Camping trip #1

Last night, my backyard sounded like a horror movie. Some critters were fighting and fighting fiercely. A raccoon, with its chittering, was one of them. We live about three miles from Boston, and raccoons are some of the few animals that thrive around humans, so we have some big mamajamas. As for the raccoon’s opponent, well, that’s where things get strange. If I were at my parents’ house in the little town of Monson, I would have no doubt it was a coyote. But as I said, I live in the suburbs of the city. That’s crazy, right? Well, as impossible as it seems, it is not entirely ridiculous. A wooded park surrounds Boston’s only remaining saltwater marsh, about five minutes down the road from me, with signs warning people to leash their dogs because of coyotes. My wife and I used to laugh about it, but apparently, the city has them, and last night, they were in my neighborhood, causing a ruckus.

As I lay awake, listening to the baying and chattering of coyotes, it got me reminiscing. In my last post, I wrote about Monson Developmental Center (MDC), a 649-acre state hospital near where I grew up, and I mentioned I used to camp in the woods nearby. The sounds of coyotes in your backyard are unnerving, but it was terrifying as a teenager out in the woods, far from civilization, with only a thin sheet of canvas as shelter.

At thirteen, my friends and I pitched a crazy idea to our parents, and remarkably, they agreed—an unsupervised camping trip. It was 1995 before cell phones were commonplace, and we aren’t talking about pitching a tent at a campground here. No, this was out in the real woods, at least an hour’s walk from the closest house. Not that any campground would allow a group of thirteen-year-olds to rent a site unaccompanied anyway. I guess I grew up in a different time. Parents today have a hard enough time leaving their thirteen-year-olds at home alone, not to mention out in the wilderness.

Needless to say, it was a big deal. It was the beginning of a tradition that lasted almost a decade and produced some of my best teenage memories. On that first trip, there were four of us. We weren’t camping novices. We grew up in rural western Massachusetts, and camping was a big part of all our lives. There was also a stipulation that there would be no fire (at least for this first trip). It’s a rule we actually adhered to, though that is probably the only rule we followed. We learned many lessons on that first sojourn, but we also grew much braver, and as we grew older, the trips got crazier.

I believe it was July, just after school ended (7th grade down, 8th grade, here we come!). We packed our framepacks with almost everything you could think of, hopped on our bikes, and headed towards Chicopee Mountain, an 820-foot rise behind MDC that overlooks the Chicopee Brook valley in Monson, Massachusetts. This was before we found the much easier egress through the MDC campus, so we had to huff it. We headed down a little dead-end street a few minutes from my parents’ house, traveled over a bridge made of an old truck bed, crossed the tracks, passed through a field, and climbed the mountain’s first half via a clearing carved by utility poles (this point is shown in the picture above). Already a trek of about an hour, this only brought us to the trailhead that snakes up to the summit. The last rise we aptly named the devil’s incline, and with 50 lbs of gear on our backs and pushing our bikes, it was always torture. It was worth it, though. There’s a ledge on top of Chicopee Moutain with fantastic views into Palmer and Monson, Massachusetts. I loved this place as a child because I could look down onto my house and my grandparents’ house, both miniaturized into toys. The visibility might be why my parents were okay with our little adventure, for although they were a long walk away, they could still see us sitting on that ledge from their kitchen window and know that if the mountain went up in smoke, something had gone terribly wrong.

It was hot that day, and reaching the summit, we were hungry. It was late afternoon and time for dinner. Our options were slim without a fire, so we decided to hike to the top, hide our packs, and then ride our bikes back down to a local pizza place and have dinner. It was a crazy idea only a teenage boy could hatch. But we did it. We crunched and cracked off the trail, hid our gear deep in the woods, and then headed back down the mountain to nosh. It was about 5:30 pm.

Monson is small, and the closest eating establishment was actually in Palmer. It didn’t take too long on our bikes roaring downhill- about an hour. We stuffed our faces and had lots of laughs, not noticing the sun dip towards the horizon. We finished our meal at around 6:30 and stepped out, barely realizing that it was starting to get dark. We went to the convenience store next door, bought some junk food for the night, and headed back to the mountain that loomed large ahead of us. The trek back was not as speedy, with it being mostly uphill. You’re probably seeing where I am going with this. By the time we made it up the devil’s incline, for the second time that day, it was dark, and in our infinite wisdom, our flashlights were in our packs someplace in those darkening woods.

If you’ve grown up in the wilderness, you’ll know that dusk is the scariest time in the forest (or anywhere, really). For one, there is enough light that you can still see, but not well, so your eyes, starving for information, see things in the growing shadows. And two, most predators choose dusk to hunt. Needless to say, as we pushed our bikes up to the summit, we all began to panic. We had to be big, brave boys externally, especially in front of our friends, but internally, we were still children.

We got to the top, threw down our bikes, and dashed into the woods to search for our hidden packs. It took a while, but we finally found them. However, all that drudging around in the woods seemed to garner some attention from the mountain’s typical inhabitants. In the distance, we started hearing a strange chattering sound, much like the laughing of hyenas, the same sound I heard in my backyard last night.

Now, humans don’t need to worry a whole lot about coyotes. They are the size of a small dog and tend to keep their distance. In recorded history, there have been only two deaths from coyote attacks in the US- and I doubt either was in Massachusetts. But they can attack and cause some damage. It was dark, and the strange sounds were terrifying. So, we ran with our packs back to the trail and began the chore of building our fortress in the guise of a few mils of polyester. It was a chore, though. It was a color-coded tent being frantically thrown together in the tender light of wobbly flashlights. But we did it. We brought everything inside and zipped up our gate, not daring to open it again until sunrise.

To our relief, the coyotes eventually left us alone and worked their way down into the valley. There were other visitors in the night sniffing around, a raccoon, maybe a skunk, but we had our fortress and, being thirteen, an assortment of knives in hand. That didn’t mean we slept. Oh no. There would be no sleeping that night. We laughed, talked about girls, gorged on an entire box of NutRageous candy bars, which were new that year (I still haven’t been able to eat one since), and drank two two-liter bottles of grape soda.

Now, I mentioned that we did not leave the tent that night and drank two bottles of soda, along with the gallon of ice-cold water we had brought up in Coleman thermos. What shall a teenage boy do if nature calls, which it tends to do as you lay awake the entire night in a mild state of fear? It didn’t take long for this to become an emergency. It seems like such a trivial thing now. Just unzip the tent, step out, and have your relief. But back then, it was like opening the gates of hell- coyotes, bears, mountain lions, bobcats, and zombies from MDC would flood in and devour us whole! No, that wasn’t an option. We were safe behind our thin polyester sheet with a flashlight in one hand and knife in the other. Almost in unison, we turned to the Coleman thermos, which was now empty. It spoke to us in gentle, reassuring tones to do the forbidden- forever soiling its purity. Thus, the legend of the piss pot was born, and giggles ensued.

I’m not going to lie to you. It was a long night. When exhaustion began to push us past the fear and our eyes grew heavy, the early dawn in the wilderness awoke the birds. This was probably like four in the morning. Their praise for the sun’s long birth made any prospect of sleeping impossible. So, we built up the gumption to unzip the gates of hell and tumbled out into a foggy early morn. Like zombies, we stumbled to the mountain’s ledge and watched the sunrise- perhaps the first time we had ever seen such a wonder. There we sat, four boys who had survived our first trial to manhood. It is a memory I will cherish forever.

We spent much of the ensuing day exploring. It was the first time we continued on the trail past the mountain’s summit and found that it led to a megalithic water tank that fed the vast MDC complex. Not expecting to find such a monster in the woods, the discovery left an impression. It was thirty feet high, rusty, and had a hole in its side that shot a jet of water fifty feet. We explored more and found that service tunnels and vast underground catch basins riddled the surrounding woods. In hindsight, it was pretty dangerous. Most had been covered with thick steel plates, but hooligans had moved some to expose deep yawning chasms to injury and death. In fact, in my research for my last post, I stumbled upon this article, so the danger was real.

After our exploration, exhaustion again reared its head. We were also thirsty, now left with only our beloved piss pot, which we ceremoniously dumped out with pinched noses. So, we packed up and headed back down the mountain. At the crossing of the Chicopee Brook, we tried our best to rinse out the Coleman thermos but decided it was a lost cause. So, we lit it sail away down the fast-moving current to oblivion and hoped the parents of whoever it belonged would not notice it gone.

Thus ended our first camping adventure- there would be nine more in the ensuing years. After the first, they all meld together, and I can no longer differentiate between them. There remain some clear memories, like adventures in pyrotechnics, our first time sleeping out under the stars, cooking on the campfire, and having strange things go bump in the night. I will dwell on those memories and see if I can pull out a few more gems to offer you in the future, but for this tale, it is complete and will sleep gently in the back of my mind, giving me little smiles when I see a NutRagous candy bar or a Coleman thermos.

Cheers!