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Arthur Shuey
As mentioned earlier, the path that led to and around Queen's Lake was flanked on one side by meadow and on the other by hardwood forest. There were two discernible paths into the woods, and one of these ran uncomfortably close to an occupied farm house, probably the home of the property owner. The other ran approximately halfway between the King's Grant streets and the salt marshes, and it was this path that we used as a springboard to thorough explorations of the woods. Soon we found a well drained hillside. Shortly thereafter, we found a treehouse in which was carefully stored a fairly new chainsaw and a large box of nails. Clearly, some higher power intended us to build a log cabin on that hillside.
We built like brutes, like idiots, like stoned teenagers. We hauled huge trees up that slope from ridiculous distances. After the chainsaw disappeared, we not only did not comprehend that some other party, possibly one as malicious as we were, had found our project, but continued to cut down trees with small axes and hatchets. We exhausted and blistered ourselves and continued to haul huge trees up that hill, where others of our group labored mightily to notch them and put them in place on our slowly rising frame. We never figured out any practical way to put a doorway on the damn thing and decided that the best thing to do was dig a hole under it for access. Expanding on this concept, we decided that we could save ourselves a lot of chopping and hauling if we just dug out part of the height we needed for our cabin instead of stacking trees up to an acceptable ceiling level.
We had just started the digging when Stanley showed up. Stanley was the other party mentioned in the paragraph above. Stanley was just exactly what we did not need, a member of the goddam football team at a high school other than ours(for King's Grant was in another school district), the owner of a dirt bike that gave him easy access to every foot of the whole Queen's Lake property, a bully, a sneak, as much of a vandal as he could get away with being, and the very person who had stolen that chainsaw and those nails from a construction site and secreted them away in his treehouse. Guerrilla warfare ensued almost immediately.
Our cabin was torn down twice. Stanley "borrowed" my blowgun and three dozen steel-tipped darts, none of which I ever saw again. We hammered nails through a sheet of plywood, placed it in the middle of the main Queen's Lake path, covered it with a thin layer of dust and hoped Stanley and his buddies would come out for a dirt bike excursion. In a final show of strength, a mob of us went up on Stanley's front porch one night while his parents were having a party, unscrewed all of the porch lights, and broke them on the steps. However, in the long run there was no way we could win, for the simple reason that Stanley lived closer to our cabin than we did and could get there to tear it up easier and more often than we could be there to build and guard it. Therefore, those hacked, hauled and chopped trees died in vain, and we went back to the forest path from which we had first found that hillside. Following it for about a quarter mile, we came to a major road, but across that road was a well trod continuation of our path, with woods stretching considerable distances on both sides.
This was the Promised Land. By this time, we were seniors, better equipped with camping gear, with money for provisions and tools, and with more muscle, and we were thrilled with this new forest. One early fall day, allegedly searching these woods for a perfect camping place but actually just walking around in the woods smoking a lot of pot and pushing over dead trees, we had an unpleasant encounter with bees. Having to face the fact that dead trees were likely sites for beehives and should not be wantonly pushed over without good cause was another one of many minor, sad rites of passage that year.
Soon, however, we did come upon our second to last and in many ways our best campsite. When I say that it was in many ways our best campsite, I am extremely biased, for we made it a great campsite. It was not near potable water, but we stocked it well with plastic milk jugs full of water before using it. It did not feature trees close enough together to weave one of Ronny Gayle Midgette's bizarre shelters, but we cut down saplings and used the rest of Stanley's nails to attach them to some of the trees near our firepit, first as seats and then, as an extension of the idea, as monkey bars on which to climb when stoned and/or drunk.
This was where our camping technique achieved its classic, complete form, similar in many respects to a fifth century barbarian invasion yet increasingly sophisticated, at least for us. Canned spaghetti and corn dodger were things of the past for more and more of the Palms Gang. Now it was smoked oysters and bake-in-the box bread. By now, we all either owned tents or had established tentmates and negotiated deals for equitable distribution of haulage. Rain could be feared less now, for with our growing skills at construction site tarpaulin theft and Ronny Gayle's new motorcycle, we were able to haul a huge canvas out and tie it protectively over our firepit. On early morning preparatory trips to the campsite, we made mental note of the houses that were getting milk deliveries, for reasons that will be explained later. We took care of our few remaining needs on the final march from Midgette's house to the campsite in early October by stealing a couple of extra tents and several lawn chairs from convenient back yards.
That first afternoon featured an encounter with wild dogs. The pack ran baying toward us when our wits had long since fled in the other direction on the wings of E-Z Wider rolling papers, so instead of simply reaching for our ever-present arsenal of pellet guns, machetes, knives, hatchets, clubs, slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune and standing our ground, we scurried toward those damn monkey bars. Steve Arnold made it as far as the fourth rung before Andy Reid yanked him down by the seat of the pants and headed up like a malignant squirrel, only to be grabbed by the trousers himself by some other stoned jackass. It was like an old Three Stooges routine. As my inebriated brain slowly worked out the intricacies of simply going around the tree and climbing up the equally serviceable monkey bars on that side of it, I spied a can of Raid on the ground and decided to take it along into the branches for protection.
There we all finally sat like a flock of mildly hallucinating turkeys as wild dogs ransacked our provender and dignity. Left to their devices, as it seemed they would be for quite some time, they would have destroyed all of our foodstuffs and half of our footwear, but a brilliant idea came to me. I threw the can of Raid into our campfire. A huge blue ball of flame ensued, followed by the greasy, toxic reek of burning petroleum-based poisons, melted nylon from the tents closest to the firepit and singed dog hair. Well, the newly stolen tents made good the losses caused by my idiotic bug spray bomb, a dry cold front kept away both the insects and the rain, and Andy killed not only enough wormy, inedible squirrels to garnish every shell loop on the crown of his floppy army surplus hat with a tail, but also a raccoon that we skinned, gutted and would have tried to eat except that the stick we were roasting it on burned through and fell in the fire.
Finally, Steve Arnold's plan to leave notes asking for extra orange juice, chocolate milk and cottage cheese on doorsteps at milk-delivery houses, then to steal only those extra items as subsidiary campsite nutritional sources before our victims awoke worked perfectly. We used that campsite twice, and I returned to it for several weeks' stay a couple of years later when I was between houses.