The Soggy, Foggy Campout Read online

  “What do we do now?” I heard Emily scream.

  That was the best question I had ever heard her ask.

  The rain was pounding down on us. And to make things worse, fog was rolling in, as thick as pea soup with ham. I tried to follow the path of our tent as it rolled down the hill toward the lake. It was hard to see with all the fog and the rain.

  We were soaking wet, and even our sleeping bags were getting soggy.

  “I’ll go down the hill and get our tent,” Mom said. “Everyone stay just where you are.”

  “No!” Emily screamed. “Don’t leave me, Mommy.”

  Emily threw her arms around my mom. She held on so tight, she almost put her in a headlock. That girl could be a wrestler on TV. It was clear my mom wasn’t going anywhere without Emily attached to her like a fanny pack.

  “I’ll go after the tent,” I said. I couldn’t believe that those words had come out of my mouth. But there they were.

  “Frankie!” I yelled over the wind. “You stay here and stand guard. Cheerio, you come with me.”

  Cheerio yipped and looked at me as if to say, “You’ve got to be kidding. Do I look like I’m wearing a raincoat?”

  He dived into my sleeping bag, and all I could see was the shape of a long body burrowing into the deep end of my bag.

  “Okay, I guess it’s just me,” I said.

  “Here, take the flashlight,” my mom said, rummaging around in her duffel bag to find it. “And come right back with the tent.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said in the most confident voice I could come up with. “I’ll handle this.”

  I turned on the flashlight and jumped off the wooden platform. What had been solid ground in the afternoon was now a sea of slippery mud. I’d like to say I landed on my feet, but I didn’t. I’d like to say I landed on my knees, but I didn’t. That leaves only one possibility, and you guessed it. I landed smack on my backside.

  “You okay, Zip?” I heard Frankie call out.

  “No problem,” I hollered back. “I meant to do that.”

  Since I was already on the ground, I thought I’d just stay there and crawl the rest of the way. I waded through the mud on my hands and knees. Every few feet, I’d stop and shine the flashlight ahead of me, looking in the distance for our tent. The flashlight didn’t help much, because all it did was light up the fog.

  Just keep going forward, I said to myself. You can’t be scared now. Everyone is counting on you.

  It’s too bad that I was too nervous to answer myself.

  I continued crawling down the muddy hill, trying to listen for the sound of a flapping tent. I was so busy listening that I crawled right into a big puddle of muddy water. I lost my balance and dropped the flashlight. I reached out to search for it, digging my hands into the mud in front of me. I grabbed on to something that I hoped was the flashlight, but it wasn’t! It was long and thin and slimy.

  “Yikes! A snake!” I yelled as I pulled it out of the ground.

  It took me a few seconds to realize the snake wasn’t moving. That’s because it wasn’t a snake at all. But it was a snake-shaped old tree root, so you can’t blame me for being a little scared.

  I decided to leave the flashlight behind. Through the howling wind, I thought I heard the tent flapping in the distance. I had to get to it. Just the thought of my mom and Emily and Frankie sitting out in the open was enough to push me forward.

  I crawled past swaying trees and empty campsites. Up ahead, I saw the shadowy outline of something wide and dark. Because of the thick fog, I couldn’t make out what it was. It could have been our tent. Or it could have been a bear. I stopped moving and held my breath, waiting for it to roar.

  It flapped instead.

  Phew! It was our tent!

  I crawled toward it at top speed. I don’t think I’ve ever crawled so fast in my life, not even when I was a baby. Just before I reached the tent, another gust of wind blew so hard, it snapped off a tree branch. I rolled over in the mud just in time for the branch to land on the ground next to me.

  I scrambled to my feet and lunged at the tent, grabbing at it so hard I fell over on it. I heard another snap, but this time it wasn’t a tree branch. It was the plastic poles that held our tent up, breaking in two. It didn’t matter, though. At least I had the tent in my hands.

  I turned and started up the hill, my legs ankle-deep in mud. The mud was so thick that I could barely lift my feet out to take the next step. I was totally surprised when I realized that my foot was out but my shoe was still stuck under all that muck.

  Oh well, I thought, one shoe down, but I’ve still got the other one. Onward, Hank!

  I headed up the path, struggling to hold on to the tent as it flipped and flopped in the wind. It was slow going, but I was making it. That is, until I saw the two eyeballs glowing in the dark on the path in front of me. Suddenly, there were four eyeballs, then six. Maybe there were more, but I stopped counting at six. Any creature with over six eyeballs was definitely not one that I wanted to meet.

  “Excuse me, whoever you are,” I said, “but could you please step off the path? My family needs me.”

  Not one of the six eyeballs moved. Obviously, the polite approach wasn’t working, so I decided to make the loudest noise my throat could make.

  “Aarrgghhhuuugggaaahhhh!” I shouted.

  I squinted hard, trying to see the creature through the fog. At last it came into focus. It was a family of possums, just standing in the middle of the path.

  “Zengawii!” I yelled. “Possums, disappear!”

  They didn’t disappear, but what they did do was good enough for me. At the sound of my screaming voice, they rolled over on their sides and played dead. They just lay there, not moving a muscle.

  “Have it your way, guys,” I said.

  Grabbing the tent tightly, I ran past them. I glanced back, and they still weren’t moving.

  I scrambled up the last part of the hill, slipping and sliding in the mud. I squinted again, trying to find the platform, but I couldn’t see that far in front of me.

  The fog was so thick, it was like being in a dark gray cloud. Then I saw it off to the left. Or maybe it was the right. I’m not good at directions. But, anyway, I recognized our red-and-white cooler sitting on the edge of the wooden platform. As I got closer, I could see something was strange, though. Nobody was on the platform.

  “Mom!” I shouted. “Where are you guys?”

  But there was no answer.

  My heart started to race. Where were they? Had they left me alone out here? No, my mom would never do that. Oh no! Then maybe something had happened to them. Maybe they went looking for me and got lost in the soggy, foggy forest.

  “Mom!” I shouted again. My voice echoed in the darkness. I could hear that I was starting to panic.

  Then one of the sleeping bags started to talk. I couldn’t understand what it was saying, but it sounded like this.

  “Schmank, schmank.”

  I’d never heard that word before. I wondered what it meant. Was it an alien language?

  “Schmank,” I whispered to myself. And then it hit me. Schmank rhymes with Hank. The sleeping bag was calling my name!

  “I’m over here,” I yelled. “Next to the platform.”

  Suddenly four heads popped out of the sleeping bags—Frankie, Emily, Cheerio, and my mom.

  “Whoa, am I glad to see you guys!” I said, almost crying with relief. “Why were you hiding? Did you see a bear?”

  “We were just trying to stay dry,” my mom answered.

  “I even made us hats out of wax paper,” Emily said. “Cheerio hates wearing his.”

  “Did you find the tent, Hank?” Frankie asked. “No offense to you, Emily, but I think that will keep us drier than your wax-paper hats.”

  “Yes, I got it,” I said, holding up the soaking tent
.

  “You are the best, Zip!” Frankie crawled out of his sleeping bag. “I never doubted you. Let’s put it up right away.”

  “One small tent problem,” I said. “I fell on it and broke it.”

  Suddenly, there was a gust of wind followed by a giant burst of hard rain. It was as if a cloud above us had opened up and emptied itself out. And then there was a big crash. Our lantern was broken now, too.

  Emily screamed and dived back into my mom’s sleeping bag.

  “Hank, how badly is the tent broken?” my mom asked. “We need shelter . . . now.”

  “I’ll figure this out, Mom,” I said. “You just take care of Emily and Cheerio.”

  My mom disappeared back into her sleeping bag, leaving Frankie and me to build a shelter. I slipped the tent poles out, hoping that at least one of them hadn’t broken. No such luck. I had four short poles that would be perfect if I were building a tent for Cheerio. But they sure wouldn’t work to build a tent that we could all fit into.

  “If we could put all these pieces together to make one long pole, we could build some sort of tepee,” I suggested.

  “Great thinking,” Frankie said. “That’s using the old Zipzer brain. Except how are we going to connect the poles? You don’t happen to have any glue on you, do you?”

  I looked around the platform, searching for an idea. I saw Emily’s bag, our red-and-white cooler, Frankie’s backpack, my dad’s emergency kit, and my mom’s knitting bag.

  Wait a minute, Hank. Back up. Dad’s emergency kit—maybe there’s something in there that I could use.

  I jumped across the platform, grabbed the kit, and unzipped it. There were enough first-aid supplies in there to open a hospital. Rubber gloves, batteries, needles and thread, light sticks, gauze, adhesive tape, anti-itch cream, a silver emergency blanket, and a pack of twenty-five Band-Aids of every size and shape. My dad always says “be prepared,” and boy, was he ever!

  I took the light sticks, the Band-Aids, the gauze pads, and the adhesive tape and ran back to Frankie.

  “What’s all that for?” he asked.

  “Dr. Zipzer reporting to surgery,” I said. “I’m going to operate on the pole.”

  I snapped the center of one of the light sticks. It put out a soft green glow. That was good enough for us to see what we were doing. Frankie matched the four pieces of pole together, while I ripped open the gauze pads. I wrapped a bunch of them around the spots where the poles connected.

  “You hold this tight,” I told Frankie. “Don’t let go.”

  Then I grabbed the twenty-five Band-Aids and tore each one out of its wrapper. One by one, I peeled the paper off the sticky parts and placed them over the gauze until I couldn’t see it anymore.

  “You can let go now,” I told Frankie. “It should hold.”

  “I don’t think so, Zip. The connection is still too weak. I think we need to double it up with adhesive tape.”

  “Okay,” I said. “And maybe I can use the light stick as a splint.”

  I pulled out the roll of adhesive tape. Frankie held the light stick tightly against the pole, and I wrapped a whole lot of tape around it, making sure I left enough of the light unwrapped so we could still see. Between the gauze and the Band-Aids and the light stick and the adhesive tape, we had made one long pole.

  “Here we go,” I said. “One tepee coming up.”

  We propped the pole up using all our duffel bags. Then we threw the tent over the pole. We held one side down using the cooler and the other side with Dad’s emergency kit. For extra protection, we threw the thin silver emergency blanket over the top.

  “That’s one weird-looking tepee,” Frankie said.

  “True,” I agreed. “Let’s hope that it works.”

  I stuck my head inside. It was dry. No rain was getting through.

  “Mom!” I yelled. “We’ve got shelter. Come on out!”

  My mom crawled out of her sleeping bag holding Emily’s hand. I noticed that Emily’s braids were dripping like a leaky water faucet.

  “Our tepee doesn’t look like much,” I explained, “but it works.”

  “You did a great job, boys,” she said.

  My mom led Emily across the platform. I held part of the tepee up high enough for them to crawl in.

  “Cheerio!” I called. “Come on, puppy!”

  I saw a small moving lump scooting along inside the sleeping bag, then Cheerio’s head popped out. He scampered out and started to run in circles.

  “We don’t have time for that now, Cheerio,” I told him. “Get in here. No tail-chasing inside tepees.”

  Cheerio went into the tepee. Frankie and I followed him, closing the flap behind us. As soon as I sat down, Cheerio jumped in my lap and licked my face, as if to say thank you, Hank.

  “What a relief,” my mom said. “It’s dry in here.”

  “But it’s really dark, too,” Emily said in a little voice.

  “Perfect for telling ghost stories,” Frankie told her. “Anyone got one?”

  “I do,” I said. I cleared my throat and lowered my voice to a whisper. “It was a dark and stormy night in Ghostville—just like this one.”

  Before I could get another sentence out, our whole tepee was lit up by two beams of light.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “We are not alone.”

  “Mommy,” Emily said, her voice sounding very little and shaky.

  “Who’s there?” I called out.

  But the only answer I got was the sound of the wind howling through the trees.

  A few seconds later, we heard a door slam, then footsteps sloshing through the mud. They were coming toward our tepee. I gulped. Cheerio buried his head in my lap, and Emily buried her head in my mom’s lap.

  “It’s probably just the groundskeeper, Elvis What’s-his-name,” Frankie said.

  “It’s Jed What’s-his-name,” I answered.

  The footsteps grew closer and closer.

  “Where is everyone?” a voice called out.

  Wait a minute. I knew that voice.

  “We’re in here, Dad!” I shouted.

  “In where? I don’t see the tent.”

  “It’s a tepee now. Come in!”

  I lifted a side and stuck my head out. My dad got down on his knees and crawled in.

  “I was so worried,” he said. “I should never have left you guys.”

  “Hank took very good care of us,” my mom told him.

  “The tent blew totally away,” Emily chimed in, “and Hank went out in the dark and found it.”

  “I lost our flashlight, though, Dad. I’m sorry.”

  My dad reached out and put his arm around my shoulder.

  “Don’t you even think about that,” he said. “You did a great job looking after everyone. I was the one who got scared, but you—you were the brave one. You showed a lot of courage. And you took responsibility. I’m so proud of you, son.”

  My ears nearly flew off my head. Usually my dad tells me that I need to take more responsibility. But here he was telling me how proud he was of me. Wow, that made me so happy.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said. “But I have to tell you that Frankie helped me a lot.”

  “I bet he did.” My dad reached out and put his other arm around Frankie. “You boys are good friends.”

  “And the important thing is that we’re all safe and dry and together,” my mom said.

  Just then, some rainwater dribbled in through the crack where the pole was attached to the tent.

  “Well, pretty dry,” I said.

  “A little water never hurt anyone,” my dad said. “We’re not going to melt, are we, kids?”

  “We could go back to the car for shelter,” my mom said.

  “We like it in here,” Frankie and I said.

  “Okay,” my dad said. “Let�
��s settle in until the rain stops. I’m not leaving you guys ever again.”

  We snuggled together in our tepee and listened to the rain. In the green glow of the light stick, it seemed very peaceful in there. Even my dad was calm.

  “I have a great idea,” my mom said after a while. “How about a little snack to take our minds off the rain.” She looked around the tepee. “I don’t see the red-and-white food cooler.”

  “We used it to hold down the tepee,” Frankie said.

  “Do you want me to go out and get stuff from it?” I asked.

  “Thanks, Hank, but it’s my turn,” Dad said.

  He crawled under the tepee flap, and I heard him rustling around in the cooler. When he returned, he was carrying plastic baggies filled with graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate squares.

  “S’mores!” we cheered.

  “Except we don’t have a fire,” Emily pointed out. “How are we going to melt everything?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Zipzer’s Famous Cold S’mores?” my dad said. “They’re a treat known around the world.”

  “And we’re going to make them now,” my mom said. For the first time that night, she was actually laughing.

  She gave each of us two graham crackers, two marshmallows, and two squares of chocolate.

  “Now make a sandwich,” she said.

  We all did.

  “And now comes the best part,” she said. “Take a bite.”

  To be very honest, I like my s’mores better with a toasted marshmallow and the chocolate all melty and smooth. But this s’more was pretty special. As we listened to the rain drip-dropping on our tepee, I thought it was the best midnight snack I’d ever had. Suddenly, inspiration struck me. I opened my mouth and this is what came out: