(two years ago) So there I was. I should have known it would end badly as everyone of my friends had decided not to join me. Almost like I had asked them to come over and help me with yard work. Just then the rains came and dropped the temperature to make it feel at least 5 degrees cooler than hell. And we made it through the night…
(present day) I have the itch again today and just booked my campsite for a trip with my boys for a weekend to the mountains. Well, as close to the mountains as 6.5 hours of driving can get you which is Pine Mountain in Georgia. I’m bringing our golden retriever Bodhi for his first trip of primitive camping and the weather looks to be spectacular. 60s in the day and 50s at night. It will be a Blind Melon weekend, which means No Rain, so the conditions are optimal. I’ll bring fire, books, game boys (or whatever they are called now) and my speaker so the boys and I can listen to Gun Smoke at night when we are not reading from the joke book. This camping trip should be fantastic! And it reminds me of the worst camping weekend I ever did with my boys. No surprise it happened in Florida where all horrible things happen. But it definitely could have been avoided if I’d have listened to the warning from my friends…
(two years ago) I had texted Brent, Matt, Sean and Geoff to see if they wanted to go camping. They all said yes until I told them when and where. “Silver Glen Springs mid-August”. “Psh! I’m not going camping in August in Florida. You’re crazy”. I would later reflect on how right he was and once when someone asked me to play soccer in August I told them, “Dude it’s August in Florida. I don’t go outside. I wouldn’t leave my house if it was on fire”.
We showed up and set camp and we weren’t the only ones. Granted the other people were pretty toasted, and I mean on the inside, but there’s power in numbers and it didn’t seem like the worst idea when other people were there too. We headed to the spring to cool down and it was a relief. The plan was to stay one night. My father opted out not because of the heat but because it was hurricane season and he wears a helmet around the house the moment it starts to sprinkle (hurricane or not) just to be safe. After the springs we went back to the tent and got our shower on before making a fire and settling in. After the showed is when it started to hit me.
We were walking back to the campsite and by the time we got there we were dry. Then 5 minutes later we were wet again. The heat had not subsided. I reached for my bottle of water…I had only brought 3. I don’t know why but in my planning I just didn’t account for more. My kids were dripping sweat. I made a fire and sitting by it was relief compared to our surroundings. I had draped a tarp over the vehicle and over the picnic table to give us cover incase of rain. We tried to sleep but it was too darn hot. So I had a genius plan. I dropped the seats in the Ford Edge, turned on the A/C which lulled us to sleep. Sometime later I woke up from a dead sleep shooting off the pillow as if I had just remembered my science fair project was due today. Coincidentally, it was science that woke me up. A dark thought had hit me. I had covered the edge, not completely but a good amount with a tarp, isn’t that how people end themselves in the garage? Carbon Monoxide poisoning? For the scariest of moments I poked my kids to see if they were okay. In my sleep deprived state I was in full on panic mode thinking of how I was going to explain to my wife my genius idea that had sadly ruined our lives. But they rose without much prodding. After I breathed a sigh of poisonous relief, I moved them to the tent. While we slept a miracle had happened. The rains that had poured had dropped the temperature to a manageable one hundred and twelve degrees and we actually had a decent nights sleep in the tent. Plus the high of adverting a modern day Greek tragedy had left me with a smile.
We left the next day after a cooling dip in the spring water. As I looked in the rearview mirror with the spring fading away I thanked God for global warming. I relished he idea that someday the state of Florida would be sitting at the bottom of the ocean with nothing to show for itself but a page in a history book. And I laughed because nobody reads history books anyway in the year 4815.