The Sweetness of Camping.

You know what I really used to love about camping?
The cereal.
The cereal was so good.

Camping.
This was when mom would load the trunk of our old Pontiac Catalina with the most sugar-laced cereal known to mankind. At every other time of the year, yea, every single day of the year, you ate oatmeal. Like a horse. And you didn’t argue, or expect anything different. Like a horse.
But camping was a whole different story.
For some reason this was the time when pre-sweetened cereal rained down from on high, like manna.
You’d find it there in the morning, glistening in a bowl.
Back then I was not at all concerned with whatever profound reasoning process brought about the appearance of the cereal. It probably had more to do with convenience than anything else. Just pour milk, and eat. No fuss, and all that.
Maybe mom felt that cavities would never originate in a wilderness environment. Or that sugar took on wondrous nutritious properties when consumed outside city limits. I cared not for any such explanations, I simply marvelled that time and again, the cereal was there. And equating the taste of it with things like peripheral vistas of pine trees, morning mist, and the spatter of campsite water taps, remains with me to this day.
Eating pre-sweetened cereal at home was not, nor ever shall be, the same as eating it in the pre-human dawn of a campsite. I believe that there are certain differences, on a molecular level, that are impossible to understand scientifically.
For instance, when you are at home and you pour milk onto (say) Froot Loops, which is actually a prime example of the chemical process I am describing here.... nothing special happens, really. Cereal and milk. Whoop-de-doo!
But pour some milk over Froot Loops when you are shivering at a picnic table, with the fishing rod leaning beside you.
Birds sing.
Something in the air breaks little particles of simulated froot flavour from the actual loop, and these float there, discoloring the milk in a way that is impossible at home. The sugar hits you in ways that transcend explanation. There is electricity, and not a power outlet for miles.
You lift the plastic bowl to your lips to drink the dregs [note: for maximum effect, ensure that the bowl is plastic] and with this action, you are transformed.
Sleep, and/or the desire to sleep, is gone.
Thus empowered, you find yourself running now with the fishing rod across your back and a swinging, clattering tackle box at your side. Squirrels scatter.
You hope that you are in time to get down to the water before they open up the dam’s floodgates. On this side of the massive concrete walls the water has receded in the night, exposing on the jagged lakebed the hooks, the lures that yesterday’s anglers snagged on the rocks. You want to capitalize on their misfortune, you want to slip around on the damp rocks, picking treasure out of the cavities. Soon the gates will open and what is now visible will be buried by miles of water.
Hopefully no one has already been......

.....there he is.
It’s your own dad, his open and generously replenished tackle box revealing the fact that he ate his Froot Loops much earlier than you did.
“Heddon Tiny Torpedo” he says, holding up the two-barbed fish-nightmare. “Five bucks in Jim’s bait shop. Free out here, if you’re early enough.”
Together you continue to slide among the rocks, gathering, as the dam hums beside you. Soon, soon, and without warning, the water at its base will churn and froth. Even the hardiest of hook-gatherers will scramble to drier land where they will then attach lures to their lines, and cast them forth into the murky depths, to lose them among the same rocks for the rest of the day.
And tomorrow’s another one.
And none of this happens at home.
None of it.

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