Incident at Devils Den, a true story by Terry Lovelace, Esq. by Lovelace Terry

Author:Lovelace, Terry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Incident at Devil’s Den

I grabbed the cooler from the trunk and inventoried what we had. Most of the ice had melted. Still the beer was a few degrees below tepid. I busted out a package of hot dogs and a bag of badly smashed buns. I opened a bag of chips and a bag of cookies.

I skewered eight hot dogs and promptly burned all eight over the blazing brushfire I called a campfire. While Toby finished off his details, I assembled two plates of food.

We sat down, and Toby stared at his plate with the four black hot dogs. He never said a word. A hot meal was good. It’s true that things taste better when cooked over an open flame. Even burnt hotdogs. We inflated our air mattresses and lounged around by the campfire.

The scent of the wood fire was pleasant in the way my grandfather’s pipe tobacco had a pleasant aroma. We were content with listening to the crackle of the fire and watching the flames dance. The woods behind us were alive with singing crickets and tree frogs.

I said, “Hey, Tobe! This must be the allure of camping!”

“Yeah man, see! We worked out the bugs, we know how to do this stuff now,” Toby bragged.

I agreed, “Man, we paid our dues and now we’re outdoorsmen.” It was turning into a pleasant evening.

My eyes adjusted to the encroaching darkness. The campfire was dwindling but it still gave us enough light to enjoy the evening and relax. Getting to sleep would not be a problem tonight.

The sky that night was unbelievable. Without light pollution or clouds, the stars were ten times brighter than the night sky we were accustomed to seeing.

Toby pointed out various stars and constellations. The stars were time machines according to Toby. The light from the stars we see could have taken millions of years to reach us traveling at light speed. They showed us an image of what was when the light left that star.

I hadn’t given that much thought before. We could never observe the universe in real time. Even light from our sun was eight minutes old when it reached us. Relaxing on our air mattresses in the dark, we turned our full attention to the night sky. This night I noticed the dusty glow of the Milky Way! I’d never seen it so clearly before. It really was like a cloud spread across the sky.

“Toby, this is pretty goddamn cool. I bet this is how our ancestors entertained themselves for thousands of years.”

“That’s right,” he agreed. I think he was proud of his plan.

“Toby, just think, before there were televisions, people sat around a radio. Before that, the hearth was the evening gathering place for warmth and cooking. Before that, people sat by a campfire every night like we were doing at that moment.”

“Yeah, Terry, it’s kind of humbling,” added Toby.

Over small talk, we polished off a final beer apiece. Our campfire had dwindled to the red radiance of embers. Darkness closed in like a fog, but it was okay.

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