I'd been eagerly anticipating this night for months--well, ever since Christie G. convinced all the girls in our book club to forgo our monthly comfortable book-club night to brave the wild--the wild outdoors, that is.
Christie G. and Amber jointly own a pop-up camper; we could all go camping, discuss the book around the campfire, then spend the night (most of our book-club nights extend beyond midnight anyway, so what's a couple more hours?), then head home in the morning.
I jumped right on board. I used to love camping when I was a child (we didn't have a ton of money and there were so many kids in my family that anytime we went anywhere, we had to camp) and hadn't been but once with my husband, who isn't exactly a roughing-it type of guy, a couple years back. It would be great.
And it was great. Sitting around the campfire, I saw the exact moment I'd envisioned in my head in the days prior to our trip. It's rare to actually get the moment you hope for. The camp site was great, we had a nice view of the creek, and there was so much to eat and drink you couldn't want for anything.
The firewood Christie'd ordered wasn't waiting for us, so a man from the campground brought some by. He told us about the big, bad bears lurking in the woods, trying to scare the prissy girls that think they could hack it in the woods alone. We were more afraid of "Chester Molester" coming back and reaching his paws up through the opening at the edge of the camper. Bears weren't really the problem.
We did talk about the book. No one liked it, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, which I tried not to take personally since it was my book choice this month. Reading this book just proved one thing to me: Just because you can put words together poetically doesn't mean you can write a book. This book had glimpses of truth surrounded by a boring plot line and mundane, uninteresting characters.
I'm trying to take it less personally, but what I couldn't take less personally was when Christie G. came dancing out of the camper with her copy of the book and started ripping pages out and throwing them into the fire. Ha ha, I see the irony: she was throwing The Great Fire into the great campfire, but it didn't help my anxiety to see the printed page massacred. It hurt me to watch. Still not taking it personally. I didn't write the book.
We ate tons of food, played the "Imaginiff" game, then laid in our beds in the dark and played truth-or-dare. Just no dares, I know I was too afraid to go out there alone and do something that would end up being incredibly stupid or scary. It was like the slumber parties of yore (or even bedtime at college for me) when we'd sit up talking until one or two of us drifted off and the rest followed shortly after.
We woke the next morning, built another fire, ate more junk food, and then headed home. It was a night of bonding, definitely of much too much sugar, and an epiphany. We're a group that doesn't need more than what we already have. Who could want more than a night full of intimate talk, good friends, and that wonderful smell of camping in your clothes?
