleeping bag or quite possibly two, but there wasn’t much tent to look through and there were definitely no sleeping bags in any of it. So we crawled back out into the rain and sloshed to Seth and Crystal’s tent to inquire after some sleeping bags. The conversation went something like this-

“Hey!”

“Yes?”

“Do you have our sleeping bags in there?”

“No, um, wait, what do you mean?”

“Uh, I mean are they in there?”

“No.” There was something in Crystal’s voice here that gave me pause.

“Did you bring a sleeping bag for me?”

“Um, no? I thought you were taking care of your blankets.”

“Oh, I thought you were taking care of sleeping bags. Do you know where my other pillow is?”

“I think it got tossed into the kid’s tent.”

“Oh. Okay then. Goodnight!”

“Goodnight!”

They found us a spare blanket and we sloshed back to our tent.

I had a couple of bad moments around this point. Not grumpy bad. No, actually I was so amused I was having a hard time not laughing too loudly. I am still slightly flabbergasted as to how I lost my pillow because there were two pillows stuffed into one case and I would think that they’d get lost together. I had brought a sheet along for reasons I don’t recall so we spread the blanket under us and spread the sheet over us and settled in for a damp, chilly night.

A short bit later, around 12:30, Seth and Crystal came to our tent. The rain had mostly stopped so this conversation was more leisurely than our last. Seth said that the little boys weren’t settling and that they were bothering the older kids. Noah and Justice just didn’t want to do this camping thing. So Seth and Crystal were taking them home and would come back for us in the morning. This meant that we got a double sleeping bag that was only a little bit damp. This made what was left of the night much more comfortable. I dozed off and then woke up to more rain. And then I dozed some more….

I woke up a little before five in the morning. Now, I know that there are some people who get up at five or even four thirty and think that this is perfectly reasonable. I also know that there are some people who eat monkey brains for dinner. It takes all sorts. In my world, five in the morning is too early, way, way too early. I rolled over and dozed some more, but I didn’t get much more sleep. Thankfully, the children didn’t come find me until about five thirty. The rest of the morning is a tired blur. Actually, I will be honest and say that until just before Seth came and got us at about nine the rest of the morning was a tired, grumpy blur. I was too tired and still damp and I needed a shower and new clothes in a bad way. I hadn’t expected to be sleeping damp so I hadn’t brought any new clothes and it didn’t make any sense to take a shower only to put dirty clothes back on. I need a shower to wake up in the morning on a normal day and on this day, without it, I was just really grumpy. Janice Price had made coffee, a fact which has earned her my vote when she’s canonized, so I sat on the back deck, nursed a cup of coffee and tried not to grump at any one.

I sat there and looked out over the scenery. In the foreground is the death hill, but you can’t see it because of the trees. In the distance are the hill’s big brother, but they don’t come high enough to block the sky. It was beautiful and I’m realizing now that the view was so good because the house was built into the side of the death hill. My legs are sore from walking up the hill, but it made my morning better.

Thank you, Prices, for hosting this crazy, insane funness. I actually did have a lot of fun. Honest. If you do it again next year count me in, though a bit more warning about the rain would be nice. And Janice, thank you for the coffee.