In which the author and his daughter have a half-adventure on Round Bald.
On the way home from Christmas I proposed a camping trip at Roan Mountain and my middle child was the only one who hasn’t experienced camping with me as something to be avoided. Bless her heart. She, like me, never remembers it with the regrets it usually deserves–tastelessly prepared food, terrible and painful sleep, fear of mad men and wild animals, etc.
We arrived at Carver’s Gap in the early evening with backpacks too small to carry the mess of things that I had decided were essential for one night up on the bald a one mile walk from the car. Tent. Tarps. Zucchini. A pot we bought at a Thrift Store near Banner Elk.
Our Roan Mountain Adventure Began Well
We gleefully walked to Round Bald and gathered firewood before the sun went down. She loved it. We built a fire. I burned the zucchini in the pan. We roasted marshmallows.
And then it turned dark and a drizzly fog moved in. Our fire grew increasingly more difficult to maintain–though I did wander off multiple times to gather the reed-like stems of some long-dead flowers enough to burn and keep the hard-fought fire from flaming out.
My daughter sat in the door of the tent in the dark mist and watched comically with stoic curiosity my attempts to resurrect the fire that burned a quick brief orange only long enough for me to head into the fog and return with more reeds to continue the cycle.
From a distance in the fog it must have resembled someone smoking in the dark. I finally realized that giving up on that endeavor was probably the best use of energy.
I wish I was one of those dads with a story ready to tell to brighten the mood and spin yarn after yarn to fill the time that we would soon be spending in the tent staring into the dark or looking at our phones until their last minutes of battery power.
But I’m not.
I don’t know any good stories for a cold foggy camping night in December. I should have brought some playing cards. No fire. No stories. No good snacks except the bag of cold marshmallows.
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From 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. we lay there in our sleeping bags.
“What do we do now?” she asked me. I had the same question, so I said nothing. Then I said “I should have brought some playing cards or something.”
After a while of trying to doze off and then her waking me up she threw her head back on her sleeping bag. “This sucks!”
I had to agree. And some guys in a neighboring campsite were growing increasingly drunk and loud around their emasculating blaze of a fire, and I was growing increasingly nervous and bored. “You want to leave,” I asked her, somewhat jokingly.
“Yeah,” she said, half laughing.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I want to go.”
