Wood's Wet

"Wood’s Wet!"

This requires a little background, so bear with me. This isn’t so much one inside joke, but a number of one-off things that happened that everyone still laughs about today, all of which are centered around our annual vacation together. There’s no single inside joke that stands above the rest, but “Wood’s Wet!” is one of the most memorable and probably the easiest to explain.

Years before I was born, my parents and their friends got together the week before Gen Con (the premier gaming convention pre-video games era) to camp out. They’d start trickling in from across the Midwest on Friday and camp out until the convention began on the following Thursday. It was nearly a week of playing board games and role-playing games of all sorts while tent camping before hitting the convention.

Being one of the first kids in the group, I was allowed to come along, and it became quite the family tradition. As I got older, I convinced more and more of my friends to join us, and that’s where the shenanigans (at least for me) started.

The years camping at Richard Bong Recreational Area were by far the funniest and best. Yes, my fourteen year old mind snickered at its name as well, but I assure you it’s a real place.

Close to forty people were camping that year at our group site, and like always, someone brought up a ton of firewood. This was before concerns about various tree diseases and pests were a major issue in our neck of the woods. One of the guys had a massive willow tree go down earlier in the year, and he brought a truckload of wood from it up with him.

Including the tree stump.

Typically, the beginning of August in southern Wisconsin was hot as leather seats in the sun, but it was downright chilly at night this particular year. The great thing about the weather is that fewer of Wisconsin’s state birds were bothering us. For those who haven’t been there, it is not American Robin, as they claim. It’s the mosquito.

Fire time was a huge part of the bonding experience when we were out camping. It was customary to gather around the fire pit each night to eat dinner, joke around, and whatnot. We had a group site, and the fire pit was giant. An octagon made up of old railroad timbers surrounded the area, making it a great place for most of us to sit and enjoy the fire. Most of us used the fire to cook meals as well.

We had established a couple of rituals throughout the years around the bonfire. One such ritual was setting one (or more) open Jiffy Pop™ popcorn containers into the fire while we sat close by while a group of us sat close by wearing shorts. We’d laugh as sizzling hot kernels of popcorn flew from the fire at one another.

Back to that tree stump. It was easily three to four feet in diameter, and while it was massive, willow is a surprisingly light wood. One of the guys hauled the thing by himself to the woodpile, which is to say the first of many things the men did that was stupid that week. But, those stories are for another day.

Now, we were seasoned tent campers and realized that the summer had been a wet one. The stump had spent most of the summer soaking in the rains, and we knew it was going to take a long time to dry out. There was a long hard look shared by all of us at that stump and a twinge of worry that ran through us that we weren’t going to be able to burn this truckload of wood we hauled hundreds of miles.

We underestimated just how wet.

When we went to light the first of the logs, and none of them took. That first night there was a cold one, and despite our best efforts, we managed the meagerest of flames that night. Sleeping bags and blankets were hauled out so no one was too cold while we went about talking and back to games. It was just one night.

The next day we spread to the four winds, and it turned out there wasn’t a dry log to be found within 30 miles of us either. This officially started the competition of who could successfully lite the stump on fire. Full disclosure, I can’t take credit for what finally worked.

Throughout the weekend, we collectively cast despairing looks at the fire pit from across our campsite as some poor fool or another kept trying to set the stump on fire instead of joining one of the many games being played. The lack of fire forced many of us into the nearest town to eat at the small restaurants since cooking over the open flame wasn’t an option. That wasn’t all bad. We found a place that had a cinnamon roll the size of your head, made fresh daily. It was amazing, and sadly they no longer make them.

We went through the predictable methods. Lighter fluid, newspaper and other paper products, and a myriad of fire-building techniques meant to maximize airflow without killing the fire. All which merely singed the massive stump.

By Sunday night, it had been three days with small fires that took more effort than they were worth to keep alight. By then, laughing cries of “wood’s wet!” followed every bad decision and every bad die roll in every game played. Storytelling was another part of our nighttime fire time rituals. Most of us were avid role-players after decades of playing Dungeon’s and Dragons™, and the lack of a fire made it hard to know who was all there at times. There had to be over twenty of us surrounding the fire pit that night, and in an effort to know how many of us there was, someone, called out for us to count off.

In nearly perfect unison, all of us roared, “one!”

It’s been decades, and we all still crack up laughing any time someone asks to count off.

The heat from the lone citronella candle burning underneath the edge of the tree stump failed to warm even a single soul that night. Everyone laughed and joked around for a bit longer but in ones and twos, nearly everyone turned in early. Being part of the younger crowd, I was up along with another friend as we chatted away into the wee hours of the morning.

The Perseids meteor shower usually occurred while we were there, and the two of us watched the night sky and the occasional meteor as it burned across the night sky. We were talking quietly about something when we realized glowing light from the fire pit was ruining our night vision.

We turned to see the stump had finally caught.

The flame from a lone citronella candle we had set underneath it as a joke had, after the better part of a day, finally jumped to the stump. The wood burned, crackled, and hissed as the heat from the lit part boiled away its trapped moisture.

The stump burned hot and fast. The entire thing was consumed in about thirty-three hours when it finally caught (don’t worry, there was someone always watching the fire) and burned hot enough that it was able to dry out the rest of the wood we had.

So when we cry out “wood’s wet!” all of us think about that one little citronella candle sitting underneath this massive stump and how it helped restore a sense of normality to our annual camping vacation.