Tornado threatens campsite; papers strewn about

“Life is what happens when you’re making other plans,” so says the well-worn cliché. And, as we get older, and things like families and mortgages and other adult pastimes crop up in lieu of the things you used to do, like drink with your buddies three nights a week till the wee hours, you find that the things you formerly held dear are harder and harder to come by. You still hold them dear, but only as memories.

Captain and I grew up in the same town, and, after our fairly trivial academic pursuits (in which he was much more successful than I was), eventually ended up in Bloomington in our mid-20s. There were plenty of nights during that time that we spent together, drinking cheap domestic beer and painting the town yellow, trying our damnedest to find new bands to go see, and just generally having a good time, all the time.

I was the first to be domesticated, as I married Mrs. Tamble and moved out of Bloomington, back to the county in which we grew up. Captain stayed in town, moving from apartment to apartment as leases ended, before finally finishing his degree, getting married himself and snagging his first teaching job in the eastern part of the state. I visited him over there exactly once; it was about a 3-hour drive.

So, when I got the news that he was moving back my way, I was pretty excited. But it hasn’t come to pass for various reasons, our spending copious amounts of time together. Not making excuses, just saying.

All of this is a long way of saying that under normal circumstances, I would have declined the invitation he gave me to spend a Friday evening with him, drinking and listening to the new Robert Pollard album, had I known that there would be only little drinking and “listening to the new Pollard album” would be replaced by “camping.”

It’s not that I have anything against camping, it's just that I’m not a particularly outdoorsy type, myself; I tend to think that the Great Outdoors would be a whole lot better if they were inside. And, said camping excursion was threatening to be accompanied by some really rotten spring weather (torrential downpours, thunderstorms, tornado outbreaks, etc.). While I inwardly questioned the wisdom of pitching a tent in what was sure to be doom-laden weather, the fact of the matter remained that the Captain and I see each other about twice a year anymore, and I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity when the stars were finally in alignment and both of our schedules allowed us to hang out together for awhile.

I met Captain and Mrs. Captain at their home, and then followed them to a local state park early Friday evening as the skies were already carrying an ominous air about them. The short time that we spent together at the campsite was punctuated by me making smartass comments about the weather as they hurriedly tried to set up camp and build a fire:

- when I saw a tiny break in the stormclouds to the north of us: “Hey, I think that’s what they call ‘the eye.’”

- “Hey, have y’all ever seen that show on Discovery, ‘I Shouldn’t Be Alive’? Just saying.”

As the lightning in the distance started to pick up and the weather more immediately at hand began to worsen, and I made only an itty-bitty effort to help them maintain a fire, half-assedly tossing crumpled phone book pages into the embers that had miraculously recovered from life-support status a mere minutes earlier (punctuating each toss with a "Die Ken Nunn!" in protest of the injury lawyer's mug on the back cover of the phone book), the ranger drove up:

“Do you guys have a radio up here?”

“No.”

“There’s a tornado warning for our county.”

That, of course, was my cue: I gathered my chair and was all, “Time for this ratfink to head out - so long, suckers!” As much in love with the weather as I say I am, I had a close call with a tornado back in November (detailed in an earlier post), and have since come to realize that severe weather is not something to be trifled with. I think the Captain Family understood, but I could sense a little disappointment – maybe it was my disappointment in myself. Or maybe I just confirmed that I was a butthole.

As it turns out, the camping outing was aborted soon after. That's what I call a "happy ending," but I doubt that's what Mrs. Captain had in mind.