Winter Follies

I sat with my friends, a mixed group of teenagers with more mobility than common sense, and tried to think of something memorable for our last Christmas break weekend.

“Let’s go camping!” Marsha exclaimed. “It’ll be fun.” We were experienced but warm weather campers. While the weather wasn’t arctic, it was still cold. We debated and, with parental permission, Marsha prevailed.

We reached the campsite in the dark, but undeterred, we pitched our tent and built a fire. Even though we weren’t tired, we decided to go to sleep around 10. The three girls chose one side of the tent and the three boys slept on the other. “Good night,” we chorused and crawled, fully dressed, into our sleeping bags.

Being fully dressed made no difference. We forgot to bring anything to put between us and the frozen ground and the cold seeped in through my bones. I dozed, tossed, turned and finally woke up. I heard someone mutter something and grunted a response.

“Are you awake?”

“Are you awake, too?”

“Yeah, what time is it.”

“I don’t know, maybe about 5.”

“Hey, hold it down.”

Awake by now, the entire tent speculated on the time.

“Give me the flashlight,” said Dana. He held up his wrist. “It’s 12:35.”

Everyone groaned in unison and tried to go back to sleep. After three hours of trying to sleep on an ice cube, I gave up. I went outside and joined the vigil by the rebuilt fire. The endless night finally passed, and we struck the tent early, everyone eager to return to civilization and warmth.

I looked at our campsite just before we left and noticed that we left something behind. In the frozen ground, I saw six parallel, muddy areas where our body heat had thawed the frozen dirt.

Bill Bartlett lives in Belton with his wife, Sandi, and two sons.