Darkness

By Pat McManus

1999

Sooner or later, on every kid-camping trip, the unexpected happens — it gets dark. Night always came as a great surprise to me when I was a kid camper. Everything would be going along fine, and then, suddenly, the sun would go down.

“Hey, it’s starting to get dark,” one of my friends would say.

“Yeah,” I would reply calmly, even as deep inside me a little voice was crying out, “No! It can’t be! Aaaaiii!” He litle voice belonged to my liver. I had a chicken liver.

Dark never bothered me too much when it was outside the windows of my house or even when it was filling up my bedroom at night. But on camping trips, the whole world seemed to be buried under darkness. On my early camping trips, I was always afraid that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning, and several times I didn’t. After all, you can’t wake up if you haven’t gone to sleep.

The nights were long on those camping trips. Seconds ticked by like centuries; minutes came and went like ice ages. Then, after scarcely a billion years had passed, the first light of dawn would slide up the eastern sky, and a short while later the sunlight would come walking down the trees to our camp. “Hooray!” My chicken liver would shout, “We made it through the night. Gee, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

It’s very easy to let fear of the dark ruin camping out for you. So, don’t fight it. Get yourself a camping nightlight. Since there are no electrical outlets in any place worthy of the name “campsite,” what you need is a little candle lantern. You can make on yourself out of a tin can or buy one. Even though I am not in the least bothered by dark on camping trips anymore — well, maybe just a bit — I purchased a neat little fold-up candle lantern a while back, and it works like a charm as a night light. Special long-burning candles can be purchased for the lantern. They give off a surprising amount of light. As the saying goes, it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. And by the way, if you’re afraid you might be teased for using a candle lantern, let me point out that I camp with some pretty rough and rugged individuals, and not once have I heard them crack a single joke about my candle lantern. As they are quick to explain, they are not bothered at all by the dark, heh, heh, but it’s nice to have a bit of light around just in case they need to find something during the night.

One word of caution: Since candle lanterns give off light by means of flame, you must be extremely careful to hang up the lantern in such a way that it can’t fall, and so there is nothing close to it that might catch fire.

Your flashlight should be kept within easy reach during the night. It is not necessary, as some kid campers believe, to keep it clutched in a hand.

There is a great variety of lanterns on the market nowadays, including propane, white gas, and battery models. Although these lanterns may have their uses in the outdoors, they don’t add much to kid camping and are best avoided. Gas lanterns can be dangerous. A good flashlight and a candle lantern are what you need for the dark.

The dark can be dangerous, but only if you lose your head and go tearing off through the middle of it. I did this a few times as a kid and was lucky enough to pull through with only minor changes in my anatomy. When I was sixteen, a friend and I were bivouacked for the night on a ridge high up in the Rocky Mountains. A storm came up, and lightning struck right next to our camp. Both of us thought the next bolt was going to hit us dead center, so we instantly lost our heads and peeled off down the side of the mountain in pitch darkness. I stopped in time, but my friend ran right off over a cliff. He landed so hard, he said later, he thought he would have to go through the rest of his life with his legs sticking out of his armpits. Both of us learned right then that there may be good reasons for moving around through the woods in the dark, but to walk slowly and carry a good flashlight.