Camping With Dad: A Struggle For Survival pt. 2

(The story so far: Marge suspects she is pregnant with Kevin's baby, while Murphy is planning a coup and toppling Herb from his position at Moonbat & Stein. Meanwhile, Angie is in jail for...wait, that's a different story. THIS story involves my father, after recovering from a heart attack, decides to take my brother and myself on a fishing expedition into the Canadian wilds. This decision, already fraught with problems, starting with having to fly to the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from anyone else, in a Buddy Holly Memorial Death-Plane, gets instantly worse when my father forgets to take our food off the airplane. We rejoin the three drunken idiots desperately trying to catch something...ANYTHING...to eat.)

By day three, the situation had turned grim.

The company that ran the fishing “expeditions” had three canoes for their clients to use. We put the first one into the water and it immediately sank. In the second canoe, some enterprising wasps had built an impressive nest that looked more like some kind of planned community for insects that was so big they had lovely little manicured lawns and tiny garden fountains…

Late in the afternoon of the second day, we managed to find an unopened can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew that had dropped out of the gear of the previous clients. Or, maybe it had slipped out of the pack of a soldier during the Great War. Or, maybe God had dropped it on the day when he invented dirt. In any case, we managed to heat it up on that night’s fire and gobble it down like food was going to be outlawed the next day which, considering the fish weren’t biting at all, was not far from the actual truth.

We bobbed up and down in our shabby but watertight canoe, fairly close to the shore on the huge, miles long lake; sunburnt, drunk, hungry, grubby, and silent. My brother Mike was using my Dad’s brand new, and very expensive, rod and reel. He went to cast and, for some unknown reason, he let go of the rod and the very expensive rod and reel splashed into the lake.

“Mike,” grumbled my Dad, “go in there and get that!”

Mike dutifully went over the side and into the water.

Fully clothed.

Wearing heavy military boots.

It was the boots that gave my brother his biggest problem. Mike was my little brother, but he had grown to be one inch taller than me at 6’3” and a half and out weighed me by about 50 pounds of solid muscle. He and I were both excellent swimmers, but the heavy boots kept pulling him down in the water which was only a few inches deeper than Mike was tall.

“Dad!” he yelled, splashing around frantically, “hand me an oar!”

My Father grabbed one of the oars and swung it over the side of the canoe.

“SMACK!”

The blade end of the oar hit Mike on the side of the head so hard the sound of it echoed off the wall of trees on the other side of the lake. Dad and I were frozen in shock watching my brother’s arms frantically flail, trying to get his head above the surface and, when he did, he was spitting water, coughing…and laughing.

Suddenly, the weight of the entire nightmare of a trip hit me, and I started laughing, which got my Father laughing. Still, my brother was drowning, so Dad lifted the heavy oar back out of the water and swiveled it over to my brother.

“SMACK!”

Dad hit my brother on the head with the oar again. This left Dad and I in hysterics, and Mike was now in deep trouble. I wanted to jump up and leap into the water to save him, but I was drunk and laughing so hard, I FELL into the water.

Now, there were TWO potential drowning victims, dead from drowning, extreme hilarity, and bad weirdness.

The lake was cold, and even under the surface I was laughing and beginning to choke on the intake of water. I reached over and grabbed my brother and could tell as I wrapped my arms around him to get his head above the surface that he was still laughing uncontrollably while simultaneously taking water deeper into his lungs.

I managed to get behind him, get my arm around his chest, and haul him up to the surface, and, as I swam a few strokes to get back to the canoe, Mike and I were coughing up water, taking deep breaths of life sustaining air, and still laughing.

Later in the day, Dad caught a bass big enough for us to gut and fry up that night. It would be the last meal we would have in that God forsaken place.

On the fifth day, when the Death Plane deposited us back at the airport in what passed for civilization, we immediately went into the bar, ordered up some a bunch of beer and some burgers and fries. The food was cooked by a tough looking woman, a woman who seemed to have seen a lot of life in her life: maybe she rode with a motorcycle gang in her youth. Maybe she had even helped stitch up wounds suffered during a gang rumble. She looked like she probably had a fantastic figure back in her day, but now her life was making the greasiest, most gut busting hamburgers for starving survivors of the fishing “expeditions” while selling bait to smarter guys who just fished local lakes and rivers.

Without washing her hands

The fries were droopy. The burgers were gross.

To us though, it was Nectar Of The Gods.