Fiddler with a stick

A fiddler with a stick...

Sounds crazy, no? But here, in the middle of the Georgia wilderness, you might say everyone in my family is a fiddler with a stick, trying to scratch the tip of our sticks against rocks to make them sharp without breaking them. It isn't easy. You may ask, "why do we bother with sticks when Walmart sells sharp metal rods for only five bucks?" Well, we go out into the woods because it isn't our home. And how do we manage to make amazing s'mores without fancy tools? That I can tell you in one word! Tradition!

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One bundle of firewood and a hatchet is all my father allotted for our campfire. Sounds fair, until you realize we are staying out here three nights.

We arrive at dusk after a day's drive, so when the morning sun rises, we emerge with wonder in our eyes, explorers in a strange new land.

We glanced around by lantern light the night before, peering at strange forms that might be tomorrow's prey. But now the real race begins; with the morning light, we venture into undiscovered territory like a pack of wolves contending for the prize.

There she is through the clearing! Thick, but not so thick that you can’t get a hatchet through her. Dry, soft, with dozens of enticing arms jutting every which way.

"Found one!" I call out. Soon we corner her, which we have to in order to carry her back to camp. I've won the prize of knowing I have provided the fuel for our campfire for the next two nights. Throughout the day, we take turns hacking up the old fallen tree.

Before I understood it, I hated that we arrived at our campsites at night. One might say we did this because my father worked on Fridays, and we couldn't leave till late. However, there never seemed to be a rush to catch the sunset. Impatient as all hell, I would try my best, but my dad had his own vision of how things would go.

Arriving at night gave us focus and an enemy; it was us against the darkness. We found our lot, parked the car, and lept into action, armed with only a couple of flashlights between us. We couldn't sleep, eat, or lounge around until we set camp and started the fire; we wouldn't want to either. After all, there could be anything in the woods, raccoons, bears, chupacabras, you name it. Night gave us a sense of urgency and camaraderie you couldn't find in the daytime.

There is no comparable feeling to waking up in unfamiliar territory. The mind is clear, and the world isn’t “the place in the woods that we drove to that's connected to the road that's connected to the freeway that's connected to the road that's connected to our house.” Through sleep, our context has been reset; we build this place’s daylit image fresh. For the labor day weekend, it feels like we have always been here, surviving in the woods.

The second night is where we go all out with our campfire; stoking the fire from sunset till night until the coals are low and hot. Then, with the last remaining light, we chop veggies, prepare the chicken to lay nicely on the grill, and baste with barbecue sauce.

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I am twenty-eight years old now; for my birthdays, my favorite place to go is Korean barbecue. It reminds me of these times in the woods when we went about cooking in the same way, gathered around, placing preparations on the grill, then directly into our bellies; the main difference is the smoke.

There was no recipe, just raw meats, veggies, salt, and pepper. For us, the taste of summer was an uneven gradient of half-cooked to overcooked vegetable matter; barbecue chicken with an unreplicable smokey flavor; bits of dirt and tinfoil from the potatoes that “somehow still aren't cooked all the way through even though they have been laying directly in the coals for over two hours.”

After supper came the main event. S’mores. We grabbed our weapons; wooden sticks. Sure, we could have bought metal rods but finding and forging our weapons was a quest. The details of these sticks form identities between us; what we value in a marshmallow roasting instrument, sturdiness, length, reliability, fashion; there was an entire field of study that would be otherwise unexplored with the introduction of consumerism; Stickology.

I can recall the countless stories of our found artifacts; the time we competed to roast at the greatest distance, marshmallows falling into the flames like Gollum into Mt Mordor as eleven-foot sticks comically crumbled under their own weight. The time we carefully searched for branches with limbs that could evenly cook the most marshmallows at a time; this was the only time we went through the entire value bag of marshmallows.

We had varying roasting methods; my brother was the most systematic, spinning slowly and evenly. I was the most impatient. Secretly I would play a game of chicken with the closeness to the fire, trying to find the very edge of combustion, an avid speedrunner of the marshmallow roast. Loving the meltiness of the chocolate, I would carefully prepare the cracker and chocolate landing site, igniting my marshmallow and quenching the flame between two crackers.

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While at Walmart, I noticed so many new things to accomplish the goal of melty chocolate that I never had as a kid; this is what inspired me to write this recollection in the first place.

- Marshmallows with chocolate inside the marshmallows. A stick with a cage that fits the shape of the completed s’more so you can roast the whole thing all at once. I pondered how easy it would be to make that perfect S’more we were after.

Yet, as I sit here, fighting my media addictions, trying to be the writer I have always wanted to be, I appreciate the imperfections of our adventures. With each passing year, quests into the woods come closer to sitting in an Rv watching Tv, having breakfast at Denny’s next to the park.

My father wasn’t a grizzled woodsman teaching us what it's like to be a man. He was and is a programmer with a middle-class wage. We could have afforded whatever we thought we needed to make the woods more bearable.

Nowadays, as it is with my dad, the perfect vacation involves getting away from the lights and the constant struggle I have with addiction. To feel myself alive and struggling with very tactile and primal obstacles. It's a time that feels impossible to get back to as nowadays we can take our computers and TVs in our pockets.

My advice is not to escape escape. Create memories, create stories; discover yourself .

To this day I appreciate the taste of “burnt.” It is a fond reminder of summer. My siblings and parents live in three different states now, and the labor day adventures we used to have are no more. However, when we get together, we are drawn to go to parks with a bag of coals so we can reminesce with these flavors of soot, smoke, and fire.