as i sit here on my deck on a beautiful, late August, Sunday morning in rural southwest Michigan reading an article about surviving a bear attack at Signal Mountain in Grand Teton National Park in May 2024,

i am reminded that

one of my very favorite things as a kid was to visit my great grandmother and to sit in her rocking and folding lawn chair, all by myself on the tiny porch — of her modest, peach-colored stucco bungalow at 2229 West Oakdale Avenue in Chicago — because i didn’t have a porch, only a stoop at CHA’s Julia C. Lathrop Homes where i lived as a child (privacy, peace and quiet were rare there) — and comb through her Reader’s Digest magazine collection for stories of wilderness experiences and encounters with wildlife — especially the ones with predators: sometimes, not everyone survived in those excerpted stories /

but very soon, that intense desire to experience the outdoors which all those stories inspired in me was entirely extinguished when i went *with zero experience* on a three day/two night camping-canoe trip along the Fox River for my 8th grade class graduation trip;

me and another 13 year-old girl classmate were paired together in a canoe in a group of 5-6 canoes / i went wholly [un]prepared with a borrowed, indoor Barbie slumber party sleeping bag from one friend — and my best friend Jill’s dad’s old army reservist mess kit — everything stuffed into a single, tripled black garbage bag to keep my “gear” dry in case we tipped and went into the river /

my beloved Jill couldn’t go because that winter she was suddenly stricken with Raynaud’s Syndrome and was extremely ill from another, yet-undiagnosed, life-long, autoimmune disease /

my classmates and i slept outside on the bare ground without a tent and woke up covered in dew, very wet and very cold both mornings (while the adults occupied two very dry and warm pup tents) //

without any forewarning that i recall, we had to pee (and presumably, some of us also pooped) into holes dug in the ground within earshot of our 13 & 14 year old [boy] classmates and male teachers // the only other girl on the trip got her period on the first night and had to use a sock as a menstrual pad because none of the male teachers thought to come prepared in event for that very routine female bodily function — and apparently, none of our functionally useless 1970s mothers suggested this to us — or to them — or had planned for it, either //

around the campfire the first night, which was a Friday, our teachers told us in a very serious manner that the camp in the film Friday the 13th — “Camp Crystal Lake” — was actually based on a true story at nearby youth camp— we had, in fact, passed a road sign for “Crystal Lake” (a Chicago suburb) en route; while, i had not yet seen the film — the others filled me in in great detail — it no longer felt very good or safe to be on the trip with them — even after the teachers’ retractions and reassurance that they were “just teasing”

i didn’t even know what “portaging” was until we were actually in the act of portaging.

Continue reading “a reader’s digest *almost-worthy* story” →