Memories flow at cold campout
Stars shine so bright on a winter night in the Ozarks.
That unique starshine is one of the main reasons I so look forward to the annual Christmas campout with my Saline County posse: Bill Eldridge of Benton, Rusty Pruitt of Bryant and Ed Kubler of Benton. It’s worth a couple of nights in the cold, even the intense cold of last weekend.
Pruitt couldn’t make it this year, but Matthew Eldridge of Dallas made a rare appearance. His cameo delighted Kubler, who pounced on Matthew as a fresh audience for Kubler’s jokes and accounts of his various medical procedures.
One tale was especially grisly. I glanced through the fireglow at Matthew, who looked rather squeamish.
“Do Ed’s stories make your skin crawl the way they do mine?” I asked.
“Yep,” Matthew said, shuddering. I didn’t know if he shuddered from the cold or from too much information.
Hearing this, Kubler dove in for the kill.
“This is what you have to look forward to when you get old like us,” Kubler said.
“Old like you!” I said. “And don’t you get started, Bill.”
Eldridge, who was spooling up to share too much information of his own, laughed and stood down.
“These are like scary campfire stories for adults,” I said, theatrically gnawing at my fingernails. “And then, and then, and THEN what happened?”
That was the wrong question to ask. Kubler gleefully told us what happened. He was unstoppable.
Soon, after Kubler and I had downed a shot of The Dubliner Irish whisky, better stories began to flow of campouts and fishing trips of years past.
“I found some photos the other day of you and your brother that I took for a crappie fishing story on Lake Maumelle in 2006,” I said.
“Oh, my gosh! I forgot about that,” Matthew said. “Over by that old stone chimney!”
“Yep. Ya’ll were just little kids then.”
Of course, no campout is complete without the retelling of Ray Tucker’s epic canoe wreck on Crooked Creek.
“Ray usually likes to stay close, but for some reason he got way ahead of us that day,” Eldridge said.
“He wanted to beat us to the best fishing spots,” I said.
“I didn’t think that was a good idea, but …”
“… But he’s Ray Tucker, and Ray Tucker does what he wants,” I said.
Eldridge started laughing and said, “I kept that voicemail he left me on my phone for years. ‘Bill? This is Ray Tucker! I tumped my canoe. Lost everything. Call me when you can. Uh, uh, bye.”
“He left one for me, too,” I said. “He sounded like he was calling 9-1-1 to report a burglary.”
Maybe as good as that one was Kubler’s and Eldridge’s wreck in 2021, also on Crooked Creek, under “Davenport’s Bridge.”
“It was in slow motion,” I said. “Y’all got tangled up in that snag against the piling and got sideways in the current. Your bow went way up high in the air. I saw Ed’s legs splayed out and his arms waving, Bill clawing frantically at the water with his paddle. Next thing I saw was y’all bobbing around in the water.”
“First thing you did was look back upstream to see if anybody was watching,” I continued. “Rusty and I waved real big. Yeah, we saw you!”
“That was the worst part of it,” Kubler said. “I knew we’d never live it down.”
“That reminds me of that one you and Ray had,” Eldridge said.
“That was on Crooked Creek too,” I said. “One little no-account stob out by itself in the water. I dead-centered the dang thing. We were in the water before I could breathe.”
“It was in slow motion for us,” Eldridge said, “Nothing but arms and legs kicking and flailing from both ends of the boat.”
As always, the meals were superb. Kubler grilled hubcap size ribeyes that he marinated for four days. We had corn on the cob and baked potatoes wrapped in aluminum foil and cooked in the fire, and cinnamon rolls baked in a Dutch oven.
Warm from the feast and from a hot fire of thick cedar logs, I gazed at a thin window of sky framed by the ridgetops that enclose the campground at Gunner Pool Recreation Area in Stone County. The stars sparkled as bright as the eyes of a woman in love.