Camping

Short Story by Rebecca Clifford

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As I shuffle through a shoebox of snapshots, I feel a sensation of warmth that is at once comfortably familiar and slightly nauseating; faded black and whites of children scrabbling over smooth faced rocks and playing in sand at various lakeshore locations...  Sioux Narrows, Kenora, Quetico, Grundy – the summers of my childhood were spent doing the rounds in Ontario’s provincial parks. As a geologist, my father made the most of the warmer months engaged in fieldwork on the Canadian Shield. Regardless of where we were, Dad left the campsite each morning as the sun rose, taking the family station wagon into the wilds, leaving my mother with four children until sundown. The shores of Huron and Superior became my second home.

These were the camping years of dark, dank, teetering outhouses and evening fog machines meant to kill the mosquitoes. Naïve to the dangers of chemical inhalation, children from all sites danced along in the fog each evening, grubby kneed rats after this toxic pied piper. It’s a wonder I didn’t grow two heads.