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a short story about hiking, growing up, and nocturnal emissions

When I first arrived at Wind Creek Camp in central Vermont, my parents left me alone with my hiking backpack at a picnic table by the drop-off area. I waited for my Uncle Dave and his son, my cousin Jon, to appear in my field of vision so that I could suction onto them. They were the only people I knew who were attending Wind Creek with me that summer, my first time at a sleepaway camp. People you know often serve as the ultimate buffer to the discomfort of such new experiences—a slice of familiarity amidst the chaos to which you can cling like a life raft. A mere acquaintance or even a rival can become your best friend once you embark on some new adventure together, entangled as you are in fear of the unknown.

I would need them. I was scared. I had never stayed overnight anywhere without my parents, not even at a friend’s house for a sleepover, which wasn’t due to a dearth of friends but to concocted excuses on my part to avoid having to do so. On the occasions my parents took me to stay in hotels, I was crushed by bouts of homesickness, and I wanted to avoid being humiliated by a late-night call to them to take me home from any friend’s house.

My uncle and my cousin were just familiar enough to serve as comfort in the face of the coming hardships. We spent major holidays together, traversing the NY-Vermont border for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, etc. Uncle Dave was married to my dad’s sister, which made things somewhat confusing since we shared the same first name, although I wasn’t named after him and was, in fact, named before my aunt had even met him, which was a pain to explain to people.

Fortunately, they found me before I had to seek them out. Uncle Dave snuck up from behind and slid onto the bench beside me without saying hello. I was startled when he nudged me and pointed up to the sky.

“What’s that? Like a plane or something?” Uncle Dave said. I looked where he was pointing.

Way up at the top of one of the nearby trees, someone had nailed a wooden sign to a branch with big yellow lettering that read: ‘GULLIBLE’. I would have laughed, but my nerves had rendered my face permanently dour.

“What’s gullible mean?” my cousin Jon asked as he approached. He was a year older than me, going into eighth grade, so I didn’t understand how he’d never come across the word gullible.

“Means you fell for it!” Uncle Dave explained, laughing. He grabbed me in a side hug. “How’s my favorite nephew and namesake?” he asked. I was his only nephew.

The three of us small-talked and made our way to the mess hall.

Wind Creek Camp was a Christian camp for modern American WASP-ish families on the more progressive side of things to send their children for a summer without fear of values dilution—a place for the sort of kids who would wait to have sex until they were married but also believed it was okay to be gay and that abortion was alright. The way it worked was that there were a number of programs kids could sign up for, some of which were excursions, others of which took place at the camp itself.

The mess hall had the tables segregated by program for our arrival. Uncle Dave and I found the table with our program name attached to it, an excursion called Long Trail Hike and Camping. But when we went to sit down, Jon didn’t sit with us. Instead, he handed his father a piece of paper, then went and sat at another table. Uncle Dave looked as confused as I was. He read the note his son gave him.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It seems Jon isn’t coming with us on the Long Trail hike. He signed up for a sailing class instead,” Uncle Dave explained.

My brain imploded. How was I supposed to survive this trip without my cousin Jon? Sure, I still had Uncle Dave, but a fellow child companion was different from an adult one; in fact, it seemed necessary. I looked over at Jon, who was smiling and fist-bumping with kids at the other table and who did not even grace us with a look back.

“Why did he give you a note?” I asked, my mouth numb.

“It’s this thing we do, Jon and I,” Uncle Dave told me, folding up the piece of paper and putting it in his pocket. “I believe the technical term for what we have is ‘communication issues.’ And apparently, a good strategy for resolving that is delivering difficult news by way of writing. I just wish he’d delivered it sooner.” He looked as despondent as I was, but I knew that Uncle Dave’s nature was to always come to the surface and provide a buoyant face, and soon he did.

A short sermon was given, and a meal was served, one I hardly touched. My parents had begged me to go to Wind Creek Camp. They promised that once I got there all of my anxieties would melt away and I would be caught up in an unstoppable gust of friendship and adventure, but the opposite had happened, as no one at the table seemed intent on talking to me—probably due to the sourpuss I wore.

Our group was composed of three adult counselors: our leader (Uncle Dave), a Methodist pastor (Pastor Hank), and a young college girl, Maria, as well as three boy campers: Jeff, a year older than me, an athletic type with teeth that were enormous and square in the way teeth often look right after braces are removed; Adam, also a year older than me, a thin boy with, ironically, an Adam’s apple half the size of his head; and myself. Then there were two girl campers: Haley, my age, a loud blonde who seemed like the cheerleading type; and Britt, also my age, who acted and dressed a little more pious than the average Wind Creek camper.

We were to leave that very day via van for the trailhead of the Long Trail where we would start our journey. First, we had to have our backpacks checked to make sure we brought with us the requisite gear as specified by the camp. Everyone else had what they call an ‘internal frame’ hiking backpack, but I had my dad’s hand-me-down ‘external’ frame pack, which was a bit more cumbersome and embarrassingly square, both literally and figuratively.

Mercifully, it was Uncle Dave who checked my pack. “Looks good, kid. Nice job,” he remarked. “One thing, though: I think we should leave these behind.” He picked up the two thick Harry Potter books I had brought along, the thickest of them all, books four and five. I was near the end of a re-reading of four and needed five to continue.

“Why not?” I croaked out. He shook his head.

“Too much unnecessary weight. You got too much in the pack already. Trust me, you’ll thank me when we’re out there.”

“What about this stuff?” I asked, pointing to my Moleskine notebook and pen, wondering if those were superfluous as well.

He considered it for a moment. “Tell you what. I hear you and your dad are having ‘communication issues’ too. If you use that to write a letter to your dad for every day out there on the trail, you can keep that. Deal?”

I nodded, but it upset me that the details of me and my father’s relationship had been disclosed to Uncle Dave’s family.

“Sure.”

In the van on the way out, Maria, the college student counselor, explained to us how she got roped into such an involved and strenuous excursion as the Long Trail hike.

“I mean, honestly, you girls are lucky Pastor Hank gave me a call and begged me to do this one,” she said, clearly hedging her bets against having a good time. “I’ve never even pooped in the woods before.”

“Oh, stop,” Pastor Hank said. “You know you’ll have a good time; that’s why you came!”

“Why? Couldn’t the girls come without Maria?” the boy called Jeff asked. He was beginning to get facial hair, which I perceived as an affront to the supposedly prolonged pace of my own puberty.

“The camp won’t let any excursion go with girl campers unless there’s a girl counselor with them,” Pastor Hank explained. “For good reason.”

“You know…in case there are, like, girl troubles,” Maria said. “And other stuff.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. I knew about girl troubles from a book my mom had bought my sister that described ‘girl troubles’ in a very healthy and informative way, along with the ‘other stuff’ too, with illustrations and everything.

“Like getting their period,” the boy Adam said in the deep voice that matched his outsized Adam’s apple. Haley laughed, but Britt scrunched her nose.

“Ew, don’t say that,” Britt said.

“I already had my period before, so…I’m prepared,” Haley announced.

“HOH-kay, I think that’s enough of this talk,” Pastor Hank said.

“As for pooping outside, Maria: you know why bears bring toilet paper to the woods, don’t you? Because it’s a bare necessity!” my Uncle Dave said. Everyone booed.

I looked out the window at the Green Mountains and knew they would go unsoiled by my own stool, as my bowels always clenched up at the prospect of pooping in an unknown location, surrounded by unknown people.

We marched along the trail single file. I was nearer the front of the pack, behind Uncle Dave and Pastor Hank, and behind me was Maria, a buffer between me and the other campers, for which I was thankful.

“So, are you getting ready for the new Harry Potter?” Uncle Dave asked me. It always astounded me that he, an adult, read and enjoyed Harry Potter when my own father would just as soon use it for kindling.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Do you think Snape is going to be good or evil?”

“I think this whole thing about him knowing Harry’s mother is going to come back around and he’ll end up protecting Harry and being a good guy. I bet he loved Harry’s mom,” Uncle Dave speculated.

His prescient analysis in this matter was probably a reason many adults, like my father, didn’t hold the series in high regard; in retrospect, the twist was obvious.

Meanwhile, the rest of the campers behind us pierced the sacred silence of the forest with attempts at conversation. Jeff and Adam seemed only able to communicate by quoting the routines of popular stand-up comedians whom I had never heard of, while Haley interjected with nascent attempts at flirting and parried Britt’s questions about her hometown with broad proclamations about how ‘lame’ and ‘boring’ all aspects of it apparently were.

There was an obvious dynamic forming between Adam and Haley, if only because Haley took extra care to laugh at his Jim Gaffigan impressions. Jeff, to my eyes, was clearly the more attractive of the two other boy campers, but perhaps my inability to understand whatever nuanced appeal Adam held confirmed my heterosexuality. I didn’t need a mirror we didn’t have to know I was in third place.

We got to the first campsite well before the deadline of nightfall, where we found a single poorly maintained lean-to. All of us had a single-person tent in our packs, but there was a slight drizzle starting and the allure of a drier place to sleep left us all contemplating who could fit there beneath it.

“Okay, how about this,” Haley suggested as we all analyzed its dimensions. “Counselors sleep in the tents. Campers sleep in the lean-to, but if we kind of do, like, boys to girls on separate sides, but like head-to-head…”

Maria raised her eyebrows. “Head-to-head? Nice try, Haley,” she said.

It was determined that the girls would sleep in the lean-to and the boys would set up tents, leaving me to distract myself from the homesickness by imagining which of the girls I’d have preferred to share the lean-to with.

Haley was probably the conventional choice of crush, but Maria the counselor was the one for me. I found Haley crass and annoying, and Brittany prude and afraid. But Maria had a quietness about her in which I heard things unsaid, like the wisdom in the way she could discern Haley’s intentions with the sleeping arrangements. Of course, Maria was unattainable, a college girl as she was, and perhaps that fact alone was what held my attention, along with the length of the legs that emerged from her above-thigh hiking shorts.

I dreamt of her that night.

When I woke, I found my underwear inundated by a warm liquid. I thought maybe I’d peed myself, but I’d never had problems with that before. The liquid was too thick and sticky against my thighs and groin, and when I investigated in the blue light of the Vermont morning, I found it too milky and opaque to be urine. The smell was one I was unaccustomed to but would come to know very well.

I had heard of the fabled ‘wet dreams,’ but never had one before; it was curious to me that although I dreamt of Maria, the details of the dream did not include sex, and that such an ejaculation could occur without stimulation of that kind. It simply happened, seemingly unprompted.

But what would everyone else think, if they knew?

I took the underwear off and shuffled into another pair. I stuffed the soiled ones into one of my vacuum-sealed packs and shoved it way down beneath all my other stuff, and was horrified to find that, despite my father reminding me to take at least five, I only had three pairs, one of which I had already worn and the other which I had just unconsciously ruined, leaving me with only one pair left for the rest of the trip.

The group set off again that morning, the secret of the volcanic coming of my manhood secured in my pack. We passed a birch tree, and my Uncle Dave stripped off a long piece of its bark.

“What’s that for?” I asked him.

“From it, I shall create a scroll to record my travels,” he said magnanimously. Uncle Dave was a piece of work. He eyed me from beneath his tie-dye headband. “Have you been writing to your father in that notebook you brought?”

“Yes,” I lied.

The hike was extremely miserable, and I could not wait to rub it in my parents’ faces upon my return, they who had assured me such a good time awaited. For two of the four days, there was light rain. Something about my high-arched feet and my new, unbroken hiking boots made my feet and ankles ache constantly. I was homesick and hungry. I also discovered that I had whatever genetic mutation some humans have which makes them particularly amenable to mosquitos, and my ankles and wrists were swollen with their bites, while the others went mostly unbitten.

At the end of the final night, before we would get back to the van the next day, we were to take Communion.

“I’ve never done a communion,” I confessed to Pastor Hank. He put his hand on my shoulder.

“Well, that’s alright. You don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” he told me. This was technically true, but if everyone else did, it would seem like I had no choice.

Britt was the only one who seemed overjoyed by it, though. I took the wine and bread (which, along with the Bible, apparently did not constitute as much dead weight as Harry Potter books) with trepidation, but I had seen everyone else go and so knew what to do. I don’t know what it was about the experience, whether it was the power of Christ or whether I simply knew that the rock that had been gestating in my lower abdomen either had to be extricated or risk permanent damage.

But after Pastor Hank’s sermon, when everyone else had gone to sleep, I stepped into the woods with my flashlight and roll of toilet paper and spade and proceeded to take the dump of my young life.

When we finally rode the van back to Wind Creek Camp, they lined us up for a picture in our unflattering and haggard state, which seemed backward to me at the time—perhaps they should have taken it when we arrived?—but later came to understand. I still have the picture to this day, an 11 x 10 in black and white, and though I never spoke to any of those involved ever again besides my Uncle Dave, it’s framed and on my bookshelf for display.

In it, I am caught scratching through my hiking shorts at my balls, upon which a horrible rash had developed, no doubt because I had worn the same underwear for three days and nights in the dampness of the Green Mountains.

After devouring lunch at the mess hall like it was the first time I’d ever seen food, I took my external frame backpack out to the same gravel lot where I had been dropped off, and where my parents would soon pick me up. My Uncle Dave and cousin Jon were sitting at the same picnic table I was at when they arrived.

“Hey, Jon,” I said to my cousin, who only smiled and nodded at me. “Sorry you went sailing instead. Hope you had fun.”

“Wow, boys, look at that bird!” Uncle Dave exclaimed, pointing somewhere up in the trees.

Jon looked. I didn’t.

thanks for reading this story about a kid who has a wet dream on a camping trip. even if you didn’t like it, maybe click the little heart button so that people who might will find it.

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BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS:

Did you ever have a formative coming-of-age experience at sleepaway camp?

How do we as a society approach questions of puberty for boys as opposed to girls?

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