Survival Skills

David made it out of the Cahutta Wilderness intact. At one point, he and his three hiking companions inadvertently punctured an underground bees’ nest and were attacked by the swarm. They wisely ran! Since he tends to be allergic, I admonished David about how dangerous the situation could have become. They had no Benedryl and all received multiple stings. Yet, his main focus seemed to be to abstain from killing one of his best friends since grammar school. “I swear if he called us ‘gents’ one more time, I might have beheaded him,” he told me—not big on tolerance this one. Then there was the fact that the same friend snores like, as he put it, “a moose on a respirator.” It’s true; I’ve heard him, but I love him like my own, nevertheless.

David got severe blisters, not from his hiking boots, but from his water shoes while trekking through the falls. Believe me, those things can do some major damage. After hiking across Canada and the Western U. S. for about three months in my hippy-dippy years, I quickly decided I was done with the camping thing. It was over for me for a variety of reasons. My dad, who survived four years of WWII in the deserts, always said he would never set foot in a campsite again. Undergoing pitifully less rigorous standards, I quickly understood his position after only a paltry few months of doing it on my own. At one point, having not seen myself in a mirror for several weeks, I panicked when I saw the strange markings on my neck reflected in a crude campground shower mirror. I decided that I had skin cancer, dramatic youth that I was, until I ran my finger across my skin and discovered that it was dirt and I was simply filthier than I had ever been in my life.

So I asked my son, after his three days of hiking during the hottest, most ill-timed season of the year for such a quest. “So what did you think of the experience overall?”

“Well,” he said, in his deep, thoughtful voice. “As I lay there in the tent, listening to the night sounds, and thinking about all of the things we had seen and done, I said to myself, ‘To hell with this!’”

That’s my baby.