Good Old Charlie

Good Old Charlie

I recall the sense of adventure that Charlie and I had when we planned our campouts and hiked the five miles to the state park. We were next door neighbors and must have been eleven or twelve at the time. A portion of the park was set aside for the Boy Scouts, of which we were both members, and we would go there set up our tent and build our campfire pit. We became quite expert at quickly setting up camp, building a smokeless fire, and boiling a pot of water all in under twenty minutes. Into the hot water we dropped peeled sassafras roots. After drinking the tea and safely stowed our food and gear in our tent, we would explore the woods. I enjoyed looking for any unusual dead wood that could be used for a walking stick. Once I found what looked exactly like a club with a large, smooth rock firmly embedded at its end. I envisioned that some Indian warrior had fashioned this club eons ago. I wondered how many brains he had bashed in with it. More than likely it was just part of a tree root that had grown around the rock. I kept that club for many years before losing track of it.

Charlie and I went camping in any weather, rain or snow, it didn’t matter to us. I relied a great deal on Charlie's keen sense of organization. It was a great feeling of accomplishment to know that we could plan our clothing and food supplies, pack them with us, and spend the weekend in the woods and be as comfortable as if we were in our own back yards. I remember the smell of pine needles and how soft they felt, like a carpet, as we walked across them. We would cut fresh spruce pine boughs to spread on the ground for our beds. We smelled of pine needles and smoke.

At night, away from the light pollution of the city, the stars revealed themselves in all their galactic splendor. We easily pointed out the Big and Little Dippers, the North Star, Cassiopeia, and a half a dozen more constellations. We would  sit near the campfire and talk about girls, space aliens, school mates, and our latest hobby, which at the time was, making marionette puppets. The previous year we learned magic. We put on a show for the neighborhood kids. Charlie was the magician, I was his assistant.

Early mornings, we boiled water and made hobo coffee by throwing a handful of ground coffee into the water letting it settle to the bottom before sipping it from the hot rim of tin cups. The woods filled with the aroma of bacon and scambled eggs frying in an old blackened cast iron pan. We made toast by spearing slices of bread with green twigs and holding them over the smokeless fire.

On what was to be our last walk home, we were horsing around and I gave Charlie a shove. He stumbled and fell into a thorn apple tree where a large thorn punctured his thumb. Biting his bottom lip, he grimaced in pain. I felt like such a putz. I wanted to help him but it was too deep and our first-aid kit wasn’t up to the job. We stopped at the first house and asked to use their phone. The old woman at the door happened to be a retired nurse. With a long pair of tweezers, she expertly extracted the thorn. Dripping blood, it was over an inch long. She doused the puncture wound with peroxide and iodine, and neatly bandaged and wrapped his thumb. He was silent throughout the ordeal, and the only thing out of Charlie's mouth was a quiet, "Thank you ma'am." We decided not to use the phone. Charlie was now the wounded warrior marching home from war.

That was our last outing. It’s not that Charlie was mad or anything, we just never found the time. It seemed that school, sports, and girls were taking up most of our waking hours. We never did finish our puppets project. After graduating high school it would be fifty years before I saw Charlie again. He was a retired Physician's Assistant and he looked old and frail, yet it was Charlie alright. He had kept several newspaper clippings of my high school football glory days. Preserved in plastic envelopes, he presented them to me at our class reunion. Can you believe that? Good old Charlie.