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 Yellowstone 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 we 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 the intense desire to experience the outdoors that those stories inspired in me was almost entirely extinguished when i went, *with zero experience* on a three day/two night camping-canoe trip along the Fox River for our 8th grade class graduation trip; me and another 13 year-old female classmate were paired together in a canoe in a group of 5-6 canoes / i went [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 water/ Jill couldn’t go herself because that winter she was suddenly stricken with Raynaud’s Syndrome and was quite sick from another, yet-undiagnosed autoimmune disease /

my classmates and i slept outside on the ground without a tent and woke covered dew and very cold both mornings (while the adults occupied two very dry and warm pup tents) // we peed (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 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 routine bodily function — and apparently, none of our mothers suggested this to us or to them — or 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” en route; while, i had not yet seen the film — but the others filled me in in great detail — and it no longer felt good or safe to be on the trip with them — even after the teachers’ retractions and promises that they were “just joking”.

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