“Don’t worry about food. We’ll eat the trout we catch,” I told my two friends, Leo and Randy. And I believed it when I said it. Really, I did.
The facts that the native brook trout in the stream next to our planned campsite were rather small and very few and far between wasn’t a consideration. The fact that the stream was edged with thick mountain laurel at nearly every twist and turn wasn’t even recalled clearly. The facts that none of us was a skilled trout fisherman, only one of us had the small and delicate gear needed to really go after small trout, and none of us was bringing any sort of wading gear wasn’t a concern.
“Don’t worry about tents. I’ll be bringing all we need.”
After all, I would be bringing my tiny, really tiny, two-man pup tent made of canvas and what back then was sold as a “tube tent.” The latter was really just an extra-long, heavy-duty garbage bag with both ends open, held to the earth by an inadequate metal stake at each corner, with one opening propped up with a stick. When erected as shown in the instructions, it formed a loose scalene triangle. It looked comfortable enough, if the occupant didn’t care that his feet were smashed up into the flat plastic roof of his shelter while his head was exposed completely to the outside world.
Building a fire would be a cinch. We would be surrounded by forest. There would be plenty of wood for gathering, and leaves and pine needles for tinder. A dozen or so matches would get us through the weekend.
It rained for a couple days leading up to our three-day, two-night trip into the wilds of what locally was known as Small Valley, the valley on the other side of the mountain from my home in Muir. But it seemed to come to an end that Friday afternoon.
It didn’t even occur to me to check a weather forecast.
And so, late that afternoon, we three wilderness-bound adventurers loaded our gear into the back of my dad’s old pickup truck and launched into a weekend full of promise if little else.
The clouds were beginning to gather once again as Dad deposited us at our campsite, asked if we had everything we needed and drove back along the old coal-mining road.
We had arrived. We were on our own. Every decision for the next few days was ours to make.
But did it seem to be getting dark awfully early?
We dove right into setting up camp on a nice level spot in a grassy clearing. The pup tent went up quickly. The tube tent not so much. It proved to be an unwieldy contrivance, requiring ingenuity beyond the simple page of instructions, and even then, it didn’t seem all that stable or even all that sheltering.
Undaunted, we spread out two sleeping bags in the pup tent and a set of blankets in the tube tent, gathered a bit of firewood that maybe we were then realizing did not seem all that dry, and broke out the fishing gear.
Time to get us some dinner.
But the stream was not one of the wide-open, stocked trout streams or ponds that we normally cast over. There was just one spot of access that we could sight either upstream or down. The only place we were going to be able to get to the stream without getting wet was where the old coal-mining road crossed the waterway on some rusted-out pipes, creating a rather swift current and pools without the type of structure that generally attract trout.
We cast, and cast some more, and cast even more. Nothing. Rain began to fall. We continued to cast to the trout that just were not without our casting range. The rain grew heavier.
We beat a retreat back to the tents, planning to wait it out. We would dry our wet clothes over the fire after the rain had passed. Not all of us had brought a complete change. We were damp, even wet. The air, even inside our tents, was starting to feel a bit cool. The sun was almost down.
Time for dinner. We were not going to catch any trout. Our packs held a few candy bars and a couple freeze-dried backpacker meals, which I had bought with visions of some grand trek along something like the Appalachian Trail. That was a long time ago, well before modern refinements had come to the world of freeze-drying. At best the meals were going to be mush after we poured boiling water into the packets.
The rain continued. There would be no fire. There would be no boiling water. We had water, but it was as cold as we were beginning to feel.
But we were hungry. The candy bars went first. Cold water on late 1960s freeze-dried meals produced something that made mush seem like fresh-caught trout. We were still hungry. We ate it.
The rain continued. A puddle formed in the drooping roof of the tube tent. It collapsed. The sleeping bag inside was soaked.
Three of us crowded into the pup tent that had already felt tight with two of us in there. We did the best we could to fight off the cold and wet, changing into what dry clothes we had and glad for the shared warmth of the cramped canvas tent.
I don’t recall if we slept that night, but it did pass. Early the next morning we were considering our options for hiking to my home on the other side of the mountain, when my dad’s pickup bumped down the old mining road. He had come more than a day ahead of schedule to check in on us.
A soggy camp was tossed into the back of the pickup and we climbed into the cab with the heater pumped up to levels normally unwelcome in the middle of summer. Camp Small Valley was satisfyingly in the rear-view mirror.
