It might be a little bit early to go camping.

But it’s never too early to contemplate it.

Everyone should go camping at least twice, and, if after that, you become a fan, go as many times as you wish.

I am not such a huge camping addict; I used to enjoy it, but by now I much prefer a soft bed and a full night’s sleep.

I do have some powerful memories though, of times spent out in the wild, where everything degenerated into hysterical laughter, good times, and a few stomach aches.  The last not necessarily from laughing.

For starters, take plenty of starter fluid.

Especially if you plan on doing anything on a grill in Colorado.

A few of us guys were checking the slopes out.  We had purchased T-Bone steaks down in the foothills, and had the awesome idea to run up to, say, 10,000 feet and grill them while surveying life down below.

Unfortunately, our charcoal was resistant to producing heat.  We thought maybe it had gotten wet, but as a few years have passed by and experience has become more of my friend, I venture it was the elevation that gave us the stress.

But not to worry.  We had plenty of lighter fluid along, and one of the guys kept a steady stream of it feeding the feeble flames. 

We had flame kissed, lighter kissed, and finally, river kissed steaks that night. 

Because in the process of turning one, it flipped off to the ground; not a problem, said the guy with the lighter fluid.  He let up a bit on flame throwing, grabbed the lukewarm steak and marched off to the nearby river to swish it a few times through that frigid water and tossed it back on the grill, whereupon he reheated it with lighter fluid fumes.

*****

We live in an area where the nearest body of water is an hour’s drive.  We call them lakes, but upon doing a little traveling, I have since shied away from that term and now refer to them as mud puddles.

Most of them are manmade, and the fish laugh at us when we cast in our juicy fat worms for them.  They are so overfed because the ratio of people to fish is probably 9:1, and any attempt to catch one is much like trying to serve me cooked carrots after I have just finished a full course meal.  “I’ll pass,” I say, and so do they.

One sunny afternoon, when I was about 16, three of us guys rounded up the general necessities to go camping.  Ham steak, potatoes, water, eggs, bacon, and candy bars rounded out the meal side of things.

Borrowed canoe, tent, sleeping bags, mud boots, fishing poles, paddles, and firewood rounded out the rest of it.

The trusty ’74 Ford we often used as a conveyance launched us on our way with its 4-barrel Holley carb, headers, and short glasspacks. 

All went well for a while, until the lid on the Styrofoam icebox we had our food in set sail and left.  We skidded to a halt and retrieved it, but it soon left again.  We solved the problem by partially crushing the whole affair when we covered it with firewood to prevent it’s leaving again.

Lakeside and we soon had the tent up.  We cruised up and down the lake (about a mile in distance one way) several times and one guy did his best to snare a fish or two, before retiring for the evening.

A good-sized fire was built, and the ham steaks turned out perfect, even if the potatoes didn’t.

We sat around the fire and started swapping stories; our clothes were rather sodden from the wild canoeing, so we got started drying them out.

My socks were especially wet, and I was having a very difficult time of it with them.  I kept burning my hands when I tried to dry them over the fire.

Someone suggested I get a stick and hold them over the fire.

“But they’ll burn,” I said.

“No,” they said, “Not as long as they are wet, you can actually hold them right in the fire and they won’t burn.”

I took them at their word, and soon my socks were toasty warm and dry.

We were getting ready to turn in, and I thought I’d just pull those warm dry socks on, as the night was getting a bit chilly.

I pulled the first one on, but it didn’t stop when I got to the toes of it.  I was so intrigued, I pulled it easily up to my thighs. 

I had just discovered the true tube sock.

The other one was in the same shape.

Where the toe area had been was an open, black edged hole the width of the sock.

I spent the rest of my time there with the leading edges of them tucked under my toes and said toes curled tightly upon them to hold them in place.

The next morning, we found a creek that meandered back from the lake and decided to canoe it.  In places it was 2-3 inches deep and the poor guy who brought his muck boots was put to work dredging us along. 

We had no sooner cleared that area, than we hit good water and started paddling.  But something went wrong about then, and the canoe was divested of its human cargo in a most unseemly manner. 

I hit the water feet first, but my friend Gregg hit it flat.  He fully submerged, and when he surfaced, he bug-eyedly declared, “This water is deep!” and started stroking madly for shore.  I, on the other hand, stood nimbly in four feet of water, but I squatted down to chin level and thrashed a bit just to make him believe it was deep.

We slogged back to camp and stripped down to the bare essentials, or maybe even a bit less than.  We laid our clothes out on the truck hood and propped the legs open with twigs so the wind could blow through, and they could dry quicker. 

Two of us did.  The guy with the muck boots opted out of this and went for a hike to dry out.

He missed out.

Because the two of us, now liberated from the bulk of our clothes, started in on the Sun dance.  It was really going well, and we had almost lost ourselves in the beat and tempo of it all, when we noticed a school bus coming down the road towards our campsite. 

Self-preservation kicked in and we kited in level towards the tent.  We omphed in on our bellies and, looking out saw a new crisis had developed. 

The bus had stopped opposite our tent, and we saw, to our horror, it was filled with the female detail of a near junior high school. 

We hurriedly unstrapped the window covers and tied them in place.  With a final zip of the tent door, we were safe . . . until we realized that if they decided to stay, we were trapped, unless we decided to make streak for it.

Our friend, with his muck boots still on, viewed all events from afar and chuckled with glee.

The bus driver must have sensed our dilemma and in common decency to humanity pulled his crowing, screaming, pointing, giggling females away, much to our relief.

*****

It had rained between us and home during the night, but we weren’t aware of it as we sped homeward over a little traveled cowpath of a road.

Until we crested a hill, doing a sweet 70, and saw at it base a large pool of water.  We couldn’t go left or right, so with brakes locked we skidded across it. 

Since the truck we were traveling in didn’t have A/C, we had all the windows down and the wing windows open. 

Torrents of water gushed in and filled my friend Gregg’s lap right up. 

We like to wet ourselves laughing at him, especially when he realized, just then, that he had brought another change of clothes along and had completely forgotten about them the whole time. 

We didn’t let him change though.