Sleeping Out

            I work in a building where many of my co-workers complain about the mold and mildew.  They say it arouses their allergies, and they have taken to calling it a “sick building.”  If I were to start referring to it as such, I would say that the name might have more to do with the attitude of the occupants than the structure itself.

            I personally adore the smell.  To me that smell is a doorway in time, back to my childhood.  It is the smell of a canvas tent, well used and put away by a small boy whose definition of dry wasn’t quite the same as his father’s. 

            That tent was my first avenue to the adventures of camping out.  My father had come home with the tent, one day when I was five.  It wasn’t new, which even at five I could tell.  I don’t know where he had picked it up, probably a ditch on the side of the road, but I was five and new or old didn’t matter to me.  I had a tent. 

            My cousin had had a tent, but apparently it hadn’t fared too well on a cold December campout in his back yard.  Flammable not being a word that had become part of my cousin’s vocabulary at that point, his unwise efforts to provide some lifesaving heat had proved problematic for the tent.

            The day my father came home with the tent was magical.  We thought, talked and acted like mountain men all day long, without the scratching and cussing that is.  That night we cooked out over a campfire.  We ate like I’m sure all the best mountain men ate (popcorn and root beer floats).  Then we finished the night snoring away to the delightful, moldy scent of old canvas.  I thought the evening a total success. 

            The next weekend, my tentless cousin came to spend the night.  The food was about the same, but he added a bit of authenticity to the night with what I was sure was some authentic mountain man style cussing and scratching.  Though flammable wasn’t part of his vocabulary, he had obviously spent enough time around mountain men to acquire some of their other linguistic peculiarities.  By the sound of it, those mountain men had been pounding their fingers with hammers, and dropping heavy objects on their toes while my cousin was engaged in new vocabulary acquisition.

            The popcorn and root beer float portion of the evening was enjoyable, as it had been the previous weekend with my father.  I must admit I enjoyed the show of cussing and scratching as well, but before we had been out more than a couple hours I noticed a strange phenomenon.  In just the one week since I had spent the night out with my father, the nights had become noticeably darker, exponentially so.  And where just the week before there hadn’t been so much as an owl, cat or stray dog that had come to visit, my cousin and I were experiencing what could be described as a monsoon of monsters and viscous animals.  We could hear them just on the other side of the canvas. 

            The night before I had been lucky enough to stay up late and watch the first half of The Blob, on Nightmare Theater. 

Good Parent Advice - If you are going to let your young child watch the beginning of a scary movie, it is imperative that at the point in the movie that your child sees the monster, you must realize you have reached the point of no return.  You must allow the child to watch the movie to the conclusion, where the heroes defeat the monster and the world is safe once more.  Otherwise that monster will arrive in your child’s life every time the light gets low enough to make reading difficult.

            As I was saying, the night before I had gotten my first glimpse of The Blob.  I knew the Blob still lived because I had seen its gelatinous mass quivering in the doctor’s office after consuming the teenager that had come across it in the woods.

            Soon after we had bedded down, my cousin complaining that the smell of the tent was affecting his allergies, I heard the wet mucusy sounds of an approaching gooey mass.  I shook my cousin awake. 

            “Chance, it’s the Blob.”  Even though the sounds of the monster’s approach had stopped as it heard me croak the warning to my cousin, Chance obviously appreciated the gravity of the situation.

            “What?!  The Blob!  Help, Uncle Paul!” Chance yelled as he exited through the side of tent, where previously there had been no exit.  The last echoes of my father’s name still quivered in the air as my cousin entered my house.  He was soon joined by me and the rest of my family who had been awakened by Chance’s screech.  It was then that I noticed something I had been suspecting since I had first learned of the existence of mountain men.  Mountain men sleep in the buff.  My sister also learned something that the other girls at school wouldn’t believe her about until they found out for themselves in the seventh grade growth and development class.

            My cousin and I later figured that mountain men must survive through employing the same glass-shattering, high-pitched screech.  It obviously was capable of frightening away a full grown Blob, so surely it would be capable of driving off something as insignificant, by comparison, as a grizzly bear.

            Armed with a new knowledge of sleeping out survival tactics, I spent many nights sleeping out with friends that summer.  Almost every time I would hear the mucusy respiration of the Blob.  I was however, never able to get tentmate corroboration of these sighting, or rather, listenings.  Each campout evening, the Blob would stealthily depart immediately upon my rousing whatever companion was in attendance.  That friend would then spend the rest of the night listening for the same wet sound that caused me to awaken the him.  However, on not one occasion did the gelatinous devil return after my tent companion had awakened.  I took this as an obvious sigh that the beast was as clever as it was evil.

            I always explained to my companions that they need not worry while camping out with me, because I had learned many valuable lifesaving mountain man skills.  The “screech” and the appropriate use of the emergency mountain man tent exit which my cousin had been kind enough to create in the side of the tent, earlier that summer.  With these two skills, I would tell my fellow camper, survival was assured, or at least pretty likely.

            I still have that old tent.  It must be fifty or sixty years old by now.  I went to the garage today and pulled it out.  I unrolled the lovely, pasty green package and was greeted with that familiar nostalgic scent.  My eyes began to tear up as I spread out the wrinkled green fabric.  The old ropes felt rough against my hands, like I remembered they always had, and I heard the resonating clank of heavy long steel nails that we had used as tent stakes.  My father would have used those nails on landscape timbers thirty-something years ago if they hadn’t found their way into those folds of green canvas. 

            I snuffled a sigh through mucusy nostrils and rolled the package shut again to the clack of wooden tent poles.  Instead of pushing my old friend back to the hidden recesses of garage shelves, I hid it in my car.  It would be a present for my son, tomorrow.  A dense wrinkled green something that looked like it had been found on the side of the road. 

            Smiling, I took out a handkerchief and sneezed my way back into the house.