Camping with The Boys

“How’d you guys grab a site when it’s so crowded?”

“Most of these people are just here for the day,” Ravi explained. “Plus, it’s still June. Trips during July and August are almost unbookable unless we start planning a month early. Did you bring your stuff?”

“Yup.”

“Perfect. Go set your things on the purple air mattress and then get to work.”

Zip.

Bright blue light seeped through the fabric of our tent, welcoming me as my head poked through the entrance. There were two complete sleeping arrangements already set up next to each other, and an inflated purple sleeping pad on the end. Eager to start doing camping activities, I rolled open my sleeping bag and tossed my backpack to the side.

“Careful!” “Haa!” “Aurgh! Watch it!”

They were already having fun outside. I fumbled through the zipper-lined nylon flap to the sight of Prius splitting firewood.

“Stand with your legs shoulder width apart, and hold the hatchet directly above your head like this,” Ravi demonstrated with an imaginary chopping tool. Prius mirrored his movements with the miniature axe.

“Now bring it down!”

Crack.

The pre-cut log split neatly in two.

“Great, now do that again two more times,” Ravi said.

“With the same piece?” Prius whined.

“Yes. We can’t start the fire with these thick hunks of wood.”

“But I’m already starving. Other campers are eating already!”

“They’re just snacking on sausages. We’re making a real dinner. If you want to eat, then keep chopping.”

“Let me try!” Coco butted in as she snatched the hatchet from Prius’s hands.

“Careful with the hatchet!” I warned. “Hey Ravi, I can help you with food prep.”

“Much appreciated. Have you had hotpot before?”

“Yup. Do we need to prepare for that?”

“Just the vegetables.”

Ravi led me to a picnic table decorated with an assortment of spices, a large metal bowl, and pre-packaged meat. Thinly sliced cuts of lamb and beef were marbled wonderfully with paper-white streaks of fat.

“…Via, you’re drooling.”

“Whoops.”

“Whoops! I cut myself,” Prius said.

I whipped my head around to see what happened. It had barely been ten seconds since I told them to be careful. He wasn’t even holding the cutting tool, yet a small stream of blood ran down his leg.

“How?”

“It was this really sharp piece of wood.”

“Come with me,” Coco said, pouring a bottle water over his cut. “I have a first-aid kit in the car.”

As she dragged off our wounded brother, I continued preparing the hotpot ingredients with Ravi.

Snap. Plop. Squeak squeak.

Separate and wash. We pulled apart bok choy leaves and dropped them in the water-filled metal bowl. After the bok choy, we moved on to the mushrooms, then the spinach.

Wind blew, trees swayed, and kids played in the background as we prepared the vegetables. The repetitive process created a therapeutic mood. Having Ravi here made me feel like we were kids on dish-washing duty together.

“Why do we wash vegetables?” I asked.

“…Do you see the dirt on these things?” Ravi replied incredulously.

“We ate dirt on a regular basis as kids.”

“You know, my dad crunched on a cockroach the other day when we were eating dinner. It was because my grandfather didn’t wash the spinach.”

“…I don’t believe you.”

How does that even happen?

Nevertheless, I scrubbed our spinach a little harder.

Once we finished washing them, the vegetables were dumped on a paper plate for later. All that was left was starting the fire. I looked back at the table of ingredients.

“What are the spices for?”

“We’re making our own soup base. Look. I started the broth yesterday.”

Ravi walked over to a pot resting in the middle of our firepit, and lifted the lid to reveal multiple soup bones sitting in the water.

“Isn’t this cheating?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re awfully well-prepared for a camping trip. I imagined us playing survival in the woods.”

“This is just front-country camping,” he laughed. “We paid for running water, electricity, and a campsite close to the road. It’s pretty much glorified backyard camping. Backcountry is another story.”

“Ah, so that’s why we get to have such a feast today.”

“We could be feasting already, but all Prius wanted to do earlier was play guitar by the lake. I finally convinced him to chop some wood when you guys arrived.”

“Then let’s start the fire now.”

“Ehhh, we don’t have enough to start the fire,” Ravi said, rubbing the back of his neck in frustration. “This guy, Prius…”

“It looks like we have enough.”

“Not for the kindling. We need smaller pieces that catch fire more easily, like twigs or paper.”

He scanned the trees around our area.

“Hey Via. We’re technically not allowed to do this but…”

“But what?” I asked excitedly. It sounded like we were about to become accomplices in crime.

“You see those birch trees? Underneath certain parts of the bark should be some black stuff. That’s called Old Man’s Beard—it’s really flammable.”

“Is it moss?”

“It’s lichen. Don’t take too much from one tree. And make sure there’s no park rangers nearby.”

At his command, I trekked into the nearby trees for the black stuff. I always assumed that those were natural parts of the tree, since my biology courses only oriented me with lichens of oranges, greens, and yellows.

Hairy black clumps peeled off of the spotted white birch bark, sometimes taking a bit of the bark with it. Knowing how bad bark stripping could be, I performed the procedure more cautiously in fear of tarnishing Ravi’s career as an environmentalist.

“What are you doing?”

A voice startled me. I turned around.

“Oh, hey Prius. Where’s Coco?”

“She’s helping some little girl that got hurt earlier. I came back to grab a bottle of water to clean the wound.”

“Okay. Come back soon, we’re about to start the fire.”

“See ya.”

Returning to our empty pot-in-the-pit, I retrieved the Old Man’s Beard to Ravi, who was crouching by the fire with a pile of twigs. He bundled the dark bushy tufts underneath a loose roof of sticks, and procured a small metal rod from his pocket.

“Pass me the knife on the table.”

I looked around and saw a massive piece of blade-shaped fabric sitting next to the spices. Handing it over, Ravi then unsheathed a stainless-steel beast the same length as our hatchet.

“Dude, that’s a whole sword.”

“No, it’s a ferro-rod,” he explained, holding up the shiny rod. “I can scrape it with my knife to strike a fire.”

“I meant the… nevermind.”

Shhk. Shhk.

Sparks flew and caught onto the kindling we collected. As he blew on them, the sparks on the bark became a blaze, and the blaze caught on the twigs to become a crackling campfire.

Spices and mushrooms were dumped into the pot, alongside a small portion of the vegetables. Soot creeped up the metal sides, tinting its walls a smoky black.

The two of us lounged in our fabric folding chairs as we listened to the fire grow under the fading sky.

Ravi yawned contagiously, which made me follow suit. Glancing over, I saw his long lashes draped across his lower eyelids as he lazed in the leaves’ perforated shade.

Where did all his energy go?

He seemed rather docile today. The initial energy he greeted us with during our fishing trip was completely gone. Maybe it was because of Prius’s antics, or the fact that he was taking responsibility for being our camping expert. Yet for some reason, I felt more at ease seeing him this way.

Come to think of it, today was when Ravi seemed the most like himself. As a kid, he was always level-headed and supportive in contrast to the rest of our rowdiness. The three of us had so many fights that only Ravi was able to mediate. Even today, he was our guiding light. To outsiders it might’ve seemed like Ravi always tagged behind three headstrong kids, when in reality, he was the glue that held us together for so long.

I wondered why he seemed so happy-go-lucky when Prius and I first picked him up. It was definitely against what I knew of his character.

As his eyes fluttered open, I flicked my gaze elsewhere.

“What time is it?” He drowsily asked.

I checked my phone.

5:30PM.

“It’s only been an hour since I got here,” I said.

“We washed vegetables, found kindling, started a fire,” Ravi listed. “Man, what are those two doing?”

“Coco was helping an injured girl. They should be back by now…” I trailed off as I saw the pair trotting towards us.

“We’re back!” announced Prius. “Is the food ready?”

“Nope,” Ravi said. “Give it another half hour.”

“Sorry we’re late. We ended up playing ball with some kids, and one of them got hurt,” Coco said. She grabbed the seat next to mine and started warming her hands by the fire—not because it was cold outside, but because warming your hands is almost instinctive when you see a nice fire.

Having all of us here together enhanced the quality of our campfire’s ambience. After we split up and ran around accomplishing various tasks, we finally got to enjoy the savoury smell of our own labour brewing in the pot. I figured we still had some time to kill.

“Hey Prius, didn’t you want to film guitar videos everywhere? You haven’t made one since our first day trip.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot. Ravi helped me make one today by the lake. He even has a fancy camera and everything.”

“Why don’t we sing some campfire songs?”

“Oooh, let’s sing the one about the country roads,” Coco said excitedly. “Ravi, set up your camera.”