Weathering the Storm

“We don’t usually get storms in the summer,” my friend Casey explains as we stare up at jet-black clouds gathering above us in the night sky. “This never happens.”

We are standing on a farm located a short drive from Seattle, where Casey lives with her wife Amelia and their two young daughters. We’re here to camp for the weekend, the culmination of a weeklong trip that’s reunited me with three of my best friends, probably the only people who could have convinced me to go camping in the first place.

“It’ll be fun,” Tori exclaimed more than once throughout the week, right up until she found out Washington state bans wood-burning campfires during the summer. Without telling anyone, she quietly placed a pickup order for a Weber grill from a nearby Target because, for her, camping without the possibility of making s’mores felt like a human rights violation.

I was too busy marveling at the amount of things required to sleep outside to pay attention to the weather forecast.

Casey and Amelia spent the week marshaling tents and mattress pads from friends and neighbors, somehow conjuring enough shelter and sleeping materials for our group of ten. We would cook on a stove that closed into a metal briefcase, sit on chairs that folded into bags and eat from coolers piled to the brim with food and drinks. We spent Friday morning stuffing one SUV and two cars with what looked like enough gear to open our own REI - and that was before Tori picked up the Weber.

Not that we didn’t have the space.

We had rented the largest camping area on the farm; a collection of grassy clearings with a clump of towering trees in the middle, bordered on two sides by pastures. One was filled with tall grasses while the other belonged to a neighboring farm whose white wooden sign out front advertised Arabian horses.

“The horses are here!” one of us would shout periodically throughout the weekend when we spotted them, sending the kids scrambling over to the fence to watch as a pair of stunningly beautiful creatures wandered by like the last members of a parade, long after the crowds have dispersed. They’d linger for a minute just beyond the wired barrier, looking to see if we had anything interesting for them to chomp on before moseying off, never straying more than an arm’s length from each other.

“I just want everyone to note how good I’ve been about camping,” my friend Mara proclaimed on Saturday while we sat in the shade next to a nearby lake, watching their kids play in the water. “If anything, Travis has been the high-maintenance one.”

She wasn’t wrong.

Aside from not being able to go inside all weekend, my main concern was the lack of a functioning bidet, which also felt like a human rights violation. Everyone assured me I had nothing to worry about because this farm had both a sink and a shower. With hot water! Plus, the listing highlighted the fact that they threw sawdust in the outhouse toilet.

What more could you want?

It’s been over a year since we all last saw each other, not that it matters; we always manage to fall back into ourselves, quickly morphing into a roaming gaggle of jokes and laughter. We’ve known each other more than half our lives now, which means exactly no one was surprised to hear I enjoy modern comforts and Mara would like to be congratulated for not complaining. We were just kids when we met in college and now everyone has kids of their own, tiny versions of their parents who help mark the passage of time by sprouting in front of our eyes, growing taller and more distinct with every visit.

But the kids were all fast asleep by the time the storm rolled in.

“Are you guys still out there camping?” Amelia’s mom texted from somewhere along the path of the storm. When she heard that we were, in fact, still very much exposed to the elements, she responded with one word. “Yikes.”

“It’ll be fine,” Amelia assured us, right before admitting she had never actually camped during a storm.

“Because they never happen in the summer!” Casey chimed in again as the sky lit up with lightning.

Tori, whose two children were sleeping in a tent directly underneath the massive trees, worried they might all be crushed under falling branches. This fear seemed entirely warranted to me, as did Mara’s desire to just pack up the whole camp and head back to Casey’s perfectly good house with its perfectly good plumbing.

Instead, we woke up Tori and Mara’s daughters and dragged each of their tents out into the middle of the clearing, staking them in the grass just as the sky opened up, sending everyone scurrying to their respective shelters.

When I laid down on the floor of my bright orange tent that was only slightly bigger than a phone booth, the earth beneath me felt like a swelling waterbed, if waterbeds also contained sticks and rocks. While the storm raged outside, I wondered what would happen if lightning struck the tree above me, showering down sparks that would surely set my tent on fire or worse, send an electoral current straight through the giant puddle I was now effectively sleeping in.

Really? This is how I’m going to die? Camping?

“Remember, a tent offers NO protection from lightening,” I read on Google just before my phone shut off, the battery exhausted after a day full of taking pictures and filming a movie the kids created about disappearing into another dimension. With nothing to do but sleep, I closed my eyes and imagined the roaring rain sounds were coming from the white noise app I usually turn on before bed.

Only this time, I was inside of it.

When I woke up the next morning still very much alive, I crawled out of my tent and headed to the car to charge my phone, finding Mara already sitting in the front seat. We swapped battle stories from the night and laughed at our absurdities for about an hour before deciding it was time to wake up the rest of the group, which we did by subtly moving our conversation out of the car and closer to their tents.

“GOOD MORNING!” I shouted as Tori unzipped her tent’s front flap, motioning for me to be quiet because her girls were still sleeping. “YOU READY TO GO?”

We packed up our things quickly.

The sky was now a perfect blue as tents were rolled into wet logs and tossed into the carrier atop the SUV, random bags shoved into the closest open trunk, and the Weber - after being thoroughly rinsed in the storm - was put back into its box, destined to be added to Casey and Amelia’s camping cache.

Because despite mercilessly mocking Tori for sneaking a grill into her car, in the end we all apologized, grateful for the time we spent sitting around its smoldering coals, making good s’mores and even better memories.