The Half Facing the Fire

Thursday afternoon, everything went according to plan.

That should have been our first warning.

The boys came home from school.

We loaded the last few things.

We pulled out on time.

We had food.

Water.

Tents.

Chairs.

Firewood.

Enough gear to survive one night approximately forty-five minutes from our house.

We even took two vehicles.

This was a shakedown campout, after all.

If we were going to discover that we had forgotten something important, I preferred doing it somewhere we could reasonably escape from.

The forecast had been cooperating too.

Cold?

Absolutely.

We expected somewhere around 45 to 48 degrees overnight.

Chilly enough to make a campfire worthwhile.

Cold enough to bundle up.

Perfect fall camping weather.

We were ready.

Or so we thought.

I arrived first with the boys.

Kati had gotten slightly turned around and was about ten minutes behind us, so we started unloading.

The first challenge was daylight.

Or the rapidly disappearing lack thereof.

One downside of waiting for the boys to get home from school and then driving forty-five minutes to a campsite in late October is that the sun does not care about your carefully organized camping checklist.

We had maybe forty-five minutes.

Go.

We spread a giant tarp across the campsite to establish our little tent city.

Then came the boys' tent.

I bought that tent sixteen or seventeen years ago.

Before Kati and I were married.

Before four kids.

Before CranioDad.

Before a whole lot of life.

I originally bought it for a backpacking trip.

And there I was, all these years later, setting it up with my sons.

Three minutes.

Done.

David, Jacob, and Asher had a home for the night.

Then we attacked the cabin tent.

Kati arrived and jumped straight in.

Zoey started setting up her little one-person backpacking tent.

The boys moved things.

I moved wood.

Chairs unfolded.

Coolers opened.

Tent poles clicked.

Stakes sank.

Zippers zipped.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I started the fire.

That mattered.

Because daylight was bleeding through the trees.

And cold was coming with it.

Soon there was smoke curling into the evening air.

Wood cracked.

Sparks climbed.

Orange light flickered across faces.

And our campsite started feeling less like a collection of things we'd unloaded from two vehicles and more like ours.

Then came dinner.

Beef stew.

Camping food from childhood for both Kati and me.

Warm.

Thick.

Simple.

Perfect.

We toasted French bread over the fire.

Forgot the butter.

Didn't matter.

The bread browned at the edges.

The stew steamed in the cold air.

Smoke settled into our clothes.

Everybody ate.

Everybody was happy.

For a little while, the entire world was firelight, food, family, and the woods getting darker around us.

Cleanup happened by flashlight.

Beams bounced across the campsite.

Metal clinked.

Bags zipped.

Someone was always asking where something went.

The fire popped behind us.

And slowly, the campground settled.

Then something strange happened.

The kids got tired.

Early.

Turns out when you remove screens from four children and replace them with darkness, cold air, food, and physical work...

They apparently become human again.

Phones existed for pictures and emergencies.

That was it.

So one by one, everybody disappeared into tents.

Zippers closed.

Voices faded.

Soon we could hear deep breathing.

A little snoring.

Leaves shifting beyond the campsite.

An owl calling somewhere in the darkness.

Hoot.

Hoot.

Hoot.

Kati and I stayed beside the fire a little longer.

Then we let it die down.

By nine or nine-thirty, all six of us were tucked away.

And for a moment, everything was exactly what I had pictured when I planned the trip.

Then the temperature kept falling.

And falling.

And falling.

At first, it was just cold air against my face.

Then the sleeping bag didn't feel quite as warm.

Then every position somehow exposed another piece of me to the cold.

I checked the temperature.

This was no longer 45-degree camping.

It wasn't 40.

It wasn't even 35.

Thirty-three degrees.

And still dropping.

There is a fairly substantial difference between planning to sleep outside at 48 degrees and discovering, while already outside, that Mother Nature has renegotiated the contract to 32.

Our sleeping bags had apparently not been invited to the meeting.

By around eleven, I gave up.

I crawled out of the tent and rebuilt the fire.

Flame caught.

Wood cracked.

Heat returned.

At least to whichever half of me happened to be facing it.

Around eleven-thirty, Kati emerged.

Too cold to sleep.

Then came Jacob.

Then David.

Then Asher.

One zipper.

Then another.

Then another.

Little figures emerging from dark tents and migrating toward the orange glow.

And then, around one in the morning, Zoey's tent apparently decided it had also had enough.

Something shifted.

Something collapsed.

And our final camper joined us.

Six people.

One fire.

Thirty-two degrees.

The middle of the night.

At first, seeing our breath was funny.

Puff.

Fog.

Another breath.

Another little cloud.

The kids played with it.

Of course they did.

Then it stopped being quite as funny.

Because the fog wasn't going away.

Neither was the cold.

So we put water over the fire.

Soon steam joined the smoke.

Hot chocolate for the kids.

Coffee for Dad.

Warm cups wrapped between cold fingers.

Chocolate warming them from the inside while the fire worked on the outside.

Coffee doing roughly the same for me while also making increasingly ambitious promises about keeping me awake.

We sat there.

And sat there.

The half facing the fire was wonderful.

The other half was reconsidering every decision that had brought us to this point.

So we rotated.

Six human rotisserie chickens around a campfire.

Warm.

Turn.

Freeze.

Turn.

Warm.

Repeat.

But here's the strange thing.

Nobody wanted to leave.

Nobody was panicking.

Nobody was miserable enough to make the night miserable.

We were cold.

Very cold.

But we were together.

The campground had gone quiet.

Other fires crackled somewhere beyond us.

Occasionally we could hear voices from another site.

Leaves rustled in the darkness.

Something small moved through the woods beyond the reach of our firelight.

Nobody was scared.

They wanted to know what it was.

The owls kept calling.

Smoke climbed through the branches.

Sparks lifted into the black and disappeared.

And eventually I told the kids something.

The fire tells stories.

But you have to be quiet enough to watch and listen.

And somehow...

They did.

Four children.

Cold.

Exhausted.

Awake in the middle of the night.

Quiet.

Watching a fire.

For probably forty minutes.

They watched logs collapse.

Embers glow.

Flames curl around pieces of wood and change shape.

They started seeing things.

Characters.

Places.

Little stories hiding in the fire.

And in sleepy, half-awake voices, they told us what they saw.

Nobody had a screen.

Nobody needed one.

There was just fire.

Darkness.

Owls.

Cold air.

Hot chocolate.

Coffee.

And six people sitting close enough to share the same little circle of warmth.

Around three or three-thirty, Zoey announced that she was hungry.

Of course she was.

She'd been awake for hours, sitting in the cold, and hunger was making it increasingly difficult for her to concentrate on much of anything.

Apparently surviving an accidental near-freezing family campout burns calories.

We laughed.

We talked.

We kept our voices low.

We made bathroom runs.

We fed the fire.

We watched the woods.

And somehow the hours moved.

Midnight became one.

One became two.

Two became three.

Three became four.

Four became five.

Five became six.

A few of the kids eventually tried sleeping again.

The temperature had not improved much.

But exhaustion eventually wins arguments that comfort cannot.

By six in the morning, I had been tending that fire for the better part of seven hours.

I hadn't rotated enough.

I hadn't moved enough.

I hadn't slept enough.

And eventually the cold got me too.

I'm usually good with cold.

I've trained in it.

Worked in it.

Slept in it.

I run warm.

But eventually thirty-two degrees, exhaustion, and an entire night spent feeding a fire don't particularly care about your résumé.

At six, I finally climbed into the van.

Turned it on.

Turned the heat up.

And apparently ceased to exist.

My watch says I slept about thirty-seven minutes that entire night.

I'm pretty sure most of them happened right there.

When I woke up...

The campsite was disappearing.

My wife, who had spent the entire night freezing beside me, had apparently decided that sleep was unnecessary and transformed into a one-woman combat engineer.

Our tent?

Gone.

Boys' tent?

Gone.

Packed.

Zoey's tent?

Going into the bag.

Food?

Packed.

Water?

Loaded.

Campfire area?

Cleared.

I sat there for a moment trying to figure out whether I was awake or witnessing some kind of hypothermia-induced miracle.

Then I got out and helped.

First light finally started pushing through the trees around seven.

The black branches slowly became brown.

The shapes of tents and vehicles became distinct again.

The campground started returning from the darkness.

And we kept packing.

By about seven-thirty, we were rolling.

Cold vehicles.

Tired faces.

Smoke permanently embedded in every piece of clothing we owned.

And six people heading home.

Warmth has never felt so good.

I made breakfast.

Bacon.

Eggs.

Toast.

Hot food.

We turned up the heat.

Turned on the fireplaces.

And everybody slowly thawed.

Then we slept.

Beds.

Walls.

Heat.

Beautiful, magnificent civilization.

Later, we figured out what had happened.

The kids' sleeping bags?

Rated around 50 to 60 degrees.

Ours weren't much better equipped for what we'd gotten.

The forecast we'd planned around had been perfectly manageable.

The temperature we actually received?

Not so much.

And that's exactly why this was a shakedown trip.

We learned.

Better sleeping bags.

Better sleeping systems underneath everybody.

A fire poker.

A few small things we thought we'd packed.

A few things we didn't know we needed until we needed them.

Nothing catastrophic.

Nothing that can't be fixed.

By the end of Friday, everything was unloaded.

Gear was put away.

People were warm.

Everyone was exhausted.

And somehow...

We were already talking about going again.

February.

Maybe March.

After I finish my degree.

Before baseball.

Before spring break.

Before the year explodes into everything else.

Because despite the cold...

I'd do it again.

I wouldn't even change that night.

There will be better sleeping bags next time.

Better pads.

Better preparation.

Hopefully a forecast that doesn't lie directly to my face.

But there is something I don't want to improve.

Six people.

Around a fire.

At two in the morning.

Hot chocolate in little hands.

Coffee in mine.

Owls calling somewhere beyond the light.

Breath hanging in the air.

Four kids staring into flames because Dad told them the fire had a story to tell.

And then becoming quiet enough to hear it.

That's not the part that went wrong.

That's the part I'll remember.

We called this a shakedown campout before we ever left home, and that's exactly what it became. The cold exposed every weakness in our gear and gave us a very clear shopping list for next time. That's what a shakedown is supposed to do. But it also tested something that wasn't on any checklist. We were tired, uncomfortable, freezing, and awake at an hour when absolutely nobody should have been awake. Yet nobody melted down. Nobody demanded we leave. We made hot chocolate, drank coffee, told stories, listened to owls, watched our breath disappear into the darkness, and sat together around a fire until morning started finding us. The gear needs work. The family doesn't.

Much love.

Stay safe.

Wash your damn hands.

And I will see you, next time.