Eric Hove
Campground Kids
At the end of the camping season, we were tasked with raking the leaves from the campsites out into narrow piles in the road. We worked in pairs with metal rakes. We’d rake leaves toward the pile while keeping the fire burning at the ends. The contest was to see which pair could make the longest trail of ash.
As it got closer to nightfall, one of us would head to the garage to rumble out with the John Deere five-wheeler and a trash barrel. The driver would assemble a search party while the rest of us stayed behind to pull apart the smoldering piles to starve the flames with space.
On the John Deere, the search party would drive from pine tree to pine tree looking for deposits of fallen needles and shovel them into the barrel until it neared the limit of what three or four kids could lift. All this was for the bonfire we’d start just after sunset. Nothing in our world burned wilder than dead pine needles.
The bonfire would be at the old man’s campsite and he’d talk about how we were nearing the years of Daniel and how UFOs were really just a type of angel called Thrones and how Ezekiel wrote about them and how Elijah was carried away by one and how the Fallen One would come back pretending to be an alien and that’s how the Devil would deceive the whole world.
Not us. We were practiced in the ways the world could burn.
Eric Hove lives, writes, and drinks beer in St. Paul, Minnesota.