No Inventory

The woman at the camp store asked for my Golden Buckeye card, and then she didn’t believe I had one.

She looked at the card. She looked at me. She said I didn’t look old enough to have it, which I get more often than you’d think. In Ohio the card goes to anyone sixty or older, or to residents between eighteen and fifty-nine with a disability. I am fifty-seven and a half. With a heart transplant, I came in under the second one.

She wasn’t wrong about the face. The face is the part that shows.

I was checking in a day late, because there’d been nobody in the booth when I rolled through the evening before, and so my first real conversation at East Fork was with a stranger holding my card.

I spent most of my childhood summers in campgrounds. My father was our cubmaster. He’d have been in his thirties then, loading the car with sleeping bags and a cooler and whatever else was going that weekend, and it is a good memory. Cub Scouts, then Boy Scouts, family trips, then trips with friends once we were old enough to be trusted with a weekend. Not just the local parks, either. We went. The Great Smoky Mountains were the high-water mark.

Then I stopped.

It wasn’t a decision. I was in my late teens and there was always something else that needed doing that month; then there was a marriage, and then there were kids, and by the time my own were old enough for it, we stayed in hotels. That is simply what we did. It was easier. It was what worked.

So that part of me was set aside, and then it got set aside again, and eventually it was like it had never been there at all. I didn’t grieve it. I didn’t notice it. You can put something down so gradually that you never register having let go.

This summer I started camping again.

I want to be honest about what concerned me going in, because it wasn’t the heat and it wasn’t the bugs. It was the possibility that nearly forty years of not doing a thing had been my own preference the whole time, and that I’d built a story about it that wasn’t true. That I’d get out here and find I’d become a man who doesn’t much care for any of this. You can lose the taste for something and never be told.

So I came out not knowing. That’s a strange way to arrive somewhere.

That first evening, the campers around me started their fires as the light faded, the way people do, and the smell came across the sites. Woodsmoke. That was all it took. I was nine years old and holding a stick I’d spent twenty minutes whittling to a point because the point mattered, because a bad point meant a marshmallow in the dirt. Turning it slow. Going for the even gold all the way around and not the easy way, which is to let it catch and blow it out and pretend you meant to. On the scout trips there was sometimes a dutch oven sitting in the coals with a cobbler in it, a thing I have never once made as an adult and could probably still smell in a lineup.

I went to bed around eleven.

I slept straight through to four-thirty, at which point I had to get up, a man of a certain age being what he is. Took the morning meds early. And then I was standing there in the dark with nothing to do and nowhere to be.

I could have started the day. Made coffee, opened the laptop, gotten out ahead of something; there is always something. I went back to bed instead. I did not go back to sleep, and I wasn’t trying to.

The day had run into the high eighties. By evening it was down into the low seventies, and overnight it came the rest of the way into the low sixties, which is the best sleeping weather there is. The crickets did not let up once. Every so often the wind moved through the trees, and East Fork has trees. Real ones, big ones, over the sites and between them, which is not a given and which I no longer take for granted. Somewhere out there the last of the fires were going out and I could still smell them.

No traffic. No headlights sweeping a ceiling. Nothing overhead. Nobody up at two in the morning walking the hall, making the floorboards do what floorboards do.

After the camp store, I walked. A mile and a half, out and back, on the main park road. It was quiet enough that the occasional vehicle was an event: a pickup, a car, somebody towing a boat down toward the lake with the whole day ahead of them. Birds, and not many. For a park this size I saw almost nothing.

Except for the thing in the thicket.

It came alongside me somewhere in the first quarter mile and it stayed with me for most of the way out. Down in the brush past the shoulder, moving when I moved. I never saw it. Not a glimpse. Whatever it was, it was bigger than a squirrel and it was not making any attempt whatsoever to be discreet. It crashed along in there like it had somewhere to be and no particular concern about who knew.

I am reasonably confident it was a chupacabra.

What came back this week is not the boy with the stick. That kid didn’t take a handful of pills at four-thirty in the morning. He didn’t have a card in his wallet that says what mine says, and he could not have told you what any of it meant.

What came back is smaller than a self and more useful: the capacity to want this. I don’t know where it had been.

Which leaves me with the thing I actually think about now, sitting here with the trees. I have no idea what else I set aside over nearly forty years. There’s no inventory. I didn’t miss any of this either, right up until I did.